Recession Sayings And Quotes

Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone. All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves. Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence. Our rational minds say, "No, it isn't." But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, "Yes, but it could be.

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls.

6th grade. My dog, Katie, is hit by a car and killed. A mean girl during recess says it committed suicide because it didn't love me. I cry and swear revenge on mankind.

The Night Vale PTA released a statement today saying that if the School Board could not promise to prevent children from learning about dangerous activities like drug use and library science during recess periods, they would be blocking all school entrances with their bodies. They pulled hundreds of bodies out from trucks, saying, “We own all of these bodies and we will not hesitate to use them to create great flesh barricades if that is what it takes to prevent our children from learning.

A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader - even whose author, perhaps - must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.' It says, 'I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

Gareth sucked in a breath. Hyacinth’s brother wasn’t going to make this easy on him. But that didn’t matter. He had vowed to do this right, and he would not be cowed. He looked up, meeting the viscount’s dark eyes with steady purpose. “I would like to marry Hyacinth,” he said. And then, because the viscount did not say anything, because he didn’t even move, Gareth added, “Er, if she’ll have me.” And then about eight things happened at once. Or perhaps there were merely two or three, and it just seemed like eight, because it was all so unexpected. First, the viscount exhaled, although that did seem to understate the case. It was more of a sigh, actually—a huge, tired, heartfelt sigh that made the man positively deflate in front of Gareth. Which was astonishing. Gareth had seen the viscount on many occasions and was quite familiar with his reputation. This was not a man who sagged or groaned. His lips seemed to move through the whole thing, too, and if Gareth were a more suspicious man, he would have thought that the viscount had said, “Thank you, Lord.” Combined with the heavenward tilt of the viscount’s eyes, it did seem the most likely translation. And then, just as Gareth was taking all of this in, Lord Bridgerton let the palms of his hands fall against the desk with surprising force, and he looked Gareth squarely in the eye as he said, “Oh, she’ll have you. She will definitely have you.” It wasn’t quite what Gareth had expected. “I beg your pardon,” he said, since truly, he could think of nothing else. “I need a drink,” the viscount said, rising to his feet. “A celebration is in order, don’t you think?” “Er…yes?” Lord Bridgerton crossed the room to a recessed bookcase and plucked a cut-glass decanter off one of the shelves. “No,” he said to himself, putting it haphazardly back into place, “the good stuff, I think.” He turned to Gareth, his eyes taking on a strange, almost giddy light. “The good stuff, wouldn’t you agree?” “Ehhhh…” Gareth wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. “The good stuff,” the viscount said firmly. He moved some books to the side and reached behind to pull out what looked to be a very old bottle of cognac. “Have to keep it hidden,” he explained, pouring it liberally into two glasses. “Servants?” Gareth asked. “Brothers.” He handed Gareth a glass. “Welcome to the family.

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.

You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs. It's not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself into your listener's shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself.

In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.

You're missing the wow factor." Garrett snickered. "Did you really just say wow factor?" "Oh, whatever. What are you, twelve?" "Twelve inches, baby." Garrett winked. Miller laughed and rolled his eyes. "In your dreams, buddy.

…such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

It's ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have got to be twenty-eight years old and about whom no one knows. I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think and thinks, up five flights of stairs, these thoughts on a gray Paris afternoon: Is it possible, this nothing thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized, and said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had thousands of years of time to look, reflect, and write down, and that one has let the millennia pass away like a school recess in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple? Yes, it is possible. ...Is it possible that in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, that one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which would at least have been something, with an incredibly dull slipcover, so that it looks like living-room furniture during the summer vacation? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses, as if one was telling about a coming together of many people, instead of telling about the one person they were standing around, because he was alien and died? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that one believed one has to make up for everything that happened before one was born? Is it possible one would have to remind every single person that he arose from all earlier people so that he would know it, and not let himself be talked out of it by the others, who see it differently? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that all these people know very precisely a past that never was? Is it possible that everything real is nothing to them; that their life takes its course, connected to nothing, like a clock in an empty room? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that one knows nothing about girls, who are nevertheless alive? Is it possible that one says "the women", "the children", "the boys", and doesn't suspect (in spite of all one's education doesn't suspect) that for the longest time these words have no longer had a plural, but only innumerable singulars? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and think it is something they have in common? Just look at two schoolboys: one buys himself a knife, and the same day his neighbor buys one just like it. And after a week they show each other their knives and it turns out that they bear only the remotest resemblance to each other-so differently have they developed in different hands (Well, the mother of one of them says, if you boys always have to wear everything out right away). Ah, so: is it possible to believe that one could have a God without using him? Yes, it is possible. But, if all this is possible, has even an appearance of possibility-then for heaven's sake something has to happen. The first person who comes along, the one who has had this disquieting thought, must begin to accomplish some of what has been missed; even if he is just anyone, not the most suitable person: there is simply no one else there. This young, irrelevant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit himself down five flights up and write, day and night, he will just have to write, and that will be that.

Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.

She never opened up a canyon in her soul and silently disappeared into the dark recesses.

There's a joke people tell in the Soviet Union: Mitterrand, Bush and Gorbachev have a meeting with God. Mitterrand says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- lagging exports, Muslim minorities, European unification. How long will it be before France's problems are solved?' God says, 'Fifteen years.' Mitterrand begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Mitterrand. 'I'll be dead by then. I'll never see France's problems solved.' Then Bush says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- recession, crime, racial prejudice. How long will it be before America's problems are solved?' God says, 'Ten years.' Bush begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Bush. 'I'll be out of office by then. I won't get any credit for solving America's problems.' Then Gorbachev says, 'My country faces many, many difficult problems. How long will it be before the Soviet Union's problems are solved?' God begins to cry.

For all his cruelty, he is a highly intelligent man,” Amina says. “I think we sometimes make the mistake of thinking monsters are abhorrent aberrations, lurking in the darkest recesses, when the truth is far more disturbing. The most monstrous of men are those who sit in plain sight, daring you to challenge them. He’s calculating and manipulative, and believe me when I say he will not stop until he finds you.

Just to say evil Islamics did it, that's so lame, and we know it. We see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar's look, the twelve-stepper's gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know they're guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who's in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. Which of course is not to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day would have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian 'war' and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Nah, nah, perish that thought. "But there's still always the other thing. Our yearning. Our deep need for it to be true. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them--we who called down the sacred lightning of 'democracy' and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. And whatever happened then is on our ticket.

I know some kids actually like school, but I honestly can’t say I do. I like some parts of school, like PE and computer class. And lunch and recess. But all in all, I’d be fine without school. And the thing I hate the most about school is all the homework we get.

The accepted version of history is that the Federal Reserve was created to stabilize our economy. One of the most widely-used textbooks on this subject says: "It sprang from the panic of 1907, with its alarming epidemic of bank failures: the country was fed up once and for all with the anarchy of unstable private banking."23 Even the most naive student must sense a grave contradiction between this cherished view and the System's actual performance. Since its inception, it has presided over the crashes of 1921 and 1929; the Great Depression of '29 to '39; recessions in '53, '57, '69, '75, and '81; a stock market "Black Monday" in '87; and a 1000% inflation which has destroyed 90% of the dollar's purchasing power.24

The prosecuting attorney, in his plea to the jury, accused me of saying on a public platform at a public meeting, “To hell with the courts, we know what justice is.” He told a great truth when he lied, for if he had searched the innermost recesses of my mind he could have found that thought, never expressed by me before, but which I express now, “To hell with your courts, I know what justice is,

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!

The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” says Zelman. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one.

Because we approach the gospel with preconceived notions of what it should say rather than what it does say, the Word no longer falls like rain on the parched ground of our souls. It no longer sweeps like a wild storm into the corners of our comfortable piety. It no longer vibrates like sharp lightning in the dark recesses of our nonhistoric orthodoxy. The gospel becomes, in the words of Gertrude Stein, … a pattering of pious platitudes spoken by a Jewish carpenter in the distant past.

Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. That have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix the schools, they'll fix the kids." So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test-prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminated recess, the kids will study more. And just in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without playgrounds. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars." Meanwhile, Georgia's governor wanted the state to give Mozart CDs to newborns because research showed Mozart improved babies' IQs (which later proved to be mythical research). Right behind him is Lincoln, Rhode Island, where they canceled the district spelling bee because only one child would win, leaving all others behind, thus violating the intent of No Child Left Behind--or, as they might say in Lincoln, no child gets ahead.

I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

What I can say is that it was music that reached to the deep recesses of my soul, all the way down to the very core. I was certain that kind of music existed in the world—music that made you feel like something in the very structure of your body had been reconfigured, ever so slightly, now that you’d experienced it.

Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

I decide to scope out craigslist to see all the vibrant economic employment opportunities available to me in this depression. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean “recession.” No matter how many millions of jobs are lost, how much debt our country accrues, or how many years the stagnation drags on, it’s not a depression until the dogmatic media officially declares it to be a depression. It’s as if they believe by repeatedly printing or saying economists are afraid the economy will slip back into a recession, they’ll fool the masses of unemployed or underemployed into believing that not only are we not in a depression, but we aren’t even in a recession. I’m sure the millions of unemployed, freshly graduated college kids who have thousands of dollars of unshakable debt to pay off feel comforted by the empty repetition.

I never felt at Home—Below—- And in the Handsome Skies I shall not feel at Home—I know— I don't like Paradise— Because it's Sunday—all the time— And Recess—never comes— And Eden'll be so lonesome Bright Wednesday Afternoons— If God could make a visit— Or ever took a Nap— So not to see us—but they say Himself—a Telescope Perennial beholds us— Myself would run away From Him—and Holy Ghost—and All— But there's the "Judgement Day"!

