Sale Of The Century Quotes

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?

The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.

So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion.

Despite its affective packaging, the disposition to catalogue and aggregate neatly rounded-off identities is in no meaningful way radical. Not only is it evocative of nineteenth-century essentialisms, it also reproduces the mindset of the mass information industry, which, though public opinion and market research, sorts the population into the demographic equivalent of sound bites—market shares, taste communities—all in service to the corporate sales effort and management of the national political agenda.

What seems worst of all, though, is that even the leaders don't recognize this. The greatest danger of the whole mess is that all this Western-American conditioning has been on autopilot for centuries. Nobody is in control of it anymore. It's a mindless goliath wandering the Earth, devouring lives, erasing potential, and following its every whim—regardless of how irrational, obscene, uneducated, enslaving, or backwards its actions are. The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

Sometimes I pretend I'm from the 19th century. Then I drive around and say, Wow! So this is what the future's like, huh?

This is who Ezra is dating now. He is now into girls who are into dressing up as nineteenth century prostitutes. For the hats.

I want to steal 100 years. If I get caught, it’ll be the trial of the century.

A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others.

Y'know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,— same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight. See what I mean? So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. — This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying. Said by the Stage Manager

I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation.

Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales--if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.

Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project. It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us.

It's not about in store versus online, or physical versus virtual... business in this century is often but not always about omni-channel distribution and getting leads and sales through a variety of platforms that may include all of the above or unique combinations.

The fetishisation of the sexuality of black people comes from centuries of dirty dark shade. It starts with sleazy old jokes that black men have huge cocks, or that black women are hyper-sexual, and it festers to become something toxic and sinister. This continues now, mostly unquestioned, with the sexual objectification of women, rounded fat bottoms and full lips all across the media industry. But once the canned laughter dies down or the fashion shoot is done and dusted, and you stop and take a cold hard look at the root history of these jokes and stereotypes, it all comes from a shade so bleak and so ignorant, that it has a sub-human subtext to it –brown people for sale in a human pet shop window.

Even a ship can be deemed guilty of murder and confiscated as a deodand, the proceeds of its sale being given to the king to be distributed as alms.

If patriotism is a scoundrel’s last refuge, then the concept of freedom is his first sales pitch.

I think the best time to launch an assault on a city would be not only in the middle of the night, but also the middle of the sixteenth century. Yawn if you agree.

The burden of proof weighs a lot, but it’s not as heavy as a certain 19th century German philosopher’s mustache. Trust me, I used to lift weights using that mustache like it was a dumbbell.

Y'know Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney, same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight. See what I mean? So people a thousand years from now this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

Throughout the nineteenth century, newspapers were accustomed to receiving this type of correspondence from the many adherents of the temperance movement, who sought to restrict the sale and consumption of alcohol.

So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the value of that bit of paper; but as much as I love freedom, I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belong to him or his.

Toward the end of the first century A.D., a Confucian government minister had them once more abolished, declaring, “Government sale of salt means competing with subjects for profit. These are not measures fit for wise rulers.

Meanwhile, “living in a van, or ‘vandwelling,’ is now fashionable,” proclaimed The New York Times Magazine in late 2011, adding that 1.2 million homes were predicted to be repossessed that year and noting that van sales were up 24 percent.

On December 2 (aka Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving) alone, customers ordered some 36.8 million products—or about 426 orders a second—helping to bring the company’s overall sales for 2013 to a record high of $74.45 billion.

Francis de Sales, a sixteenth-century bishop, said, “We often say that we are nothing, that we are misery itself and the refuse of the world, but we would be very sorry if anyone took us at our word or told others that we are really such as we say.

Lacking tax revenues, Greece has therefore been obliged to sell public assets, often at fire-sale prices, to buyers of Greek or other European nationalities, who evidently would rather take advantage of such an opportunity than pay taxes to the Greek government.

It has taken the science some time to catch up and connect the dots, but, in 2012, one pathbreaking study derived one third of all existential threats to animal species straight from the sale of goods like coffee, beef, tea, sugar and palm oil to countries of the North.

The Century of the Self delineated expertly how the theories of Sigmund Freud were deployed by his nephew Edward Bernays to create the profession of PR and generate the consumer boom of the fifties. Prior to the inclusion of psychological principles in sales, products were sold on the basis of utility:

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.

Q:What is the proletariat? A:The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century

A Palestinian village whose feudal owner sold it for a kiss through a pane of glass..." Nothing remained of Sireen after the auction apart from you, little prayer rug, because a mother slyly stole you and wrapped up her son who'd been sentenced to cold and weaning - and later to sorrow and longing. It's said there was a village, a very small village, on the border between sun's gate and earth. It's said that the village was twice sold - once for a measure of oil and once for a kiss through a pane of glass. The buyers and sellers rejoiced at its sale, the year the submarine was sunk, in our twentieth century. And in Sireen - the buyers went over the contract - were white-washed houses, lovers, and trees, folk poets, peasants, and children. (But there was no school - and neither tanks nor prisons.) The threshing floors, the colour of golden wine, and the graveyard were a vault meant for life and death, and the vault was sold! People say that there was a village, but Sireen became an earthquake, imprisoned by an amulet as it turned into a banquet - in which the virgins' infants were cooked in their mothers' milk so soldiers and ministers might eat along with civilisation! "And the axe is laid at the root of the tree..." And once again at the root of the tree, as one dear brother denies another and existence. Officer of the orbits... attend, O knight of death, but don't give in - death is behind us and also before us. Knight of death, attend, there is no time to retreat - darkness crowds us and now has turned into a rancid butter, and the forest too is full, the serpents of blood have slithered away and the beaker of our ablution has been sold to a tourist from California! There is no time now for ablution. People say there was a village, but Sireen became an earthquake, imprisoned by an amulet as it turned into a banquet - in which the virgins' infants were cooked in their mothers' milk so soldiers and ministers might eat, along with civilisation!

I wanted that autumn, in my fervor, to state publicly that the whole system of book publishing and bookselling in the West did not foster the development of a spiritual culture. In past centuries writers wrote for a small circle of connoisseurs who in turn guided artistic taste, and high literature was created. But today publishers have their eye on mass sales, which so often entails the most indiscriminate taste; publishers make gifts to booksellers to please them; authors, in turn, depend on the mercy of their publishing houses.

A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers or their family members, or African Americans in terror of the system’s caprice. The practice would not fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the first time since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior to the Civil War.