When someone tries to derail an argument with an insult, your response depends on who the audience is. If the two of you are alone, say something like, “This isn’t recess. I’m out of here,” and walk away. You’re not about to persuade the jerk. But if there are bystanders, ridicule the insult. “So Bob’s answer to the problem of noise in this town is that I’m a jerk. Was that helpful to you all?” You turn sophistry into genuine banter.

You, dearly beloved, whom I address in no less earnest terms than those of the blessed apostle Peter, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession,” built upon the impregnable rock, Christ, and joined to the Lord our Savior by His true assumption of our flesh, remain firm in the faith, which you have professed before many witnesses and in which you were reborn through water and the Holy Spirit, and received the anointing of salvation and the seal of eternal life. But “if anyone preaches to you anything besides that which you have learned, let him be anathema”; refuse to put wicked fables before the clearest truth, and what you may happen to read or hear contrary to the rule of the catholic and apostolic creed, judge it altogether deadly and diabolical… Indeed, they put on a cloak of piety and chastity, but under this deceit they conceal the filthiness of their acts, and from the recesses of their ungodly heart hurl shafts to wound the simple… A mighty bulwark is a sound faith, a true faith, to which nothing has to be added or taken away, because unless it is one, it is no faith, as the apostle says, “one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in us all.” Cling to this unity, dearly beloved, with minds unshaken, and in it “follow after” all “holiness.” In it carry out the Lord’s commands, because “without faith it is impossible to please God,” and without it nothing is holy, nothing pure, nothing alive, “for the just lives by faith,” and he who by the devil’s deception loses it is dead though living, because as righteousness is gained by faith, so, too, by a true faith is eternal life gained, as our Lord and Savior says. And this is life eternal, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent. May He make you to advance and persevere to the end, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, forever and ever. Amen.                —Leo the Great

You’ll have your turn,” Wolfe told him. “He can have it now.” Miss Duday was contemptuous. “That’s all I have to say—unless you have questions?” “No. Well, Mr. Helmar? Go ahead.” There was a polite interruption from Eric Hagh. He wanted a refill for his glass, and others were ready too, so there was a short recess. Hagh seemed to have got the impression that we were counting on him to keep Sarah Jaffee company, and I was too busy to resent it, but apparently Nat Parker wasn’t. Wolfe poured beer from his third bottle, swallowed some, and prompted Helmar. “Yes, sir?

Her daddy had brought her a package of Twinkies, and she was so proud that as soon as she got on the bus she forgot everything she knew and yelled to another first grader, “Guess what I got in my lunch today, Billy Jean?” “What?” “Twinkies!” she shouted so loud you could have heard her in the back seat even if you were deaf in both ears. Out of the corner of his eye, Jess thought he saw Janice Avery perk up. When they sat down, May Belle was still screeching about her dadgum Twinkies over the roar of the motor. “My daddy brung ’um to me from Washington!” Jess threw another look at the back seat. “You better shut up about those dang Twinkies,” he said in her ear. “You just jealous ’cause Daddy didn’t bring you none.” “OK.” He shrugged across her head at Leslie to say I warned her, didn’t I? and Leslie nodded back. Neither of them was too surprised to see May Belle come screaming toward them at recess time. “She stole my Twinkies!” Jess sighed. “May Belle, didn’t I tell you?” “You gotta kill Janice Avery. Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!” “Shhh,” Leslie said, stroking May Belle’s head, but May Belle didn’t want comfort, she wanted revenge. “You gotta beat her up into a million pieces!

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me. Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.

Lisa In 1977, when I was in sixth grade at Pinecrest Elementary School in my hometown of West Monroe, Louisiana, I saw the cutest boy I had ever laid eyes on. He was new to our school, and I quickly found out his name was Alan Robertson. I was popular in school and people seemed to like me, but no matter how I tried, that cute boy did not seem to know I was alive. Maybe that’s because he was in eighth grade and did not have time for younger girls like me. That did not stop me from following him around school, though--during every recess, fire drill, and class change. Sometimes when I speak publicly about this now, I say I could have been on fire and he would not have noticed. At least that’s what I thought; he says he was vaguely aware that he had a sixth-grade stalker with braces.

There was a beat of silence in which I digested what he’d said. He wasn’t mean or menacing this time. There was no edge to his voice. “What?” I gasped. “I’m trying really hard not to hurt you, but I’m struggling. You need to take a step back before I do something I’ll regret,” he explained. “Who said I can leave you alone?” I asked breathlessly, not really deciphering my own words. “You think I haven’t tried?” “Try harder, Luna. I know you can, because for about eight years, you did. Three unreciprocated kisses. You sleeping with someone else. You did a pretty darn good job, so just keep doing it, okay?” I remembered what he’d said about my presence feeling like a metal chain. A heavy burden he wanted to shake off. Guess it had always been easy for me to choose Knight, because I didn’t have any options. Because Knight always chose me. But his choice came with a bigger sacrifice. He was the one getting me out of trouble, shooing off the bullies, making sure I had someone to sit with at recess. He was the one who constantly gave up the opportunity to actually date the hottest girls. “Moonshine,” he pushed through the fog in my head, pulling me back to reality. “Give it a rest. You’re poking the bear.” “You didn’t even say anything about my talking,” I sulked, feeling the anger clogging my throat. I didn’t know why it was so important to address it right this second. I could hear the smile in his voice. “I always knew you’d talk, and not just to me. To everyone. I watched you crawl out of your shell, and it was slow, but by fucking God, it was beautiful. Have you spoken to anyone else?” He sounded warm, conversational now—the Knight I was used to, who looked at me with admiration and delight.

Shortly afterwards Addis Ababa launched a crackdown on its opponents that resulted in hundreds of deaths. If America’s president was in two minds about democracy, how was the rest of the world supposed to feel? It was on Obama’s watch that the tally of global democracies fell most sharply. The world now has twenty-five fewer democracies than it did at the turn of the century. In addition to Russia and Venezuela, Turkey, Thailand, Botswana and now Hungary are deemed to have crossed the threshold. According to Freedom House, more countries have restricted than expanded freedom every year since 2008.5 ‘There is not a single country on the African continent where democracy is firmly consolidated and secure,’ says Larry Diamond, one of the leading scholars of democracy.6 What we do not yet know is whether the world’s democratic recession will turn into a global depression.

For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public works out of all proportion to its revenue and population. One thinks of the sea-wall, forever being breached and repaired; the dikes made of mud for want of money; the dirt roads and their occasional experimental surfacing; the roads that are necessary but not yet made; the decadent railways ('Three-fourths of the passenger rolling stock,' says a matter-of-fact little note in the government paper on the Development Programme, 'is old and nearing the point beyond which further repairs will be impossible'); the three overworked Dakotas and two Grumman seaplanes of British Guiana Airways. And one thinks of the streets of Albouystown, as crowded with children as a schoolyard during recess.

MASTER SUN SAYS, Of old, those who excelled in battle thought first to make themselves invincible, and so they waited for the moment when their enemies could be defeated. It is you who determine your own invincibility, but whether the enemy can be conquered or not rests with him. Therefore, whoever excels in battle can make himself invincible, but he cannot always make the enemy vulnerable. Hence I say, “The conditions for victory can be known, but they cannot be forced.”1 Go on the defensive when your enemy cannot be overcome. Go on the offensive against a vulnerable enemy. Defend when your troop strength is lacking. Attack when you have surplus strength. To excel at defense means hiding oneself away in the deepest recesses of the earth. To excel at offense means striking from the highest reaches of the heavens. Therefore, the commander who is good at both offense and defense can preserve himself and achieve total victory.

In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him—for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl—wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance—I never saw one walk—and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine,

I now turn to a *subjective* consideration that belongs here; yet I can give even less distinctness to it than to the objective consideration just discussed, for I shall be able to express it only by image and simile. Why is our consciousness brighter and more distinct the farther it reaches outwards, so that its greatest clearness lies in sense perception, which already half belongs to things outside us; and, on the other hand, becomes more obscure as we go inwards, and leads, when followed to its innermost recesses, into a darkness in which all knowledge ceases? Because, I say, consciousness presupposes *individuality*; but this belongs to the mere phenomenon, since, as the plurality of the homogeneous, it is conditioned by the forms of the phenomenon, time and space. On the other hand, our inner nature has its root in what is no longer phenomenon but thing-in-itself, to which therefore the forms of the phenomenon do not reach; and in this way, the chief conditions of individuality are wanting, and distinct consciousness ceases therewith. In this root-point of existence the difference of beings ceases, just as that of the radii of a sphere ceases at the centre. As in the sphere the surface is produced by the radii ending and breaking off, so consciousness is possible only where the true inner being runs out into the phenomenon. Through the forms of the phenomenon separate individuality becomes possible, and on this individuality rests consciousness, which is on this account confined to phenomena. Therefore everything distinct and really intelligible in our consciousness always lies only outwards on this surface on the sphere. But as soon as we withdraw entirely from this, consciousness forsakes us―in sleep, in death, and to a certain extent also in magnetic or magic activity; for all these lead through the centre. But just because distinct consciousness, as being conditioned by the surface of the sphere, is not directed towards the centre, it recognizes other individuals certainly as of the same kind, but not as identical, which, however, they are in themselves. Immortality of the individual could be compared to the flying off at a tangent of a point on the surface; but immortality, by virtue of the eternity of the true inner being of the whole phenomenon, is comparable to the return of that point on the radius to the centre, whose mere extension is the surface. The will as thing-in-itself is entire and undivided in every being, just as the centre is an integral part of every radius; whereas the peripheral end of this radius is in the most rapid revolution with the surface that represents time and its content, the other end at the centre where eternity lies, remains in profoundest peace, because the centre is the point whose rising half is no different from the sinking half. Therefore, it is said also in the *Bhagavad-Gita*: *Haud distributum animantibus, et quasi distributum tamen insidens, animantiumque sustentaculum id cognoscendum, edax et rursus genitale* (xiii, 16, trans. Schlegel) [Undivided it dwells in beings, and yet as it were divided; it is to be known as the sustainer, annihilator, and producer of beings]. Here, of course, we fall into mystical and metaphorical language, but it is the only language in which anything can be said about this wholly transcendent theme.

New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news! Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face. It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it. Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow." The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen. I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.

The bag circles the table several times. Each time Maya passes it to her neighbor, saying nothing. Finally the discussion is done. Maya looks troubled. She’s embarrassed, I’m guessing, that she hasn’t participated. Samantha reads from her notebook a list of enforcement mechanisms that the group has brainstormed. “Rule Number 1,” she says. “If you break the laws, you miss recess.…” “Wait!” interrupts Maya. “I have an idea!” “Go ahead,” says Samantha, a little impatiently. But Maya, who like many sensitive introverts seems attuned to the subtlest cues for disapproval, notices the sharpness in Samantha’s voice. She opens her mouth to speak, but lowers her eyes, only managing something rambling and unintelligible. No one can hear her. No one tries. The cool girl in the group—light-years ahead of the rest in her slinkiness and fashion-forward clothes—sighs dramatically. Maya peters off in confusion, and the cool girl says, “OK, Samantha, you can keep reading the rules now.” [...] Maya, for her part, sits curled up at the periphery of the group, writing her name over and over again in her notebook, in big block letters, as if to reassert her identity. At least to herself.

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head—useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.

Why are you here? Where am I? You have come to this place… to lie in the ground? The derision in the question was clear. I have come to this place to find peace. And what is peace? Laughter in the recesses of his mind. This is peace. Perhaps it is. I don’t know. A pause. Talking to yourself, eh? There is no one else around. That is the beginning of wisdom. And what of it? Who are you? I am Peter. What are you? I… I am that which says I. Clever. Sometimes. He sparked a cigarette, nicotine bringing a touch of stability to his otherwise entirely too excited cognitions. What is I? I am. That is all? I don’t know. Where is I? Where am I? I am between this and that. This is again wisdom. He laughed aloud now, pulling deeply on his smoke, exhaling through clenched teeth. I am space. Of a sort. I am a character in a story. Sometimes. Nothing more? A page of your life turns. Do you see it? Sometimes. The blank of the page, the openness of its margins, do you see? Yes. This is the void of your unfolding imagination. Indeed. Would you fill it with your own story? I am void. I am between. I am neither this nor that. I am an idea of a between. What story would you have? Whatever I can. I am nothing. That is enough? No. What would you be? A man. This is also wisdom.

Say what you will of religion, but draw applicable conclusions and comparisons to reach a consensus. Religion = Reli = Prefix to Relic, or an ancient item. In days of old, items were novel, and they inspired devotion to the divine, and in the divine. Now, items are hypnotizing the masses into submission. Take Christ for example. When he broke bread in the Bible, people actually ate, it was useful to their bodies. Compare that to the politics, governments and corrupt, bumbling bureacrats and lobbyists in the economic recession of today. When they "broke bread", the economy nearly collapsed, and the benefactors thereof were only a select, decadent few. There was no bread to be had, so they asked the people for more! Breaking bread went from meaning sharing food and knowledge and wealth of mind and character, to meaning break the system, being libelous, being unaccountable, and robbing the earth. So they married people's paychecks to the land for high ransoms, rents and mortgages, effectively making any renter or landowner either a slave or a slave master once more. We have higher class toys to play with, and believe we are free. The difference is, the love of profit has the potential, and has nearly already enslaved all, it isn't restriced by culture anymore. Truth is not religion. Governments are religions. Truth does not encourage you to worship things. Governments are for profit. Truth is for progress. Governments are about process. When profit goes before progress, the latter suffers. The truest measurement of the quality of progress, will be its immediate and effective results without the aid of material profit. Quality is meticulous, it leaves no stone unturned, it is thorough and detail oriented. It takes its time, but the results are always worth the investment. Profit is quick, it is ruthless, it is unforgiving, it seeks to be first, but confuses being first with being the best, it is long scale suicidal, it is illusory, it is temporary, it is vastly unfulfilling. It breaks families, and it turns friends. It is single track minded, and small minded as well. Quality, would never do that, my friends. Ironic how dealing and concerning with money, some of those who make the most money, and break other's monies are the most unaccountable. People open bank accounts, over spend, and then expect to be held "unaccountable" for their actions. They even act innocent and unaccountable. But I tell you, everything can and will be counted, and accounted for. Peace can be had, but people must first annhilate the love of items, over their own kind.

Also, even when people feel they know nothing, they typically know a bit and that bit should tip them away from maximum uncertainty, at least a bit. The astrophysicist J. Richard Gott shows us what forecasters should do when all they know is how long something—a civil war or a recession or an epidemic—has thus far lasted. The right thing is to adopt an attitude of “Copernican humility” and assume there is nothing special about the point in time at which you happen to be observing the phenomenon. For instance, if the Syrian civil war has been going on for two years when IARPA poses a question about it, assume it is equally likely you are close to the beginning—say, we are only 5% into the war—or close to the end—say, the war is 95% complete. Now you can construct a crude 95% confidence band of possibilities: the war might last as little as 1/39 of 2 years (or less than another month), or as long as about 39 × 2 years, or 78 years. This may not seem to be a great achievement but it beats saying “zero to infinity.” And if 78 years strikes you as ridiculously long that is because you cheated by violating the ground rule of you must know “nothing.” You just introduced outside-view base-rate knowledge about wars in general (e.g., you know that very few wars have ever lasted that long). You are now on the long road to becoming a better forecaster. See Richard Gott, “Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects,” Nature

Back in 2015, a volunteer group called Bitnation set up something called the Blockchain Emergency ID. There’s not a lot of data on the project now, BE-ID - used public-key cryptography to generate unique IDs for people without their documents. People could verify their relations, that these people belonged to their family, and so on. It was a very modern way of maintaining an ID; secure, fast, and easy to use. Using the Bitcoin blockchain, the group published all these IDs on to a globally distributed public ledger, spread across the computers of every single Bitcoin user online - hundreds of thousands of users, in those times. Once published, no government could undo it; the identities would float around in the recesses of the Internet. As long as the network remained alive, every person's identity would remain intact, forever floating as bits and bytes between the nations: no single country, government or company could ever deny them this. “That was, and I don't say this often, the fucking bomb,” said Common, In one fell swoop, identities were taken outside government control. BE-ID, progressing in stages, became the refugees' gateway to social assistance and financial services. First it became compliant with UN guidelines. Then it was linked to a VISA card. And thus out of the Syrian war was something that looked like it could solve global identification forever. Experts wrote on its potential. No more passports. No more national IDs. Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s the United Nations Identity in a nutshell. Julius Common’s first hit - the global identity revolution that he sold first to the UN, and then to almost every government in the world - was conceived of when he was a teenager.

A MAP IN THE hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man’s faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader — even whose author, perhaps — must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’ And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing. Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humourless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtsman’s board. That coastline there, that ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the casual eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet. Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest.

There are many things the Chinese do differently from Westerners. There’s the question of extra credit, for example. One time, Lulu came home and told me about a math test she’d just taken. She said she thought it had gone extremely well, which is why she didn’t feel the need to do the extra-credit problems. I was speechless for a second, uncomprehending. “Why not?” I asked. “Why didn’t you do them?” “I didn’t want to miss recess.” A fundamental tenet of being Chinese is that you always do all of the extra credit all of the time. “Why?” asked Lulu, when I explained this to her. For me this was like asking why I should breathe. “None of my friends do it,” Lulu added. “That’s not true,” I said. “I’m 100% sure that Amy and Junno did the extra credit.” Amy and Junno were the Asian kids in Lulu’s class. And I was right about them; Lulu admitted it. “But Rashad and Ian did the extra credit too, and they’re not Asian,” she added. “Aha! So many of your friends did do the extra credit! And I didn’t say only Asians do extra credit. Anyone with good parents knows you have to do the extra credit. I’m in shock, Lulu. What will the teacher think of you? You went to recess instead of doing extra credit?” I was almost in tears. “Extra credit is not extra. It’s just credit. It’s what separates the good students from the bad students." "Aww - recess is so fun," Lulu offered as her final sally. But after that, Lulu, like Sophia. always did the extra credit. Sometimes the girls got more points on extra credit than on the test itself - an absurdity that would never happen in China. Extra credit is one reason that Asian kids get such notoriously good grades in the United States. Rote drilling is another. Once Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth grade teacher administered every Friday. She lost to a Korean boy named Yoon-seok. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time. Poor Yoon-seok. He went back to Korea with his family, but probably not because of the speed test.