Francis de Sales, a sixteenth-century bishop in France, wrote, “Each of us has his own endowment from God, one to live in this way, another in that. It is an impertinence, then, to try to find out why St. Paul was not given St. Peter’s grace, or St. Peter given St. Paul’s. There is only one answer to such questions: the Church is a garden patterned with countless flowers, so there must be a variety of sizes, colors, scents — of perfections, after all. Each has its value, its charm, its joy; while the whole vast cluster of these variations makes for beauty in its most graceful form.

The natives use human excrement for tanning leather. When Bernal Diaz came with Cortés to the great market-place of Mexico City, in Montezuma's day, he saw the little pots of human excrement in rows for sale, and the leather-makers going round sniffing to see which was the best, before they paid for it. It staggered even a fifteenth-century Spaniard. Yet my leather man and his wife think it screamingly funny that I smell the huaraches before buying them. Everything has its own smell, and the natural smell of huaraches is what it is. You might as well quarrel with an onion for smelling like an onion.

The first true newspapers, which conveyed information from around the world and were intended for a wide audience, started to be circulated in the early seventeenth century….By 1640, there were nine newspapers in Amsterdam alone…A few decades later there were hundreds of dailies across Europe. The news had finally become a business. Anything that might pique readers’ interest and boost sales was considered newsworthy by the publishers, regardless of whether it was actually important. This fundamental fraud - the new being sold as the relevant - has persisted to this day. It remains the dominant model in print, online, on social media, the radio and television.

In verse 2 of the immediately following chapter, god tells Moses to instruct his followers about the conditions under which they may buy or sell slaves (or bore their ears through with an awl) and the rules governing the sale of their daughters. This is succeeded by the insanely detailed regulations governing oxen that gore and are gored, and including the notorious verses forfeiting “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Micromanagement of agricultural disputes breaks off for a moment, with the abrupt verse (22:18) “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform.

No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.

Then there is the very salient question of what the commandments do not say. Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended? In verse 2 of the immediately following chapter, god tells Moses to instruct his followers about the conditions under which they may buy or sell slaves (or bore their ears through with an awl) and the rules governing the sale of their daughters. This is succeeded by the insanely detailed regulations governing oxes that gore and are gored, and including the notorious verses forfeiting “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Micromanagement of agricultural disputes breaks off for a moment, with the abrupt verse (22:18) “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform. Occasionally, there are injunctions that are moral, and also (at least in the lovely King James version) memorably phrased: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” was taught to Bertrand Russell by his grandmother, and stayed with the old heretic all his life. However, one mutters a few sympathetic words for the forgotten and obliterated Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites, also presumably part of the Lord’s original creation, who are to be pitilessly driven out of their homes to make room for the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel.

Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.

When I first started dual enrollment at Lake City Community College you could print in the library for free. I printed whole books. Like James Legge's 1891 "Tao Te Ching" translation. He was to parentheses what Emily Dickinson was to the Em Dash. "To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (at­tain­ment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a dis­ease." I'd sit around listening to records as their dot matrix printer whirred. Slowly printing a book from the 6th century BCE. They had those hard blue plastic headphones. Your ears would ache. But Rimsky-Korsakov was pretty metal. Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response" had me picking "ZOOM" as my meditation mantra. Reading Vonnegut with his nonlinear narrative. Books will often have Acknowledgments. A page or two. Things that helped you. What matters. Everything I write is an Acknowledgment. What matters. And I've printed whole books.

When I started my marketing company, I fell into the same trap most entrepreneurs do in the early stages of their business. Desperate for sales I created page after page on my website, offering everything and anything from logo design and email marketing to Google AdWords and SEO. It was only when I stripped all of this noise away and focused almost exclusively on Google AdWords and PPC marketing that things started to happen for me. It was easier to rank my website on Google because the whole website was optimised around specific niche keywords. It was easier to close customers, because they wanted professional PPC services and I could demonstrate with little effort that I was a PPC specialist. In most cases I didn't even need to demonstrate this point because 5 seconds spent on my website would tell the client that my whole business was Google AdWords PPC. By making it look like the only thing I specialised in was PPC consultancy, I cornered the market in every channel my services were advertised.   But

Liturgy gathers the holy community as it reads the Holy Scriptures into the sweeping tidal rhythms of the church year in which the story of Jesus and the Christian makes its rounds century after century, the large and easy interior rhythms of a year that moves from birth, life, death, resurrection, on to spirit, obedience, faith, and blessing. Without liturgy we lose the rhythms and end up tangled in the jerky, ill-timed, and insensitive interruptions of public-relations campaigns, school openings and closings, sales days, tax deadlines, inventory and elections. Advent is buried under 'shopping days before Christmas.' The joyful disciplines of Lent are exchanged for the anxious penitentials of filling out income tax forms. Liturgy keeps us in touch with the story as it defines and shapes our beginnings and ends our living and dying, our rebirths and blessing in this Holy Spirit, text-formed community visible and invisible. When Holy Scripture is embraced liturgically, we become aware that a lot is going on all at once, a lot of different people are doing a lot of different things. The community is on its feet, at work for God, listening and responding to the Holy Scriptures. The holy community, in the process of being formed by the Holy Scriptures, is watching, listening to God's revelation taking shape before an din them as they follow Jesus, each person playing his or her part in the Spirit.

Something must be wrong then in art, or the happiness of life is sickening in the house of civilization. What has caused the sickness? Machine-labour will you say? Well, I have seen quoted a passage from one of the ancient Sicilian poets rejoicing in the fashioning of a water-mill, and exulting in labour being set free from the toil of the hand-quern in consequence; and that surely would be a type of man's natural hope when foreseeing the invention of labour-saving machinery as 'tis called; natural surely, since though I have said that the labour of which art can form a part should be accompanied by pleasure, so one could deny that there is some necessary labour even which is not pleasant in itself, and plenty of unnecessary labour which is merely painful. If machinery had been used for minimizing such labour, the utmost ingenuity would scarcely have been wasted on it; but is that the case in any way? Look round the world, and you must agree with John Stuart Mill in his doubt whether all the machinery of modern times has lightened the daily work of one labourer. And why have our natural hopes been so disappointed? Surely because in these latter days, in which as a matter of fact machinery has been invented, it was by no means invented with the aim of saving the pain of labour. The phrase labour-saving machinery is elliptical, and means machinery which saves the cost of labour, not the labour itself, which will be expended when saved on tending other machines. For a doctrine which, as I have said, began to be accepted under the workshop-system, is now universally received, even though we are yet short of the complete development of the system of the Factory. Briefly, the doctrine is this, that the essential aim of manufacture is making a profit; that it is frivolous to consider whether the wares when made will be of more or less use to the world so long as any one can be found to buy them at a price which, when the workman engaged in making them has received of necessaries and comforts as little as he can be got to take, will leave something over as a reward to the capitalist who has employed him. This doctrine of the sole aim of manufacture (or indeed of life) being the profit of the capitalist and the occupation of the workman, is held, I say, by almost every one; its corollary is, that labour is necessarily unlimited, and that to attempt to limit it is not so much foolish as wicked, whatever misery may be caused to the community by the manufacture and sale of the wares made.