He had no desire to eke out a living from the land as his family had during his childhood. He and Saphira were a Rider and dragon; their doom and their destiny was to fly at the forefront of history, not to sit before a fire and grow fat and lazy. And then there was Arya. If he and Saphira lived in Palancar Valley, he would see her rarely, if at all. “No,” said Eragon, and the word was like a hammerblow in the silence. “I don’t want to go back.” A cold tingle crawled down his spine. He had known he had changed since he, Brom, and Saphira had set out to track down the Ra’zac, but he had clung to the belief that, at his core, he was still the same person. Now he understood that this was no longer true. The boy he had been when he first set foot outside of Palancar Valley had ceased to exist; Eragon did not look like him, he did not act like him, and he no longer wanted the same things from life. He took a deep breath and then released it in a long, shuddering sigh as the truth sank into him. “I am not who I was.” Saying it aloud seemed to give the thought weight. Then, as the first rays of dawn brightened the eastern sky over the ancient island of Vroengard, where the Riders and dragons had once lived, he thought of a name--a name such as he had not thought of before--and as he did, a sense of certainty came over him. He said the name, whispered it to himself in the deepest recesses of his mind, and all his body seemed to vibrate at once, as if Saphira had struck the pillar beneath him. And then he gasped, and he found himself both laughing and crying--laughing that he had succeeded and for the sheer joy of comprehension; crying because all his failings, all the mistakes he had made, were now obvious to him, and he no longer had any delusions to comfort himself with. “I am not who I was,” he whispered, gripping the edges of the column, “but I know who I am.” The name, his true name, was weaker and more flawed than he would have liked, and he hated himself for that, but there was also much to admire within it, and the more he thought about it, the more he was able to accept the true nature of his self. He was not the best person in the world, but neither was he the worst.

All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,—for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,—wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,—I never saw one walk,— and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,—for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the top-most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate;—a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;—and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.

After months of calling for inflation of housing prices, Krugman in 2002 came right out and said the Fed needed to create a housing bubble. Since 2007, Krugman has repeatedly and angrily denied that was what he was saying, so let me run his comments in their full context: A few months ago the vast majority of business economists mocked concerns about a “double dip,” a second leg to the downturn. But there were a few dogged iconoclasts out there, most notably Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley. As I’ve repeatedly said in this column, the arguments of the double-dippers made a lot of sense. And their story now looks more plausible than ever. The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.6 Well, Krugman got exactly what he wanted.

This Girl I Knew Glasses, bad bangs, patched blue jeans, creek-stained tennis shoes caked in mud, a father who sells vacuum cleaners, a mother skinny as a nun, a little brother with straw-colored hair and a scowling, confused look in the pews at church: this girl I knew. House at the edge of town, crumbling white stucco. Dog on a chain. Weeds. Wildcat Creek trickling brown and frothy over rocks out back, past an abandoned train trestle and the wreck of an old school bus left to rot. This girl I knew, in whatever room is hers, in that house with its dust-fogged attic windows, its after-dinner hours like onions soft in a pan. Her father sometimes comes for her, runs a hand through her hair. Her mother washes every last stick of silverware, every dish. The night sky presses down on their roof, a long black yawn spiked with stars, bleating crickets. The dog barks once, twice. Outside town, a motorcycle revs its engine: someone bearing down. Then nothing. Sleep. This girl I knew dreams whatever this girl I knew dreams. In the morning it’s back to school, desks, workbooks, an awkwardly held pencil in the cramped claw of a hand. The cigarette and rosewater scent of Ms. Thompson at the blackboard. The flat of Ms. Thompson’s chest, sunburned and freckled, where her sweater makes a V. You should be nice to her, my mother says about this girl I knew. I don’t want to be nice to her, I say to my mother. At recess this girl I knew walks around the playground, alone, talking to herself: elaborate conversations, hand gestures, hysterical laughing. On a dare from the other girls this girl I knew picks a dandelion, pops its head with her thumbnail, sucks the milky stem. I don’t want to be nice to her. Scabbed where she’s scratched them, mosquito bites on her ankles break and bleed. Fuzzy as a peach, the brown splotch of a birthmark on her arm. The way her glasses keep slipping down her nose. The way she pushes them up.

Abigail!” Mrs. Gardener says sharply. “We do not throw things in class. Move your clothespin to blue, please. You‘ll have to miss recess.” Thank God the little heathen is missing recess. Maybe I’ll try to get in a game of handball. As long as she isn’t there to torture me, the other kids will probably let me play.

The evaluation of securities and businesses for investment purposes has always involved a mixture of qualitative and quantitative factors. At the one extreme, the analyst exclusively oriented to qualitative factors would say, “Buy the right company (with the right prospects, inherent industry conditions, management, etc.) and the price will take care of itself.” On the other hand, the quantitative spokesman would say, “Buy at the right price and the company (and stock) will take care of itself.” As is so often the pleasant result in the securities world, money can be made with either approach. And, of course, any analyst combines the two to some extent—his classification in either school would depend on the relative weight he assigns to the various factors and not to his consideration of one group of factors to the exclusion of the other group. Interestingly enough, although I consider myself to be primarily in the quantitative school (and as I write this no one has come back from recess—I may be the only one left in the class), the really sensational ideas I have had over the years have been heavily weighted toward the qualitative side where I have had a “high-probability insight.” This is what causes the cash register to really sing. However, it is an infrequent occurrence, as insights usually are, and, of course, no insight is required on the quantitative side—the figures should hit you over the head with a baseball bat. So the really big money tends to be made by investors who are right on qualitative decisions but, at least in my opinion, the more sure money tends to be made on the obvious quantitative decisions. As

Over the last few years the counselling, the friendships and the holistic therapies she has embraced have enabled her to win back her personality, a character which has been smothered by her husband, the royal system, and the public’s expectations towards their fairy-tale princess. The woman behind the mask is not a flighty, skittish young thing nor a vision of saintly perfection. She is, however, a much quieter, introverted and private person than many would like to believe. As Carolyn Bartholomew says: “She has never liked the media although they’ve been friends to her. Actually she has always been shy of them.” As she has matured over the last three years the physical changes in her have been noticeable. When she asked Sam McKnight to cut her hair in a shorter sportier style it was a public statement of the way she felt she had altered. Her voice, too, is a barometer of the way she has matured. When she speaks of the “dark ages”, her tone is flat and soft, almost fading to nothing, as though dredging thoughts from a dim recess of her heart which she only visits with trepidation. When she is feeling “centered”. And in charge of herself her voice is lively, colourful and brimming with wry amusement. When Oonagh Toffolo first visited Diana at Kensington Palace in September 1989 she observed that the Princess was timid and would never look her straight in the eye. She says: “Over the last two years she has got in touch with her own nature and has found a new confidence and sense of liberation which she had never known before.” Her observation is borne out by others. As one friend who first met Diana in 1989 recalls: “My initial impression was of a very shy and retiring person. She bowed her head low and hardly looked at me when she spoke. Diana emanated such sadness and vulnerability that I just wanted to give her a hug. She has matured enormously since that time. She now has a purpose in life and is no longer the lost soul of that first meeting.

It wouldn’t be long before I’d learn another lesson that was a real turning point. I saw a dog scrounging around in the school parking lot, a dirty and scrawny mutt that had evidently been on his own for a while. Some of the kids and I shared a bit of food with the dog at recess. By the time classes were starting again we had befriended the poor thing. I suddenly felt an unusual responsibility toward the stray. I didn’t feel it was enough just to give it something to eat and say that I’d helped it, and then move on. I needed to make sure that dog was in a safe place. “We’ve got to do something to help,” I said to my teacher. “The school’s already called animal control,” my teacher explained. She assured me that if the owners were looking for the stray, they would have the best chance of finding it through animal control. I was stubborn. “But after a period of time, if the dog isn’t claimed, they’ll put it to sleep, right?” My teacher nodded reluctantly. “I suppose.” “So that’s not good enough.” My teacher sighed, giving me an I-haven’t-got-time-for-this look. “There aren’t really any other options, Terri.” And that was that. What happened to the stray dog, I’ll never know. But with the fierce determination of a child to right injustice, I resolved that when I grew up, I would no longer turn a blind eye and walk past a problem. I would stop and fix it. I remember that episode very clearly as a defining moment in my life. Neither the stray dog nor the ducklings were huge events, just minor incidents in the life of a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest. But they formed two vital threads in the fabric of who I am today: When you help an animal, do your absolute best to make sure you don’t harm it at the same time, and Never walk past a problem with an animal--fix it. These were the lessons I remembered when I encountered a sick, emaciated cougar in a plastic pet cage.

In November 2013, Credit Suisse published research confirming this, saying that “US net business investment has rebounded – but, at around 1.5% of GDP, still only stands at the trough levels seen during the past two recessions”.[46] It showed that since the early 1980s, the peaks reached by net business investment as a share of GDP have been declining in each economic recovery. As John Smith writes in Imperialism In The Twenty First Century: “A notable effect of the investment strike is that the age of the capital stock in the US has been on a long-term rising trend since 1980 and started climbing rapidly after the turn of the millennium, reaching record levels several years before the crisis.”[47] Smith points out that in the UK the biggest counterpart to the government’s fiscal deficit (the difference between total revenue and total expenditure) of 8.8% of GDP in 2011 was “a corporate surplus of 5.5% of GDP, unspent cash that sucked huge demand out of the UK economy”.[48] The problem is even worse in Japan, where huge corporate surpluses and low rates of investment have been the norm since the economy entered deflation in the early 1990s. According to Martin Wolf in the FT, “the sum of depreciation and retained earnings of corporate Japan was a staggering 29.5% of GDP in 2011, against just [sic] 16% in the US, which is itself struggling with a corporate financial surplus”.[49]

God has a strong reason for hating pride so much; it is the sin that led to the fall of humanity, and it was the fatal flaw of the tempter who brought about such destruction. Pride is what prompted Lucifer to say in his heart: I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High. (Isa. 14:13–14) God’s grace is reserved for the humble.

she realized deep in the darkest recess of her mind that a life with Jack would mean saying goodbye to herself. She wondered if it were like that for everyone who got married and had children and lived the life they were expected to live. Did they, too, lose a little bit of themselves? Over the years, did they stop recognizing who they once used to be? What was it about giving yourself to someone? She supposed it was just that, that you gave yourself and they did with you what they pleased. Which meant it was vitally important to give yourself to the right person. The person who would take you in but leave you unchanged, intact, whole – so that you didn’t look back after twenty or thirty years and wonder who you used to be.

In the receding wake of the engine, night faded into day. Birds twittered in the growing forest. All around her, a sprawl of rotting ex-suburbs roused its wheezing way into sunlight. Vines clung to abandoned houses like lover’s limbs as if saying come back to the earth with us. come back to the earth and sleep.

Finally, you get to explain the way you are, and justify staying that way. This payoff, the strongest of the three, is directly connected to the “in order to” column of your Winning Strategy. Indeed, a racket can be thought of as the “dark side” of your Winning Strategy, the side that you would rather dismiss from sight, because you don’t want to acknowledge its hold on you. The film producer who never works up to her potential is running a racket. She can always say to herself, “I could have done more to make that work”—which becomes a handy justification for things staying the way they are. An executive named Jack identified his racket accurately when he said, “I keep telling my people what I want them to do, but in the deep recesses of my mind, I wonder, with a good deal of concern, what would happen if they really did all the things I requested. In my gut, I can’t help but feel I would no longer be necessary. Of course, that’s very human of me and not something that readily comes into my mind, but whether I am aware of it or not, it lives very viscerally for me. Do I really want to be dispensable? I tell myself and everyone else, I want to be dispensable—I harp on it all the time—and yet I have the ugly confrontation with the truth inside my thoughts. The recurring fear is: If I become dispensable, I’ll have to find something else to do.” Jack’s Winning Strategy was listening for “What is the largest possibility?” so as to act by “challenging and arguing,” in order to “be the best and avoid being ordinary.” When he looked at the unwanted condition of being indispensable, saw it as a racket, and asked, “What is the payoff?” he replied, “The payoff is to justify staying the way I am—that is, being indispensable. If I were dispensable, I would be like anyone else—ordinary. And in my Winning Strategy, being ordinary is something that I’m constitutionally unwilling to tolerate.

By the time the Copenhagen conference kicked off in December, it seemed that my worst fears were coming to pass. Domestically, we were still waiting for the Senate to schedule a vote on cap-and-trade legislation, and in Europe, the treaty dialogue had hit an early deadlock. We’d sent Hillary and Todd ahead of me to try to drum up support for our proposed interim agreement, and over the phone, they described a chaotic scene, with the Chinese and other BRICS leaders dug in on their position, the Europeans frustrated with both us and the Chinese, the poorer countries clamoring for more financial assistance, Danish and U.N. organizers feeling overwhelmed, and the environmental groups in attendance despairing over what increasingly looked like a dumpster fire. Given the strong odor of imminent failure, not to mention the fact that I was still busy trying to get other critical legislation through Congress before the Christmas recess, Rahm and Axe questioned whether I should even make the trip. Despite my misgivings, I decided that even a slight possibility of corralling other leaders into an international agreement overrode the fallout from a likely failure. To make the trip more palatable, Alyssa Mastromonaco came up with a skinnied-down schedule that had me flying to Copenhagen after a full day in the Oval and spending about ten hours on the ground—just enough time to deliver a speech and conduct a few bilateral meetings with heads of state—before turning around and heading home. Still, it’s fair to say that as I boarded Air Force One for the red-eye across the Atlantic, I was less than enthusiastic. Settling into one of the plane’s fat leather conference-room chairs, I ordered a tumbler of vodka in the hope that it would help me get a few hours’ sleep and watched Marvin fiddle with the controls of the big-screen TV in search of a basketball game. “Has anyone ever considered,” I said, “the amount of carbon dioxide I’m releasing into the atmosphere as a result of these trips to Europe? I’m pretty sure that between the planes, the helicopters, and the motorcades, I’ve got the biggest carbon footprint of any single person on the whole goddamn planet.” “Huh,” Marvin said. “That’s probably right.” He found the game we were looking for, turned up the sound, then added, “You might not want to mention that in your speech tomorrow.

But you see how man is also machine, and it suffices to turn one wheel on the surface and other wheels then turn inside: the brother and the enmity are merely the reflection of the fear that each man has of himself, of the recesses of his own soul, where unconfessed desires lurk, or, as they are saying in Paris, unconscious concepts. For it has been demonstrated that imperceptible thoughts exist, affecting the soul without the soul's being aware of them, clandestine thoughts whose existence is demonstrated by the fact that, however little each of us examines himself, he will not fail to remark that in his heart he bears love or hatred, joy or sorrow, while remaining unable to remember distinctly the thoughts that generated it.

His phone rang just as he was tucking it back into his coat. He saw that it was his brother, Matt, and answered. “I had a feeling you’d call.” “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a douchebag?” Nick grinned at the inside joke. Back when he and his brothers were younger, they’d once gotten carried away and “accidentally” tossed three footballs through Tommy Angolini’s second-floor apartment windows after he’d claimed during recess that Scottish douchebags couldn’t throw for shit. Tommy had been wrong on two counts: first, in not knowing that they were only half-Scottish douchebags, and second, in doubting the athletic prowess of the McCall brothers. Not surprisingly, that bit of good-natured fun had put an end to any trash talk from Tommy Angolini, but also had royally pissed off their father. A sergeant on the NYPD at the time, he had rounded up Nick and his brothers, brought them down to the Sixty-third Precinct, and locked them up in an empty jail cell. For six hours. Needless to say, after that the McCall brothers had all developed a healthy appreciation for the benefits of being lawabiding ten-, nine-, and seven-year-olds. The only person more traumatized by the lockup had been their mother, who’d spent the six hours crying, refusing to speak to their father, and making lasagna and cannoli—three helpings of which she’d practically force-fed each of her sons immediately upon their homecoming from the Big House

IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.

Also, the Bible does not explicitly say that it was only due to the water’s recession (which all sides agree is indeed a factor) as to why mountaintops were seen. The text says “the tops of the mountains were seen” (Genesis 8:5). This involves two things: water level (1) and visibility (2). This second factor that is often overlooked is the conditions that may affect visibility. The warmer ocean water (which is expected from the Flood with continental shifting, rising basalts from the mantle, and possibly some nuclear decay would surely generate heat and volcanism) gives off vapors and mists that form low-lying fog and clouds. Hence, visibility would likely be rather low. Genesis 8:5 may well be discussing the state of visibility and atmospheric condition regarding clouds and fog from the heated ocean just as much at it discusses water level.

The evaluation of securities and businesses for investment purposes has always involved a mixture of qualitative and quantitative factors. At the one extreme, the analyst exclusively oriented to qualitative factors would say, “Buy the right company (with the right prospects, inherent industry conditions, management, etc.) and the price will take care of itself.” On the other hand, the quantitative spokesman would say, “Buy at the right price and the company (and stock) will take care of itself.” . . . Interestingly enough, although I consider myself to be primarily in the quantitative school (and as I write this no one has come back from recess—I may be the only one left in the class), the really sensational ideas I have had over the years have been heavily weighted toward the qualitative side where I have had a “high-probability insight.” This is what causes the cash register to sing. However, it is an infrequent occurrence, as insights usually are, and, of course, no insight is required on the quantitative side—the figures should hit you over the head with a baseball bat. So the really big money tends to be made by investors who are right on qualitative decisions, but, at least in my opinion, the more sure money tends to be made on the obvious quantitative decisions.

Q’s face twisted; he captured my face between hot hands. “What are you?” he clipped, face hard and unreadable. The question anchored me and I looked into his pale ferocious eyes. I knew the answer he wanted. “I’m yours.” He sucked in a heavy breath, body jerking. “Say it again, but not in English.” Q intoxicated me. My lips parted, and I wanted to stay captured by him, forever. An ancient connection linked us together. I looked into his soul—it churned with agony and demons, but he wasn’t evil. Q dropped his gaze to my lips. “Je suis à toi.” Something feral heated his features; he pressed his mouth against mine in one fast kiss. “It means, I am yours.” My breath stuttered as power sliced, deep and fast, igniting broken parts of me with sparks. His allure, his power, all magnified to fist around my stomach. In the dark recess of my brain, I translated his words to him being mine. The power trip the little words gave was indescribable. No wonder he wanted me to say it. I was drunk on them. He was mine. Mine. What life did Q live, needing to hear such a strong affirmation? What ghosts haunted him? Q tightened his fingers, biting into my jaw. “Say it.” With his command, I fumbled into the victim I was, the rape survivor, the slave. The brief sense of ownership left me bereft. Q twisted my nipple under the wet material of my bra. His cruelty reddened my skin and fight skittered into yielding. He sent me reeling into needful and damaged. I’d been so close to finding strength, but he took it away in an instant. Fresh tears spilled as I whispered, “Je suis à toi.” Q sighed heavily, resting his forehead on mine. “Will you run again? Will you leave the one man who wants you above all others? Leave his protection?” His voice wavered with regret, resignation, as if he expected me to run, and already suffered loneliness. My eyes popped wide; I shook my head. “No, I won’t run again.” He looked with half-hooded eyes. “How can you be so sure? Don’t I scare you? Repulse you?” He never repulsed me, and fear where Q was concerned was an aphrodisiac. But I couldn’t tell him. “I will never escape. Je suis à toi.