What I thought was a black hole turned out to be nothing more than a splatter of ink on my tie. And I assumed I was wearing the most astrological outfit of the century.

Obesity isn't as cool as it used to be, back in the earlier centuries. Before it was a reflection on your gross income, and now it's just gross.

The issue here turned on the work content of a day's labor power, which Taylor defines in the phrase "a fair day's work." To this term he gave a crude physiological interpretation: all the work a worker can do without injury to his health, at a pace that can be sustained throughout a working lifetime. (In practice, he tended to define this level of activity at an extreme limit, choosing a pace that only a few could maintain, and then only under strain.) Why a "fair day's work" should be defined as a physiological maximum is never made clear. In attempting to give concrete meaning to the abstraction "fairness," it would make just as much if not more sense to express a fair day's work as the amount of labor necessary to add to the product a value equal to the worker's pay; under such conditions, of course, profit would be impossible. The phrase "a fair day's work" must therefore be regarded as inherently meaningless, and filled with such content as the adversaries in the purchase-sale relationship try to give it.

This was very much Billing territory. He picked up on the literary, journalistic and political notions of the radical right: proposals for Jewish ghettoes and yellow star badges; anti-German and anti-alien strictures; moves against the sale of honours and internal corruption; and, crucially, took them to the masses.

New German conglomerates built mainly on the seizure of Jewish-owned companies sold bonds on the international market to raise capital to Aryanize still more companies at fire-sale prices.

Until well into the twentieth century there even were legal bans on the sale of Bibles in most nations of Latin America, which led to the widespread belief that only Protestants accepted the Bible.

He taught that the “great priest” (i.e., the Pope) dishonours the Saviour by taking to himself the Divine power to forgive sins, which God has reserved for Himself alone. “God has borne witness that he Himself remits sins and blots out men’s iniquities through Christ who died for the sins of men. As to this, the testimony of faith is that He is the Lamb of God who took away sins and forgives the world, possessing in Himself the unique right of forgiving sins, because He is Himself at once God and man. And on this account He died as a man for sins and gave Himself to God on the cross as an offering for sins. Thus God obtained by Him and His pains the forgiveness of the sins of the world. So He alone has the power and right to forgive men their sins. Therefore, the great priest, in utmost pomp with which he raises himself above all that is called God, as a robber has laid hands on these rights of Christ. He has instituted the pilgrimage to Rome through which sins are to be cleansed away. Therefore, drunken crowds run together from all lands, and he, the father of all evil, distributes his blessing from a high place to the crowds that they may have the forgiveness of all sins and deliverance from all judgement. He saves from hell and purgatory, and there is no reason why anyone should go there. Also he sends into all lands tickets, for money, which ensure deliverance from all sins and pains; they do not even need to take the trouble to come to him, they have only to send the money and all is forgiven them. What belongs to the Lord alone, this official has taken to himself, and he draws the praise which belongs to his Lord, and becomes rich through the sale of these things. What is left for Christ to do for us when His official frees us from all sins and judgement and can make us just and holy? It is only our sins that stand in the way of our salvation. If the great priest remits all these what shall the poor Lord Jesus do? Why does the world neglect Him so and does not seek salvation from Him? Simply on this account that the great priest overshadows Him with his majesty and makes Him darkness in the world, while he, the great priest, has a great name in the world and unexampled renown. So that the Lord Jesus, already crucified, is held up to the world’s laughter, and the great priest only is in everyone’s mouth, and the world seeks and finds salvation in him.

I don’t drink alcohol even when I’m not in the family way. Never have.” “Never?” “Nope.” “Never drank once in all your life? That’s impossible.” “It’s partly a religious decision. I’m a Mormon. From Utah, you know.” He stared, mouth slightly agape. “How many wives does your husband know.”have?” “Oh please. Mormons aren’t polygamists.” “Yes they are,” the driver piped up. He wore one of those cliché chauffeur hats low over his eyes. “Everyone knows. The men have loads of wives, make them all wear bonnets.” Becky sighed and gave her speech. “Some Mormons were polygamists in the nineteenth century, but they gave up the practice in 1890. There are small religious groups around the Utah area who practice polygamy, but they have nothing to do with the LDS Church.” “That’s not what I saw on TV. Mormons, they said. Polygamists. Loads of ’em.” “I am a Mormon, from Utah, lived there my entire thirty-four years, and I’ve never met a polygamist.” The driver straightened the Mets plush baseball that dangled from the rearview mirror. “You must not get out much.” “Yes, that must be it.” “It’s tragic really,” Felix said. “She’s agoraphobic and hadn’t been out of the house in, what was it, fifteen years?” “Sixteen,” Becky said. “Right, sixteen. Last time was when Charles and Diana wed.” “You’re thinking of the last time I leaned out the window. The last time I actually left the house was for a sale at Sears.” “Of course, the day you bought those trousers. Sixteen years later, here she is! And in the same trousers, but still . . . We’re so proud of our little Becky!” Felix patted her head. “You dug deep, but you found the courage to step out of that door.” “I did like you told me, Felix. I just shut my eyes and chanted, ‘The polygamists are not going to eat me, they’re not going to eat me,’ and I wasn’t afraid anymore.” “She is a rare example of true bravery. Don’t you agree?” “Uh, yeah,” said the driver. “Congratulations.” “Thanks.” Becky smiled politely. “Go Mets.” The driver snorted.