On the thirty-first, Richard listened, over a loudspeaker in the court holding cell he despised so much, as the hearing to poll the jury took place. Clark reiterated the defense’s position. Yochelson stood for the people, saying Ms. Singletary’s murder had happened two weeks earlier. It made no sense to rehash the tragedy and stir things up—after they apparently had been able to put it behind them. Tynan said he thought letting the defense question the jury about Singletary’s death would be a fatal mistake, and he denied the motion. In his cell, pacing back and forth, Richard cursed the judge and told his jailers the trial was a joke; he spit and he cursed and kicked the bars. Daniel told the court, Richard refused also to attend a second motion to be heard on September 5. The judge said it would be all right, but he would have to sign another waiver. Deputy Warden asked to speak to the judge at a sidebar and told Tynan that Richard was cursing and yelling and had stated he’d fight before he allowed deputies to bring him into court. Tynan announced that for security reasons, the defendant would sign the waiver on September 5. The jury’s deliberations moved on. On September 5, when Ramirez was led into court, he was subdued. Doreen was in her usual place, her eyes riveted to him. There was not an empty seat in the house. Ramirez signed the waiver form and was taken to the holding pen. The defense had decided to seek a mistrial based on several points: one, the death of Singletary, the other, that the juror who had replaced her, Mary Herrera, had two brothers in law enforcement who’d been shot to death, which she had failed to mention on her initial questionnaire. The judge refused to grant a new trial, court was recessed, and the jury continued its deliberations. On September 14, court was convened because of Arturo Hernandez. He had been ordered to call the court daily but had failed to do so on the sixth through the fourteenth. Judge Tynan found him in contempt and issued a body attachment with $5000 bail. On the eighteenth, Arturo showed up in court. Tynan bawled him out for not calling in as he had agreed to. He didn’t want to hear any excuses, he just wanted to know how Arturo pled. The lawyer said he was guilty. Tynan fined him $2400 or twenty-four days in jail. He gave him until September 24 to come up with the money. The judge then had Arturo remanded to do a day in jail for a September 1 contempt charge.

Michelle, the girls, and I visited a sprawling favela on the western end of Rio, where we dropped in at a youth center to watch a capoeira troupe perform and I kicked a soccer ball around with a handful of local kids. By the time we were leaving, hundreds of people had massed outside the center, and although my Secret Service detail nixed the idea of me taking a stroll through the neighborhood, I persuaded them to let me step through the gate and greet the crowd. Standing in the middle of the narrow street, I waved at the Black and brown and copper-toned faces; residents, many of them children, clustered on rooftops and small balconies and pressed against the police barricades. Valerie, who was traveling with us and witnessed the whole scene, smiled as I walked back inside, saying, “I’ll bet that wave changed the lives of some of those kids forever.” I wondered if that was true. It’s what I had told myself at the start of my political journey, part of my justification to Michelle for running for president—that the election and leadership of a Black president stood to change the way children and young people everywhere saw themselves and their world. And yet I knew that whatever impact my fleeting presence might have had on those children of the favelas and however much it might cause some to stand straighter and dream bigger, it couldn’t compensate for the grinding poverty they encountered every day: the bad schools, polluted air, poisoned water, and sheer disorder that many of them had to wade through just to survive. By my own estimation, my impact on the lives of poor children and their families so far had been negligible—even in my own country. My time had been absorbed by just trying to keep the circumstances of the poor, both at home and abroad, from worsening: making sure a global recession didn’t drastically drive up their ranks or eliminate whatever slippery foothold they might have in the labor market; trying to head off a change in climate that might lead to a deadly flood or storm; or, in the case of Libya, trying to prevent a madman’s army from gunning people down in the streets. That wasn’t nothing, I thought—as long as I didn’t start fooling myself into thinking it was anywhere close to enough.

A piece of paper will not feed you when there is no bread to eat. It will not build a factory when there are no steel girders to buy. It will not make shoes when there is no leather, no machines, no fuel. You have heard it said that today’s economy is afflicted by sudden, unpredictable shortages of various commodities. These are the advance symptoms of what is to come. You have heard economists say that they are puzzled by the nature of today’s problem: they are unable to understand why inflation is accompanied by recession—which is contrary to their Keynesian doctrines; and they have coined a ridiculous name for it: “stagflation.

You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive. I think I might even say more. The love of those things which are outside visible Christianity keeps me outside the Church. Such a spiritual destiny must seem unintelligible to you. But for this very reason it provides useful matter for reflection. It is good to reflect about whatever forces us to come out of ourselves. I have difficult in imagining how it can be that you really have some friendship in me; but as you apparently have, it may be for this purpose.

She turns back once before she sweeps into the recesses of the office, her apple-seed mouth unshriveling very slightly. “It’s not that I don’t understand. Every woman has once wanted what she shouldn’t, what she can’t have. I wish…” Juniper wonders if Miss Stone was ever a little listening to her grandmother’s stories about the Maiden riding her white stag through the woods, the Mother striding into battle. If she once dreamed of wielding swords rather than slogans. Miss Stone gives her shoulders a stern little shake. “I wish we might make use of every tool in our pursuit of justice. But I’m afraid the modern woman cannot afford to be sidetracked by moonbeams and witch-tales.” Juniper smiles back as pleasantly as she knows how and Bella whispers, “yes, of course” beside her. But there’s a look in Bella’s eyes as she says it, a struck-flint spark that makes Juniper think that her sister doesn’t intend to give up her moonbeams or witch-tales at all; that maybe, she too, wants another kind of power.

A WORLD OF SLOWER GROWTH AND HIGHER INFLATION If triple-digit oil prices are the true culprit behind the recent recession, what happens if oil prices recover to triple-digit levels or even close to them when the economy recovers? Does the economy slip right back into recession again? Everything else being equal—or ceteris paribus, as they say in the economics textbooks—that’s probably as good a forecast as any. Every oil shock has produced a global recession, and the record price increase of the past few years may produce the biggest one of all. But recessions, no matter how severe, are finite events. Ultimately, we face a far more challenging economic verdict from oil. Any way you cut it, a return to triple-digit oil prices means a much slower-growing world economy than before. And not just for a couple of quarters of recession. That’s because virtually every dollar of world GDP requires energy to produce. Not all of that energy, of course, comes from oil, but far too much does for world GDP not to be affected by oil’s growing scarcity. And there is nothing at the end of the day that we can do about depletion. Big tax cuts and big spending increases can mitigate triple-digit oil’s bite, but the deficits they inevitably produce ultimately lead to tax hikes and spending cuts that just make the suffering all the more painful down the road. Taking out a loan to pay your mortgage might defer your problems for a month or so, but in the end, it often makes your difficulties more acute. Borrowing from the future just turns today’s problems into tomorrow’s, and by the time tomorrow comes, they’ve become a lot bigger than if we had dealt with them today. Trillion-dollar-plus deficits, just like a near-zero percent federal funds rate, can mask the impact of high energy prices for a while, but ultimately they can’t protect economies that still run on oil from the impact of higher energy prices and the toll that they take.

I sacrifice to Thee this cherished wish, this lust, this weakness, this scheme, this opinion: make me what Thou wouldst have me; I bargain for nothing; I make no terms; I seek for no previous information whither Thou art taking me; I will be what Thou wilt make me, and all that Thou wilt make me. I say not, “I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest”, for I am weak; but I give myself to Thee, to lead me anywhither. I will follow Thee in the dark, only begging Thee to give me strength according to my day. Try me, O Lord, and seek the ground of my heart; prove me, and examine my thoughts; look well if there be any way of wickedness within me; search each dark recess with thine own bright light, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Then there is before us the matter of not the required two but nine separate application essays, some of which of nearly monograph-length, each without exception being—’ different sheet—‘the adjective various evaluators used was quote “stellar”—’ Dir. of Comp.: ‘I made in my assessment deliberate use of lapidary and effete.’ ‘—but in areas and with titles, I’m sure you recall quite well, Hal: “Neoclassical Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar,” “The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema,” “The Emergence of Heroic Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment”—’ ‘ “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality”?’ ‘ “A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass”?’ ‘ “Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica”?’ Now showing broad expanses of recessed gum. ‘Suffice to say that there’s some frank and candid concern about the recipient of these unfortunate test scores, though perhaps explainable test scores, being these essays’ sole individual author.

My Order emerged,” he breathed and the terror in his voice told me all I needed to about what had happened. “You’re not a Dragon?” I asked, my own voice cracking with fear for him. Father would have been more than furious to discover that his son was anything other than a full blooded Dragon Shifter. It was a matter of pride and respect; he ridiculed families with mixed blood, he believed wholeheartedly in the superiority of our kind. One of his sons being anything other was totally unthinkable. Xavier shook his head slowly, trying to withdraw his hand from mine as footsteps sounded on the stairs behind me but I refused to release him. “It doesn’t change anything for me,” I growled. “You’re still my brother, I don’t care if you’re a Werewolf or a Vampire or a-” “So he told you, did he?” Father’s cold voice came from the doorway behind me and the hairs along the back of my neck stood to attention in warning. Xavier snatched his hand out of mine, blinking away the evidence of the tears which hadn’t even fallen. I stood before him, placing myself between him and Father. “It doesn’t matter,” I said firmly, though the simmering rage in my father’s eyes told a very different story. “I’m the oldest. I’m the first in line anyway, Xavier never wanted to challenge me for that role so-” “Yes, I still have my Heir but I’ve lost the spare. Did he tell you exactly what Order he is?” Father snarled, his eyes changing to their Dragon form and a trail of smoke leaving his nostrils. He was so angry about this that he was battling against the urge to shift. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him look so close to the edge before. “Not yet. But surely it’s not the end of the world if-” “Shift,” Father commanded, his gaze passing me to land on my brother. Xavier got out of his chair and backed up, shaking his head in panic. His skin looked odd though, like there was light shining from within it, trying to break free. “I told you, I’ll get control of it; I won’t shift ever,” he said anxiously. “No one will ever find out that I’m-” “SHIFT!” Father bellowed, using fear to force the change on him. Xavier cried out in panic as the light beneath his skin grew to a powerful glow and he bucked forward as his Order form took over. I backed up as his form changed, giving him room to become- “Fucking hell,” I breathed, my eyes widening in panic. “My thoughts precisely,” Father hissed venomously. Xavier had transformed into a lilac Pegasus complete with golden horn and rainbow patterned wings. His coat shone with glitter in the light of my magical orbs and his wide, horsey eyes looked back at us fearfully. I stared at him with my mouth hanging open, scrambling for something, anything to say. “I... didn’t know we had any recessive Pegasus genes in the bloodline...maybe he's linked to the constellation,” I muttered, unsure what else I could say. Father hated the weaker, more common Orders. He was a Dragon through and through; he loved power, invoking fear and breathing fire. A Pegasus was about as far as you could get to the opposite end of the Order spectrum. They were flying horses who pooped glitter, granted wishes and were... cute. Xavier hadn’t even been lucky enough to have a dark coloured coat, it was lilac. Lilac! (DARIUS POV)