We’re all “storytellers.” We don’t call ourselves storytellers, but it’s what we do every day. Although we’ve been sharing stories for thousands of years, the skills we needed to succeed in the industrial age were very different from those required today. The ability to sell our ideas in the form of story is more important than ever. Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. In the information age, the knowledge economy, you are only as valuable as your ideas. Story is the means by which we transfer those ideas to one another. Your ability to package your ideas with emotion, context, and relevancy is the one skill that will make you more valuable in the next decade. Storytelling is the act of framing an idea as a narrative to inform, illuminate, and inspire. The Storyteller’s Secret is about the stories you tell to advance your career, build a company, pitch an idea, and to take your dreams from imagination to reality. When you pitch your product or service to a new customer, you’re telling a story. When you deliver instructions to a team or educate a class, you’re telling a story. When you build a PowerPoint presentation for your next sales meeting, you’re telling a story. When you sit down for a job interview and the recruiter asks about your previous experience, you’re telling a story. When you craft an e-mail, write a blog or Facebook post, or record a video for your company’s YouTube channel, you’re telling a story. But there’s a difference between a story, a good story, and a transformative story that builds trust, boosts sales, and inspires people to dream bigger.

BRIEF HISTORY OF TRADE BETWEEN AFRICA AND EUROPE Hereditary slavery had been around since the times of Greece and Rome and was nothing new. But with the Renaissance, Europe introduced certain novelties: never before had slavery been determined by skin color, and never before had the sale of human flesh been the brightest light in the world of business. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Africa sold slaves and bought rifles: it traded hands for arms. Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africa delivered gold, diamonds, copper, ivory, rubber, and coffee in exchange for Bibles: it traded the riches of the earth for the promise of heaven.

BARBIE GOES TO WAR There are more than a billion Barbies. Only the Chinese outnumber them. The most beloved woman on the planet would never let us down. In the war of good against evil, Barbie enlisted, saluted, and marched off to Iraq. She arrived at the front wearing made-to-measure land, sea, and air uniforms reviewed and approved by the Pentagon. Barbie is accustomed to changing professions, hairdos, and clothes. She has been a singer, an athlete, a paleontologist, an orthodontist, an astronaut, a firewoman, a ballerina, and who knows what else. Every new job entails a new look and a complete new wardrobe that every girl in the world is obliged to buy. In February 2004, Barbie wanted to change boyfriends too. For nearly half a century she had been going steady with Ken, whose nose is the only protuberance on his body, when an Australian surfer seduced her and invited her to commit the sin of plastic. Mattel, the manufacturer, announced an official separation. It was a catastrophe. Sales plummeted. Barbie could change occupations and outfits, but she had no right to set a bad example. Mattel announced an official reconciliation.

The Ultimate Guide To SEO In The 21st Century Search engine optimization is a complex and ever changing method of getting your business the exposure that you need to make sales and to build a solid reputation on line. To many people, the algorithms involved in SEO are cryptic, but the basic principle behind them is impossible to ignore if you are doing any kind of business on the internet. This article will help you solve the SEO puzzle and guide you through it, with some very practical advice! To increase your website or blog traffic, post it in one place (e.g. to your blog or site), then work your social networking sites to build visibility and backlinks to where your content is posted. Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other news feeds are great tools to use that will significantly raise the profile of your pages. An important part of starting a new business in today's highly technological world is creating a professional website, and ensuring that potential customers can easily find it is increased with the aid of effective search optimization techniques. Using relevant keywords in your URL makes it easier for people to search for your business and to remember the URL. A title tag for each page on your site informs both search engines and customers of the subject of the page while a meta description tag allows you to include a brief description of the page that may show up on web search results. A site map helps customers navigate your website, but you should also create a separate XML Sitemap file to help search engines find your pages. While these are just a few of the basic recommendations to get you started, there are many more techniques you can employ to drive customers to your website instead of driving them away with irrelevant search results. One sure way to increase traffic to your website, is to check the traffic statistics for the most popular search engine keywords that are currently bringing visitors to your site. Use those search words as subjects for your next few posts, as they represent trending topics with proven interest to your visitors. Ask for help, or better yet, search for it. There are hundreds of websites available that offer innovative expertise on optimizing your search engine hits. Take advantage of them! Research the best and most current methods to keep your site running smoothly and to learn how not to get caught up in tricks that don't really work. For the most optimal search engine optimization, stay away from Flash websites. While Google has improved its ability to read text within Flash files, it is still an imperfect science. For instance, any text that is part of an image file in your Flash website will not be read by Google or indexed. For the best SEO results, stick with HTML or HTML5. You have probably read a few ideas in this article that you would have never thought of, in your approach to search engine optimization. That is the nature of the business, full of tips and tricks that you either learn the hard way or from others who have been there and are willing to share! Hopefully, this article has shown you how to succeed, while making fewer of those mistakes and in turn, quickened your path to achievement in search engine optimization!

Hilda Ross, the straight-shooting government minister in charge of the welfare of women and children, blamed youthful immorality on “lustful images flowing from trashy magazines and unclean reading matter”, and in July 1954, as the trial of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme was about to begin, the government convened a special committee to investigate. It reported that both comics and working mothers were to blame. The government quickly passed legislation banning the sale of contraceptives to anyone under sixteen.

The popularity of biomedical treatments for autism mirrored the general rise of interest in so-called complementary and alternative medicine in recent decades. By the first years of the twenty-first century, the trade in high-dose vitamins and supplements had become an economic powerhouse, with annual sales topping $33 billion. Americans now consult their homeopaths, naturopaths, herbalists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and Reiki workers more often than they see their primary care physicians. Up to three quarters of all autistic children in the United States receive some form of alternative treatment, with dietary interventions often beginning even before their diagnosis.

Khalil Henareh works in the real estate sector as a successful realtor. He simply enjoys the day-to-day challenges. Khalil Henareh like meeting new people, He value long-term relationships, and there is never a dull moment as this business helps him bring his love of people and architecture together beautifully.  Khalil Henareh takes pride in setting goals for himself and then exceeding his own expectations. It’s no surprise then that Khalil Henareh is the winner of many times from 2015-2021 CENTURION Awards that is the top home sales award level in the worldwide Century 21 franchise. The Centurion It's the Oscar of real estate sales!

Federal funding of the interstate highways, whose routes often deliberately tore through communities of color, literally paved the way for white flight. At the same time, federally guaranteed mortgages issued by the Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration made home ownership accessible to millions of Americans living in neighborhoods that were restricted to whites through overt measures such as restrictive covenants (contracts signed by property owners in all-white neighborhoods prohibiting the sale of homes to nonwhites) and through the stealthy acts of realtors and neighbors.