That the New Deal should have been bigger, sooner, is a conclusion of long standing: John Maynard Keynes told Roosevelt he needed to approximately double the rate of “direct stimulus to production deliberately applied by the administration” in 1934, at a time when Roosevelt had reduced such expenditures in response to political pressure just like the kind that later came from Grassley or King.29 Roosevelt soon moved in the direction that Keynes suggested, getting the so-called big bill—amounting to nearly $5 billion—from Congress and allowing him to create the WPA to employ Americans nationwide under the direction of Harry Hopkins. But a few years afterward, once recovery seemed well under way, Roosevelt again cut relief spending—again in response to political pressure. For many economists—including Keynes—that premature reduction in fiscal stimulus was the cause of the 1937‒1938 recession.30 Only after making that fiscally cautious error did the Roosevelt administration adopt a deliberately Keynesian budget. Soon afterward, mobilization for war began.31 In 1941 Hopkins took a new job, directing Lend-Lease operations; Congress approved nearly $50 billion for the program—an order of magnitude more than the “big bill” that created the WPA.32 So when Grassley says the war ended the Depression, he is not stating an argument against the New Deal: he is stating an argument for a bigger New Deal, an argument that New Dealer Harry Hopkins at WPA should have had a budget more like World War II–era Harry Hopkins at Lend-Lease.33

There isn't anything you can say, anyway. It's too late. It was always too late.

Lucy picked up the point. “I remember this one time when I was in the third grade? And Jesse Cantu decided that he liked me? But I didn’t like him? So he decided that I would fall in love with him if he rescued me from some kind of danger, because that’s what always happens in the movies? So one day he told me that there was a surprise waiting for me in the cupboard at the back of the classroom and all I had to do was go in at recess and open the cupboard door—” “And you believed him?” Benno interrupted, aghast. “Of course!” Lucy said indignantly. “Because I’m from Mississippi! Where we believe people! So anyway, when I opened the cupboard there was a whole mess of spiders in there and I know people say that spiders scuttle away when they see you coming, but these spiders jumped out at me like they were rabid or something and Jesse ran into the room to save me but I was screaming so much that the principal called 911!” She paused for breath. “And the only good thing that happened was that we all got out of school for the rest of the day.” There was a brief silence as everyone absorbed this. Finally Silvia muttered, “Men are pigs.” Giacomo sighed. “How old was this boy with the spiders?” he asked Lucy in a patient voice, as if they had all gone off the rails but were fortunate that he was there to put them right. She frowned, as if suspecting a trick, but finally answered, “Eight.” “As I thought! Far too young to realize what a mistake he was making,” he said triumphantly. “But I’m sure he learned from this sad experience, yes? He didn’t keep trying to attract women with spiders?” “Well, no, of course not,” Lucy said. “Jesse’s still real immature, but he’s not an idiot.” “There you are, then.” Giacomo leaned his chair back, teetering on the back two legs, looking pleased with himself. “Everyone makes mistakes in love. The point is to learn from them. For example, Jesse learned—” “What?” Kate scoffed. “That attacking a girl with spiders isn’t a good way to say ‘I love you’? That should have been obvious from the start.” “Well, yes.” He nodded, as if conceding the point, but then added. “Of course, all knowledge is useful.” “But not all knowledge is worth the cost.” “And what cost is that?” Giacomo’s deep brown eyes were alight with enjoyment. “Looking like a fool.” “Oh, that.” He folded his arms across his chest with the air of one who is about to win an argument. “That’s nothing to concern yourself with. After all, love makes fools of everyone, don’t you agree?” “No, I don’t.” Kate bit off each word. “I don’t agree at all.” “How astonishing,” he muttered. “In fact,” she said meaningfully, “I would say that love only makes fools of those who were fools to begin with.” She smiled at him, clearly pleased with her riposte. Giacomo let his chair fall back to the floor with a thump. “If the world was left to people like you,” he said in an accusing tone, “we’d all be computing love’s logic on computers and dissecting our hearts in a biology lab.” “If the world were left to people like me,” Kate said with conviction, “it would be a much better place to live.” “Oh, yes,” he said sarcastically. “Because it would be orderly. Sensible. And dull.” “Love doesn’t have to end in riots and disaster and, and, and . . . spider attacks!” she said hotly.

Each jagged shard of light in the darkness is a tiny message sent from the recesses of time. “You are alone,” the stars say. “You are alone. You are still alone.

The long run is just a collection of short runs you have to put up with. Saying you have a ten year time horizon doesn't exempt you from al the non-sense that happens in the next ten years. Everyone has to experience the recessions, the bear markets, the meltdowns, the surprises and the memes. So rather than assume long term thinkers don't have to deal with short-notice nonsense, ask the question: how can I endure a never-ending parade of nonsense?

senator decided that he didn’t want to be the bad guy in the story. He spent Saturday huddling with West, sketching out a fresh offer for a climate bill, assembling a compromise he deemed worthy. When West passed along the document to Petrella and Deese, he told them that some fine-tuning might be required, but he thought it was a fair deal that Schumer and the White House could accept. As Petrella scanned the offer, he braced himself for the worst. But as he read, he absorbed the reality that Manchin had confounded his expectations. The plan was actually ambitious, not that far from the substance of their negotiations. Manchin had his demands, to be sure. They had covered most of this ground before. He wanted approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport natural gas from wells in north-central West Virginia, turning his state into a major player in that energy market. He asked for the Democratic leadership’s support for a separate bill reforming the process for permitting new energy infrastructure so that it could be built without having to surmount so many bureaucratic impediments. And he needed hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for deficit reduction, to assuage his centrist conscience. But that was just horse trading. The only thing that truly mattered was his proposing more than $300 billion in tax credits that would incentivize the nation to rapidly embrace clean energy. If Congress passed his proposal, carbon emissions would fall by 40 percent of the 2005 levels by 2030. Petrella, who felt at once elated and frustrated by Manchin’s wild swings, told West, “Lance, I’ve been sticking my neck out, defending you guys, saying that you were going to fucking do something here, for a year. I’m willing to do it one more time, but it’s got to be before the August recess, and this has got to be it. This is the deal. We’re locking arms.” West told Petrella that the document in his hands was the “flight plan.” They were going to finally land the plane. —

The availability bias says this: We create a picture of the world using the examples that most easily come to mind. This is idiotic, of course, because in reality, things don’t happen more frequently just because we can conceive of them more easily. Thanks to the availability bias, we travel through life with an incorrect risk map in our heads. Thus, we systematically overestimate the risk of being the victims of a plane crash, a car accident, or a murder. And we underestimate the risk of dying from less spectacular means, such as diabetes or stomach cancer. The chances of bomb attacks are much rarer than we think, and the chances of suffering depression are much higher. We attach too much likelihood to spectacular, flashy, or loud outcomes. Anything silent or invisible we downgrade in our minds. Our brains imagine showstopping outcomes more readily than mundane ones. We think dramatically, not quantitatively. Doctors often fall victim to the availability bias. They have their favorite treatments, which they use for all possible cases. More appropriate treatments may exist, but these are in the recesses of the doctors’ minds. Consequently, they practice what they know. Consultants are no better. If they come across an entirely new case, they do not throw up their hands and sigh: “I really don’t know what to tell you.” Instead, they turn to one of their more familiar methods, whether or not it is ideal. If something is repeated often enough, it gets stored at the forefront of our minds. It doesn’t even have to be true.