According to Ivar, he and Dr Glowacki reached a final agreement on July 2, 1925, just days before the new participating preferred shares were to be sold. Ivar’s assistant, Karin Bökman, said she witnessed the signatures to the secret deal; she certified the translation of the original contract, as did a Polish notary. Dr Glowacki signed on behalf of the “Treasury of the Polish State,” and Ivar signed on behalf of International Match Corporation.32 Ivar apparently didn’t need to use the stamp he had prepared with a facsimile of Dr Glowacki’s signature. Like the B Shares, this contract was a marvel of financial innovation. First, the agreement provided for the creation of a new Dutch company called N.V. Maatschappij Garanta, or Garanta for short. Garanta would be incorporated in Amsterdam, and its shares would be owned by Polish citizens nominated by Dr Glowacki. Garanta would take over the entire match industry in Poland, from production to sale. Garanta also would assume “certain exchange losses which have been sustained by International Match Corporation in connection with financial transactions in Poland. This item is to be carried as an asset on the books of Garanta.”33 Apparently, Ivar had continued gambling on foreign exchange rates during 1925. This time, though, he had used International Match’s money, and this time he had lost. The secret agreement shifted those losses from International Match to Garanta. Durant and Berning were unaware of these losses, or their transfer.

Following the tour, the guides usher the visitors into a cavernous hall where interactive displays invite them to press buttons to learn about the different parts of the dollar or to hear about its history. Children press the buttons, but the lights do not go on, and so none of the questions are answered. They rush to the next interactive display only to find that it too no longer interacts. The large room also offers souvenirs for sale, such as a souvenir pen filled with shredded money. In a corner, Japanese tourists buy sheets of uncut American currency from women behind security windows of thick glass. They take the money home with them to use as novelty wrapping paper for gifts and flowers. The twentieth century became the era of paper money. Never before had so much of it been manufactured in so many countries and in so many denominations. Behind the perpetually operating machines of the U.S. Treasury lay a long process whereby paper money won the confidence of ordinary people.

Also known as hire purchase, installment credit was not entirely new—and consumer credit itself dated back to antiquity. In reality, according to Lendol Calder, an expert on the history of consumer credit, overindebtedness was a headache for the Pilgrims, the colonial planters, and nineteenth-century farmers: “A river of red ink,” he writes, “runs through American history.” However, up until the 1920s, installment credit had been used primarily for the sale of pianos, and, to a lesser extent, furniture and sewing machines.

Before 1922, the Spanish government had controlled the match monopoly, but still permitted Swedish Match to export matches to Spain. Then the government shifted course and signed a fifteen-year lease with a Spanish company, Compañia Arrendataria de Fosforos (CAF). It also began enforcing a decree that match interests could only be held by Spanish citizens or companies owned by Spanish citizens. From that time on, CAF would control all match production and sales within Spain. As a foreigner, Ivar was not permitted to own shares of CAF. But Ivar refused to be locked out of the Spanish market. He began buying shares of CAF through Spanish intermediaries, and even created a front company in Spain, Sociedad Financiera de la Industria Española (SAFIE).5 The share purchases were time-consuming and expensive, and even by 1924 he was a long way from taking control of the Spanish match market. SAFIE gave Ivar a presence, so that Swedish Match could make some money from exports to Spain, but a Spanish match monopoly seemed unlikely anytime soon. Like Germany and Italy, Spain would have to wait.

By this time, Ivar and Berning had developed a much cozier relationship. Ivar had given up on getting Berning’s first name right, but at least he addressed letters with an honorific now, as in “My dear Mr Berning.”27 Berning had gotten over the scrubbed trip to Japan, and instead was focused on an upcoming trip to Europe with his wife, at Ivar’s expense. He wrote that “Mrs Berning and I are looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to our visit to Sweden.”28 A.D. Berning’s responses to detailed inquiries from Durant ranged from murky to non-responsive. What, Durant wanted to know, did International Match’s income statement entry of $4,318,827.84 for “income from other sources” represent? Berning cryptically answered that the “other sources” entry “represents all the income of the corporation other than from sales. It includes dividends and interest received on investments, interest received on advances, accounts receivable, etc., profit on exchange and other miscellaneous items.”29 Whatever that meant, it could not have inspired much confidence.

The sale of its own citizens into slavery and the importation of firearms undermined the productive capacity of Benin and hastened its decline during the eighteenth century.

207, 2nd Floor, 3rd Main Rd, Chamrajpet, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560018 Call – +91 7022122121 ### The Development of Kannada Literature and the Rise of Online Accessibility The rich history of Kannada literature, which stretches back more than a millennium and is littered with vibrant narratives, poetic forms, and academic works, is extensive. The development of Kannada writing has been both rich and varied, ranging from the ancient texts of the 9th century to contemporary novels and essays. The way readers interact with their literary heritage has changed significantly as the digital age has progressed, making Kannada literature significantly more accessible. Thanks to platforms like Veeraloka Books, readers can now explore the depths of Kannada literature without being restricted by location. By making it possible for customers to purchase books with just a single click, these online retailers have created a link between readers and authors. This progress from customary physical book shops to computerized stages has been critical in advancing Kannada writing, guaranteeing its significance in a quickly impacting world. The extensive selection of titles offered by Kannada books online is one of the most significant benefits. Poetry, fiction, historical novels, and biographies are all forms of Kannada literature. Stages, for example, Veeraloka Books curate a huge determination of these works, taking care of different peruser interests. Because literature has become more accessible to everyone, you can find something that piques your interest whether you're a casual reader or an avid collector. In addition, readers can get their beloved books delivered to their homes through Kannada books online, saving them the hassle of going through crowded stores or standing in long lines. People who live in remote areas or in areas with few bookstore options will appreciate this convenience. Online platforms remove barriers and foster a deeper connection between authors and their audiences by delivering Kannada literature to your doorstep. Sales alone are not enough to stop the digital transformation of Kannada literature; It also includes promoting fresh and upcoming authors. Online platforms make it easier for aspiring authors to have their voices heard in a more democratic setting than traditional publishing avenues. Self-publishing on platforms like Veeraloka Books has helped numerous authors reach a larger audience than ever before. This change ensures that the literary landscape remains dynamic and vibrant by encouraging experimentation and innovation in Kannada writing. E-books and audiobooks have also become more widely available, making them more accessible. These choices provide readers who prefer digital formats with portability and flexibility. Younger readers who are accustomed to using smartphones and tablets can now more easily access Kannada literature. Audiobooks cater to those who enjoy listening to stories during their daily commutes or while multitasking, while e-books are portable, making it simple to read on the go. Moreover, the web empowers perusers to draw in with writing in manners that were already impossible. Discussions of books, authors, and literary themes can flourish on social media, online forums, and other platforms. Perusers can associate with one another, share surveys, and effectively partake in the abstract talk encompassing Kannada composing. The community of readers of Kannada literature is also bolstered by this interaction, which not only enhances the reading experience. In conclusion, Kannada literature faces both challenges and opportunities in the digital age. Platforms like Veeraloka Books make it easier for people with disabilities to access literature, allowing it to flourish.