And here is the happiest news of all! When graduation was over, Room Nine did not even have to say good-bye to each other! Because all of us are coming back to this same school for first grade! So we can play at recess, just like Mother said! And guess what else? I can’t wait to see those guys again! Because we will be friends forever and forever. And always and always. And I mean it.

the art of growing i felt beautiful until the age of twelve when my body began to ripen like new fruit and suddenly the men looked at my newborn hips with salivating lips the boys didn’t want to play tag at recess they wanted to touch all the new and unfamiliar parts of me the parts i didn’t know how to wear didn’t know how to carry and tried to bury in my rib cage boobs they said and i hated that word hated that i was embarrassed to say it that even though it was referring to my body it didn’t belong to me it belonged to them and they repeated it like they were meditating upon it boobs he said let me see yours there is nothing worth seeing here but guilt and shame i try to rot into the earth below my feet but i am still standing one foot across from his hooked fingers and when he charges to feast on my half moons i bite into his forearm and decide i hate this body i must have done something terrible to deserve it when i go home i tell my mother the men outside are starving she tells me i must not dress with my breasts hanging said the boys will get hungry if they see fruit says i should sit with my legs closed like a woman oughta or the men will get angry and fight said i can avoid all this trouble if i just learn to act like a lady but the problem is that doesn’t even make sense i can’t wrap my head around the fact that i have to convince half the world’s population my body is not their bed i am busy learning the consequences of womanhood when i should be learning science and math instead i like cartwheels and gymnastics so i can’t imagine walking around with my thighs pressed together like they’re hiding a secret as if the acceptance of my own body parts will invite thoughts of lust in their heads i will not subject myself to their ideology cause slut shaming is rape culture virgin praising is rape culture i am not a mannequin in the window of your favorite shop you can’t dress me up or throw me out when i am worn you are not a cannibal your actions are not my responsibility you will control yourself the next time i go to school and the boys hoot at my backside i push them down foot over their necks and defiantly say boobs and the look in their eyes is priceless

II-238. Suppose he should relent / And publish Grace to all, on promise made / Of new Subjection; with what eyes could we / Stand in his presence humble, and receive / Strict Laws impos'd, to celebrate his Throne / With warbl'd Hymns, and to his Godhead sing / Forc't Halleluiah's; while he Lordly sits / Our envied Sovran, and his Altar breathes / Ambrosial Odours and Ambrosial Flowers, / Our servile offerings. This must be our task / In Heav'n, this our delight; II-238. Let's say he forgives us all if we promise to worship him. Are you ready to follow his laws, sing his praises, bring him flowers? II-248. how wearisom / Eternity so spent in worship paid / To whom we hate. II-248. It would make us sick to spend eternity worshiping the one we hate. II-249. Let us not then pursue / By force impossible, by leave obtain'd / Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state / Of splendid vassalage, II-249. Let's forget about fighting a war we can't win, or returning to Heaven in miserable slavery. II-252. but rather seek / Our own good from our selves, and from our own / Live to our selves, though in this vast recess, II-252. Let's make the best of what we have here where we don't owe anybody anything.

I’m sorry for your loss? Why do people say that? The loss is the least of your problems. It’s the pain that follows we should be sorry for. A loss is an event, a moment in time. But grief is relentless—a simmering flame that can be stoked by a whisper. It burrows down in the deep recesses of your heart, then surges up like bile, filling your lungs until it hurts to breathe.

As the latest science and psychology entered behavioral management, the approach shifted. Now, if a student acts out or isn’t following directions, Hillary says, “I first provide them with a choice, asking, ‘Can you reset?’” A reset is a momentary pause, an opportunity for the child to think about their behavior or mistake and correct it. Teachers explain and practice resets throughout the year. If the child resets, the teacher quickly moves on. As Hillary summarizes, “Everybody makes mistakes and mistakes are okay. A reset is a chance to think through your emotions and come back online. Children aren’t used to or equipped to navigate the barrage of emotions they feel. Give them space to deal with them.” And if the behavior continues? “I give them two options. For example, you can start your assignment at your desk or at my table. Or, you can reset now or we can practice resetting at recess together. They feel like they have control as they’re picking a choice, but I’m steering their behaviors toward what is acceptable. They can’t just say ‘No.

She wants to tear her eyes from the carnage before her, but she can’t. From the recesses of her mind, Mug’s words return. Sweetheart, no one wants to fight, but sometimes you have to handle your business. Did she always know? Did a muted part of her psyche always know that her father was a monster? Or was she just a dumb kid living a fantasy life under the watchful eyes of her mother and Mug? “Pea,” her father says. His voice is husky but not with sadness or regret or any human emotion that Pea would understand in this moment. No, this is exhilaration and it makes her want to vomit. He steps closer. “My princess.” “Don’t.” Her voice squeaks out, clawing past the lump in her throat. “Stay away from me. Don’t come near me. Not ever again.

Carrington was busy spreading a thick layer of glue on the last of three strips of wood that would be joined and fastened to the top edge of the skiff as a gunnel. I had to smile at the sight of Gage crouched beside her, murmuring instructions, holding back one of the braids that threatened to drag through the glue. “. . . and then at recess,” the girl said, squeezing a huge bottle of wood glue with both hands, “Caleb wouldn’t let anyone else play with the basketball, so Katie and I went and told the teacher—” “Good for you,” Gage said. “Here, put more glue on the edge. Better to use too much than not enough.” “Like this?” “Perfect.” “And then,” Carrington continued, “the teacher said it was someone else’s turn to play with the ball, and she made Caleb write an essay about sharing and cooperation.” “Did that fix him?” Jack asked. “No,” came Carrington’s disgusted reply. “He’s still the terriblest boy you could ever meet.” “They all are, honey,” Jack said. “I told him you were going to take me fishing,” Carrington went on indignantly, “and you know what he said?” “That girls aren’t good at fishing?” Jack guessed. “How did you know?” she asked in amazement. “Because I was a terrible boy once, and that’s probably what I would have said. But I’d have been dead wrong. Girls are great at fishing.” “Are you sure about that, Uncle Jack?” “Of course I— wait a minute.” Together Jack and Gage lifted the assembled wood strips and fit them to the edge of the boat. “Sweetheart,” Gage murmured to Carrington, “bring that bucket of clamps over here.” Carefully he placed clamps along the gunnel, pausing to adjust the wood strips when necessary. “What were you saying, Uncle Jack?” Carrington pressed, handing him some paper towels to wipe up dripping glue. “I was about to ask you: Who is the fishing expert in this family?” “You.” “That’s right. And who’s the expert on women?” “Uncle Joe,” she said, giggling. “Joe?” he asked in feigned outrage. “Humor him, Carrington,” Gage said. “Otherwise we’ll be here all day.” “You’re the expert on women,” Carrington told Jack promptly. “That’s right. And I’m here to tell you, some of the best anglers in the world are women.” “How come?” “They’re more patient, and they don’t give up easy. They tend to fish an area more thoroughly. And women can always find the spot with the hidden boulders or underwater weeds where fish are hiding. Men, we just look right past those spots, but women always find ’em.” As Jack spoke, Carrington caught sight of me in the doorway, and she threw me a grin. “Are you gonna take Miss Ella fishing?” she asked Jack, who had picked up a Japanese saw and was cutting off the protruding end of the gunnel at an angle. “If she wants to,” he said. “Is she gonna catch you, Uncle Jack?” Carrington asked slyly. “She already did, darlin’.

I remember once my kid got in trouble for saying to his teacher, “What time is fucking recess?” and I remember thinking, “Now where would he fucking pick up something like that?

A true story. One afternoon when our son, Richard, was in fifth grade, my wife called me at work to say he had received a one-day suspension for losing his temper during recess. Because we both worked, this was more of a punishment for us than it was for Richard. He hated going to school anyway. I called the school immediately and attempted to reason with the principal. She refused to understand my point of view, and by the time I finished yelling at her, she had suspended Richard for two more days.

it is not an overstatement to say, as Paul sees things, that at the core of their being, in the deepest recesses of who they are—in other words, in “the inner self”—believers will never be more resurrected than they already are. God has done a work in each believer, a work of nothing less than resurrection proportions, that will not be undone.

When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say, “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.” During that early self-employment period, when I struggled every day, completely clueless about what to do and terrified of the results (or lack thereof), Mr. Packwood’s advice started beckoning me from the recesses of my mind. I heard it like a mantra: Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow. In

Grieve not for lost love, whether it is through death or the fickle fluctuations of human nature. Love itself is never lost, but just plays hide-and-seek with you in many hearts; that in pursuing it you might find its ever greater manifestations. It will keep hiding from you, and disappointing you, until you have quested long enough to find its abode in the One who resides in the deepest recesses of your own soul, and in the heart of everything. Then you will say: “O Lord, when I resided in the house of mortal consciousness, I thought I loved my parents and my friends; I fancied I loved birds, beasts, possessions. But now that I have moved into the mansion of Omnipresence, I know it is Thee alone I love, manifested as parents, friends, all creatures and all things. By loving Thee alone, my heart expanded to love the many. By being loyal in my love to Thee, I am loyal to all I love. And I love all beings forever.” I see life on earth as only a scenic backdrop behind which my loved ones hide at death. As I love them when they are before my eyes, so does my love follow them with my ever-watching mental gaze when they move elsewhere, behind death’s screen. Those whom I have loved I could never hate, even though they grow uninteresting through ugly behavior. In my museum of recollections, I can still behold those traits that caused me to love them. Beneath the temporary mental masks of those whose behavior I dislike, I see the perfect love of my great Beloved, even as I see it in those worthy souls that I love. To stop loving is to stem the purifying flow of love. I shall loyally love every being, every thing, until I find all races, all creatures, all animate and inanimate objects embraced by my love. I will love until every soul, every star, every forsaken creature, every atom, is lodged in my heart; for in the infinite love of God, my breast of eternity is large enough to hold everything in me. O Love, I see Thy glowing face in the gems. I behold Thy shy blush in the blossoms. I am enraptured, hearing Thee warble in the birds. And I dream in ecstasy when my heart embraces Thee in all hearts. O Love, I met Thee in all things—only a little and for a while—but in Omnipresence I clasp Thee entirely and forever, and I rejoice in Thy joy evermore.

Zeke,” I say when I open the door. “What’s your problem? It’s the middle of the night.” There’s a line of sweat on his forehead, and he’s out of breath. He must have run here. “I was working the night shift in the control room,” Zeke says. “Something happened in the transfer dorm.” For some reason, my first thought is her, her wide eyes staring at me from the recesses of my memory. “What?” I say. “To who?” “Walk and talk,” Zeke says. I put on my shoes and pull on my jacket and follow him down the hall. “The Erudite guy. Blond,” Zeke says. I have to suppress a sigh of relief. It’s not her. Nothing happened to her.