To hell with the issues. I have a wife and three kids, a mortgage and a car loan; they’re my issues. I’ve fought my way up to regional sales manager and I have a shot at national sales director in a few years’ time. I’ve worked my socks off for this and no one’s going to take it away from me: not rioting Negroes, not drug-taking hippies, not Communists working for Moscow, and certainly not a softhearted liberal like Hubert Humphrey. I don’t care what you say about Nixon, he stands for people like me.” At that moment Dave felt, with an overwhelming sense of impending doom, that Nixon was going to win.

Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence,2 argues that we are undergoing the most recent of our every-500-year “rummage sales”—an upheaval in culture and worldview that will inevitably reshape our faith interpretations and institutions as surely as the Great Schism of the eleventh century and the Great Reformation of the sixteenth century. This tsunami of change is well under way, marked by the postmodern and post-Christian sensibilities of the millennial generation.

... the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be equally about niches. For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator far, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

The Danish element dates from the piratical invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. It includes anger, awe, baffle, bang, bark, bawl, blunder, boulder, box, club, crash, dairy, dazzle, fellow, gable, gain, ill, jam, kidnap, kill, kidney, kneel, limber, litter, log, lull, lump, mast, mistake, nag, nasty, niggard, horse, plough, rug, rump, sale, scald, shriek, skin, skull, sledge, sleigh, tackle, tangle, tipple, trust, viking, window, wing, etc.

Would you mind washing my feet? I’m a centipede, so it may take you a century.

One of my seminars is “Leadership in the 20th century: How being a century behind still puts you ahead of all your competition still living in the 19th century.

The rising prosperity of the Muslim elites was accompanied by a growth in slavery. Military campaigns in India reduced thousands of Hindus to slavery. In sub-Saharan Africa, local elites enslaved other Africans for sale and, as Muslim customs gained influence, for their own use. By modern estimates, sub-Saharan and Red Sea traders sold about 2.5 million enslaved Africans to Muslim buyers in northern Africa and the rest of the Muslim world between 1200 and 1500, though no figures are reliable. African slaves reached China by at least the seventh century, and by the twelfth century some wealthy people of Canton had black slaves. Some wealthy Muslim men aspired to having a concubine from every part of the known world. One Indian noble reportedly kept 2,000 harem slaves, including women from Turkey and China.15

For the dangers of an economy absolutely dominated by a single staple crop were as clear in the seventeenth century as they are nowadays. Dependence on one primary product leaves the producers at the mercy of the market, with its recurring gluts and lowered prices, and its recurring shortage of money. Primary producers are normally at the mercy of their customers anyway: but if they have diversified their products they can at least hope to live off the sales of the others when the sales of one – say, cocoa – have declined, in volume or in value. To

Then, in the 1400s, medical education began including dissection of human corpses in a new, realistic approach to anatomy. But even then, students were not allowed hands-on participation. Typically, the teacher sat and lectured while a barber did the cutting and students observed. Not for several hundred years thereafter were students themselves permitted to do dissections. But as the practice spread, it became harder to obtain bodies for teaching. Enter the grave robbers, or resurrectionists as they were called, who by the eighteenth century turned a good profit supplying bodies for physicians to study. They robbed the graves of the poor and unclaimed, those who were least likely to be missed. Some took their practice a bit far, as witness the notorious Burke and Hare, who committed several murders to procure corpses for sale. So, absent those who took the career too seriously, grave robbers may actually have contributed to medical understanding.

Raising awareness of the tight connection between sales and production also helps guard against one of the great evils of traditional selling and order-taking systems, namely the resort to bonus systems to motivate a sales force working with no real knowledge of or concern about the capabilities of the production system. These methods produce periodic surges in orders at the end of each bonus period (even though underlying demand hasn’t changed) and an occasional “order of the century” drummed up by a bonus-hungry sales staff, which the production system can’t possibly accommodate. Both lead to late deliveries and bad will from the customer. In other words, they magically generate muda.

Nazism, fascism, and communism were belief systems adopted passionately by millions of well-educated men and women. Taken together, all of the totalitarian ideologies were self-contained and delivered through a one-way flow of propaganda that prevented the people who were enmeshed in the ideology from actively participating in challenging its lack of human values. Unfortunately, the legacy of the twentieth century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. In an age of propaganda, education itself can become suspect. When ideology is so often woven into the “facts” that are delivered in fully formed and self-contained packages, people naturally begin to develop some cynicism about what they are being told. When people are subjected to ubiquitous and unrelenting mass advertising, reason and logic often begin to seem like they are no more than handmaidens for the sophisticated sales force. And now that these same techniques dominate the political messages sent by candidates to voters, the integrity of our democracy has been placed under the same cloud of suspicion. Many advocacy organizations—progressive as well as conservative—often give the impression that they already have exclusive possession of the truth and merely have to “educate” others about what they already know. Resentment toward this attitude is also one of the many reasons for a resurgence of the traditional anti-intellectual strain in America. When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience, and share with one another in a robust and dynamic dialogue that enriches what the “experts” are telling them with the wisdom of the groups as a whole, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best. If well-educated citizens have no effective way to communicate their ideas to others and no realistic prospect of catalyzing the formation of a critical mass of opinion supporting their ideas, then their education is for naught where the vitality of our democracy is concerned.

The current fast food fuss obscures the reality that such foods are ancient. Fried kibbeh, sausages, olives, nuts, small pizzas, and flat breads have been sold on the streets of Middle Eastern and North African cities for a cycle of centuries; Marco Polo reported barbequed meats, deep-fried delicacies, and even roast lamb for sale in Chinese markets.

But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system. P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking real risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage real rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins. In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “Port Huron Statement” and the Digger Papers, in the flapper’s slang and the Pinkster Ode. In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surprises, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like The Simpsons and South Park to Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.

The movie marketing paradigm says throw an expensive premiere and hope that translates into ticket sales come opening weekend. A growth hacker says, “Hey, it’s the twenty-first century, and we can be a lot more technical about how we acquire and capture new customers.” The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their sales funnel. The necessity of that jolt—needing to get it any way they can—has made start-ups very creative.

Simon was killed in Betar. Akiva was captured, imprisoned, finally tortured to death, the flesh torn from his body ‘by iron combs’. Dio says that of the rebels ‘very few were saved’. The Roman vengeance was awe-inspiring. Fifty forts where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns, villages and agricultural settlements. Dio says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judaea was laid waste.’.126 In the late fourth century, St Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.

world; my brilliant, insightful and lovely UK editors Selina Walker and Georgina Hawtrey-Woore for believing and making things even better; Dan Balado for seeing things I couldn’t; Richard Ogle for a beautiful UK cover; Jen Doyle and Philippa Cotton for getting me “out there”; and the entire team at Century and Arrow, from publicity to marketing to sales and beyond—I am so very grateful for all your hard work. Big thanks also to my wonderful publishing team at Crown in the USA for also believing in this book so wholeheartedly—especially

Food was seen primarily as a necessity, whereas clothes – necessary as they are – were the pre-eminent objects of fashion. This distinction made one of the fundamental contrasts in image between the grand department stores of the late nineteenth century, associated with luxury goods, and the supermarkets of the twentieth, associated with the basic necessities and principally with the sale of food; but at the same time, supermarkets were also taking food into the category of fashion.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about 85 per cent of the population of India lived in its villages. Both peasants and landed elites were involved in agricultural production and claimed r i g h t s t o a s h a r e o f t h e p r o d u c e . T h i s c r e a t e d r e l a t i o n s h i p s o f c o o p e r a t i o n , c o m p e t i t i o n a n d conflict among them. The sum of these agrarian relationships made up rural society. At the same time agencies from outside also entered into the rural world. Most important among these was the Mughal state, which der ived the bulk of its income from agricultural production. Agents of the state – revenue assessors, collectors, record keepers – sought to control rural society so as to ensure that cultivation took place and the s t a t e g o t i t s r e g u l a r s h a r e o f t a x e s f r o m t h e produce. Since many crops were grown for sale, trade, money and markets entered the villages and linked the agricultural areas with the towns.

Control of trade was sought by specifying that no ships should "break boulke [bulk] or make privatt sales of any comodities" before reaching Jamestown. Taxes were not ignored either for a levy of ten pounds of tobacco, already the common currency it appears, was laid on each male above 16 years of age to help defray the "publique depte [debt]." Lest it be forgotten, it was enacted that obedience was required "to the presente government." Old planters were given special exemption from public service, "they and theire posteritie," while Burgesses were rendered exempt from seizure during Assembly time. "Persones of qualitie" when found delinquent, it was stated, could be imprisoned if not fit to take corporal punishment. It is of note that service to the Governor, or the public, was made contingent on Assembly consent. Of particular interest, too, was the action on the principle of taxation. It was bold, indeed, at this time for the Assembly to declare that; The Governor shall not laye any taxes or impositiones uppon the Colony, theire landes or comodities otherwi[se] then by the awthoritie of the Generall Assemblie, to be levied and imployed as the saide Assembly shall appoint. This was an early word on taxation, but it was to be far from the last word in the next century and a half.

In Tepito everything is for sale but dignity,” the maxim goes.

During the era of that trade, Africa was largely ruled by Africans, who established the conditions under which slave sales took place. The crew of a slave ship was in no position to defy African rulers and their armies by going out across the land and capturing people willy-nilly. The stronger African peoples captured and enslaved the weaker peoples—the same pattern found over the centuries in Europe, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and Polynesia:

There have been three major slave revolts in human history. The first, led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus against the Romans, occurred in 73 BC. The third was in the 1790s when the great black revolutionary Touissant L'Ouverture and his slave army wrested control of Santo Domingo from the French, only to be defeated by Napoleon in 1802. But the second fell halfway between these two, in the middle of the 9th century AD, and is less documented than either. We do know that the insurgents were black; that the Muslim 'Abbasid caliphs of Iraq had brought them from East Africa to work, in the thousands, in the salt marshes of the delta of the Tigris. These black rebels beat back the Arabs for nearly ten years. Like the escaped maroons in Brazil centuries later, they set up their own strongholds in the marshland. They seemed unconquerable and they were not, in fact, crushed by the Muslims until 883. They were known as the Zanj, and they bequeathed their name to the island of Zanzibar in the East Africa - which, by no coincidence, would become and remain the market center for slaves in the Arab world until the last quarter of the 19th century. The revolt of the Zanj eleven hundred years ago should remind us of the utter falsity of the now fashionable line of argument which tries to suggest that the enslavement of African blacks was the invention of European whites. It is true that slavery had been written into the basis of the classical world; Periclean Athens was a slave state, and so was Augustan Rome. Most of their slaves were Caucasian whites, and "In antiquity, bondage had nothing to do with physiognomy or skin color". The word "slave" meant a person of Slavic origin. By the 13th century it spread to other Caucasian peoples subjugated by armies from central Asia: Russians, Georgians, Circassians, Albanians, Armenians, all of whom found ready buyers from Venice to Sicily to Barcelona, and throughout the Muslim world. But the African slave trade as such, the black traffic, was a Muslim invention, developed by Arab traders with the enthusiastic collaboration of black African ones, institutionalized with the most unrelenting brutality centuries before the white man appeared on the African continent, and continuing long after the slave market in North America was finally crushed. Historically, this traffic between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa begins with the very civilization that Afrocentrists are so anxious to claim as black - ancient Egypt. African slavery was well in force long before that: but by the first millennium BC Pharaoh Rameses II boasts of providing the temples with more than 100,000 slaves, and indeed it is inconceivable that the monumental culture of Egypt could have been raised outside a slave economy. For the next two thousand years the basic economies of sub-Saharan Africa would be tied into the catching, use and sale of slaves. The sculptures of medieval life show slaves bound and gagged for sacrifice, and the first Portuguese explorers of Africa around 1480 found a large slave trade set up from the Congo to Benin. There were large slave plantations in the Mali empire in the 13th-14th centuries and every abuse and cruelty visited on slaves in the antebellum South, including the practice of breeding children for sale like cattle, was practised by the black rulers of those towns which the Afrocentrists now hold up as sanitized examples of high civilization, such as Timbuktu and Songhay.

In these laissez-faire markets, investors were free to go wild. And wild they went. The hottest two emerging industries were cars and radio. Annual car sales had doubled from two years earlier, and there were now more than 15 million cars on the road. Manufacturers introduced faster, safer, and cheaper models every year, and the only asset people wanted more than cars were securities issued by car companies. Anyone who bought shares of General Motors or Fisher Body or Yellow Cab expected to double or triple their money after just a few years.

As recently as 1920, only about 5,000 families had owned in-home radio sets, and RCA’s share price was around a dollar then.10 At that time, radio wasn’t doing much better than other businesses suffering through the postwar recession. Then WBAY, a pioneering New York radio station, sold the first-ever advertising spot, a pitch for apartments in Jackson Heights – and the world changed overnight. Radio stations popped up in every major city, and radio sales soared, to $60 million in 1922. RCA’s share price flew even higher than its sales. Anyone who held RCA shares during the 1920s earned an average annual return of 60 percent. All of that gain was from share price appreciation, not any periodic payments from the company. RCA did not even pay a dividend.

By 1922, Sweden was the leading exporter of matches, and Swedish Match Corporation made two-thirds of all matches used in the world.11 Matches were Sweden’s pride, and its most important export. In the heady US markets, safety matches were the ideal new investment, and Ivar Kreuger was the perfect messenger. Matches, like cars and radio, were tangible products. They used new technology, and could be exported throughout the world. Antitrust regulators had declared monopolies illegal at home, but, by investing in Swedish Match, Americans could earn profits from a monopoly abroad. Ivar’s sales pitch was compelling. An investor who heard him talk about Swedish Match for more than a few minutes invariably would pull out a checkbook. Nearly every passenger on Berengaria used Swedish matches, and many would have heard of Swedish Match Corporation. By the time Ivar’s henchmen briefed the passengers, they also would have known that Ivar controlled Swedish Match, and that his grand postwar plans were to establish a global match monopoly. By all appearances, he was well on the way.

Still, Frederic Allen and his partners recognized that the markets were changing. Given its Boston roots, Lee Higginson lacked the national networks of Morgan or National City, a leading commercial bank. The firm needed someone to establish stronger connections, first with new companies whose securities would appeal to investors, and then throughout the United States with the investors themselves. Every American already knew Jack Morgan. They were getting to know National City’s chairman, Charles Mitchell, a former electrical goods salesman, who had been encouraging his brokers with sales contests, high commissions, and motivational speeches. Lee Higginson needed someone to join this fray, and to introduce the firm’s name and the companies it discovered to the public. It wouldn’t hurt if this man resembled Fred Astaire

Durant and Lee Higginson were ideal for Ivar’s new plans. Durant’s group had built a new sales force, and his partners were embracing new clients, especially from abroad. As Ivar put it, Lee Higginson & Co., with its extremely good sales organization – probably larger than that of any other American firm – is particularly well placed to handle issues for companies that have not previously been introduced on the American market, and therefore require energetic preparation of the market. As an example, this firm has single-handedly managed the financing of the American subsidiaries of the Shell Company, which seems to be the only instance of a European company raising American capital through a share issue. The Shell Company is – as is well known – the most important European business now extant.40

However, if these factories could be consolidated, the owner of a Swedish match monopoly could raise prices and make a fortune. Some factories in Sweden recently had combined, to form the Jönköping-Vulcan trust, but the men running the trust were conservative and slow. Ivar was sure he could dominate them. He began using loans from the Swedish Credit Bank to buy match factories throughout Sweden. During the next eight years, Ivar parlayed a few family match factories into a conglomerate. He modernized factories and expanded overseas sales. Production increased from 90,000 cases in 1914 to double that in 1916; his profits more than tripled.12 He reduced costs by purchasing the companies that made his machines, as well as companies that supplied chlorate acid potash for the tips. The hardball tactics Ivar used to take over competitors must have reminded Lee Higg’s partners of John D. Rockefeller, who used a similar approach to acquire competitors of his company Standard Oil.

Ivar joined Durant on road shows, and interest grew as Ivar repeated his speech throughout 1923. By the fall Durant believed he finally had found enough investors, and Ivar and Lee Higginson began preparing to close a deal. They followed the same procedure as anyone seeking money. First, they created a new firm, called International Match Corporation, and incorporated it in Delaware. During the late nineteenth century, states had begun competing for corporate charters, the formative documents that corporations are required to file when they are created. Delaware had recently surpassed New Jersey as the incorporation state of choice, and increasingly companies chose to file in Delaware, even if their operations were in another state. Delaware judges took a hands-off approach to business, and would be unlikely to second-guess Ivar’s decisions. By incorporating International Match in Delaware, Lee Higginson would give Ivar and themselves maximum flexibility. Next, Durant and Ivar chose the initial shareholders and directors of International Match. The two original shareholders would be Swedish Match and a syndicate of Swedish banks; they would contribute start-up capital of 30 million dollars and receive the company’s shares, in equal amounts. As shareholders, Swedish Match and the bank syndicate would vote for the company’s board of directors, as well as other major business decisions. The shareholders would elect five directors to oversee International Match’s business: Ivar; Krister Littorin, Ivar’s engineering classmate from Stockholm; Donald Durant; Frederic Allen, Lee Higginson’s senior statesman and head of the firm’s New York office; and Percy A. Rockefeller, a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. Percy Rockefeller owned the World Match Company of Walker-ville, Ontario, and recently had met Ivar while negotiating the sale of a Canadian match manufacturing plant to Swedish Match.29 The two men had impressed each other, and Ivar saw that Rockefeller, who then served on more than sixty other boards, would be the ideal director of International Match: he was well connected, wealthy, generally familiar with the match industry, and far too busy to care about any details. Ivar had idolized the Rockefellers since he was a boy in Kalmar; now, a member of that family would serve on his board.

In the food sector alone, four agribusiness giants known as the ABCD group (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus) control over 75 percent of the global grain trade. Another four account for over 50 percent of global seed sales, and just six agrochemical firms control 75 percent of the world’s fertiliser and pesticide market.

But whether or not economic value gets monetised through the market does matter a good deal to finance, to business and to government. Financiers only make a return—by extracting interest, rent or dividends—on economic value that has a market value. Business can only capture value as revenue and profit when that value has been monetised in sales. And governments find it far easier to levy taxes for public revenue on economic value that is exchanged through the market. All three of these—finance, business and government—are structured to expect and depend upon a growing monetary income: if GDP is no longer set to grow even though total economic value may well continue to do so, then those expectations need to change profoundly.

In the late nineteenth century, alcohol and drinkers were the targets in the United States. It was asserted that the drug “takes the kind, loving husband and father, smothers every spark of love in his bosom, and transforms him into a heartless wretch, and makes him steal the shoes from his starving babe’s feet to find the price for a glass of liquor. It takes your sweet innocent daughter, robs her of her virtue and transforms her into a brazen, wanton harlot.”2 These negative narratives became so plentiful that Congress was persuaded to amend the Constitution, banning the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages.