Short Accumulation Quotes

After perhaps thirty meters, just as a soldier turned around, the girl was felled. Hands were clamped upon her from behind and the boy next door brought her down. He forced her knees to the road and suffered the penalty. He collected her punches as if they were presents. Her bony hands and elbows were accepted with nothing but a few short moans. He accumulated the loud, clumsy specks of saliva and tears as if they were lovely to his face, and more important, he was able to hold her down.

Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product...if we should judge the United States of America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.

The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales’ stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you spray on Chanel Number 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.

The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

Even though Dale had surpassed his aspirations of success, he was never satisfied with his current level of wealth or power. He always figured the next victory would provide him with an overall sense of accomplishment where he could relax in complacency and soak up his attainment. But every triumph was shortly celebrated as the next pinnacle stared down at him from above. Like the loss of enthusiasm shortly after a product was purchased, he casted aside his sense of accomplishment and hungered for the next greater and better conquest. He knew he would be fulfilled when his true aspiration had been procured. It would come soon, he could feel it. It was just around the corner. Dale had been warned by a colleague years back that his hunger would never cease no matter how much money he accumulated, power he gained, or lofty status he obtained. He was told that the greedy train ride he’d boarded would never reach a suitable destination he’d want to disembark at. The next stop would always be imagined as grander and better. This advice had come from a colleague who ended up getting let go because he couldn’t pull his weight in the numbers-accumulating game. This had proven to Dale that the colleague was a failure, and therefore his advice was bogus. It had simply been vocalized jealously. Dale knew his train ride would soon come to the destination he desired.

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.

The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short, of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications. To be truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims and fantasies and sicknesses....

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of partial victory by which new efforts are powered.

How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! How short his time! Consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature’s productions should be far “truer” in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?

What the US evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital. I call this kind of state apparatus a neoliberal state. The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital. Bremer invited the Iraqis, in short, to ride their horse of freedom straight into the neoliberal corral.

To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.

Never be intimidated by what seems ominous, for BiG is only an accumulation of many smalls.

Slow to anger.” The Hebrew phrase is literally “long of nostrils.” Picture an angry bull, pawing the ground, breathing loudly, nostrils flared. That would be, so to speak, “short-nosed.” But the Lord is long-nosed. He doesn’t have his finger on the trigger. It takes much accumulated provoking to draw out his ire. Unlike us, who are often emotional dams ready to break, God can put up with a lot. This is why the Old Testament speaks of God being “provoked to anger” by his people dozens of times (especially in Deuteronomy; 1–2 Kings; and Jeremiah). But not once are we told that God is “provoked to love” or “provoked to mercy.” His anger requires provocation; his mercy is pent up, ready to gush forth. We tend to think: divine anger is pent up, spring-loaded; divine mercy is slow to build. It’s just the opposite. Divine mercy is ready to burst forth at the slightest prick.

Feathers," he says. They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time — two months, three? He's lost count — they've accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he's forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he's cold because he eats fish, and fish are cold. No: he wraps himself up because he's missing his man thing, and he doesn't want us to see. That's why he won't go swimming. Snowman has wrinkles because he once lived underwater and it wrinkled up his skin. Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone.

It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies.

WHY DID THE rise of agriculture launch the evolution of our crowd infectious diseases? One reason just mentioned is that agriculture sustains much higher human population densities than does the hunting-gathering lifestyle—on the average, 10 to 100 times higher. In addition, hunter-gatherers frequently shift camp and leave behind their own piles of feces with accumulated microbes and worm larvae. But farmers are sedentary and live amid their own sewage, thus providing microbes with a short path from one person’s body into another’s drinking water.

The Three Considerations You’ll want to consider: In what stage of your investing life are you? The Wealth Accumulation Stage or the Wealth Preservation Stage? Or perhaps a blend of the two? What level of risk do you find acceptable? Is your investment horizon long-term or short-term?

there’s an accumulation of technical know-how, so short of some grievous error nothing’s ever totally ruined. But you can’t stockpile vision and creativity—they’re more perishable, like fresh fruit. Making it big is no guarantee of success. There have been lots of companies that made it big, only to disappear.

People generally suppose that they don't understand one another very well, and that is true; they don't. But some things they communicate easily and fully. Anger and contempt and hatred leap from one heart to another like fire in dry grass. The revelations of love are never complete or clear, not in this world. Love is slow and accumulating, and not matter how large or high it grows, it falls short. Love comprehends the world, though we don't comprehend it. But hate comes off in slices, clear and whole—self-explanatory, you might say.

I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time. Novels and movies don’t quite capture it; journalism doesn’t; photography, dance, painting, and theater don’t; molecular biology and quantum physics certainly don’t either. We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them.

This matters. Real friends - people you trust, respect, laugh with, and can rely on - are a vitally important part of life. No matter how much wealth or fame you accumulate, if you don’t have true friends it’s unlikely you’ll be happy. Sadly I know too many people who have achieved their material goals, but have no friends. As the expression goes: greed is a hole you can never fill

Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.

We repeat, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, the antiquary and the historian. They make us aware to what extent architecture is a primitive thing, demonstrating as they do, like the cyclopean remains, the pyramids of Egypt, or the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that architecture's greatest products are less individual than social creations; the offspring of nations in labour rather than the outpouring of men of genius; the deposit let behind by a nation; the accumulation of the centuries; the residue from the successive evaporations of human society; in short, a kind of formation. Each wave of time lays down its alluvium, each race deposits its own stratum on the monument, each individual contributes his stone. Thus do the beavers, and the bees; and thus does man.

Although precautionary saving in anticipation of short-term shocks does indeed exist in the real world, it is clearly not the primary explanation for the observed accumulation and distribution of wealth.

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.

In life there are four forces: love, habit, time, and boredom. Love and habit at short range are immensely powerful, but time, lacking a minus charge, accumulates inexorably, and with its brother boredom levels all.

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish me for this and rob me of these treasures, I carefully hid them in secret places where I could enjoy them unmolested. As I grew older, my love for strange stories became even stronger, and I learned of things stranger than what I had read in my childhood. When I was in my thirties, my memory was full of these stories accumulated through years of eager seeking. l have always admired such writers of the T'ang Dynasty as Tuan Ch'eng-shih [author of the Yu-yang tsa-tsu] and Niu Sheng [author of the Hsuan-kuai lu]. Who wrote short stories so excellent in portrayal of men and description of things. I often had the ambition to write a book (of stories) which might be compared with theirs. But I was too lazy to write, and as my laziness persisted, I gradually forgot most of the stories which I had learned. Now only these few stories, less than a score, have survived and have so successfully battled against my laziness that they are at last written down. Hence this Book of Monsters. I have sometimes laughingly said to myself that it is not I who have found these ghosts and monsters, but they, the monstrosities themselves, which have found me! ... Although my book is called a book or monsters, it is not confined to them: it also records the strange things of the human world and sometimes conveys a little bit of moral lesson.

The short story can be hot and sweet or hot and fierce. You get it in one sitting or you don’t get it. It’s like a shore break. It happens quickly, and is right there in front of you, menacing you. First you’re looking at the shore break, and then if you don’t back up, it’s on you. The novel is the long, low wave that you ride south from the Arctic Circle. It’s powerful, but its power accumulates over a very long time as it rolls towards the reef.

Investment Owner’s Contract I, _____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.

In some respects, the sexual mores of Victorian Britain replicated the mechanics of the age-defining steam engine. Blocking the flow of erotic energy creates ever-increasing pressure which is put to work through short, controlled bursts of productivity. Though he was wrong about a lot, it appears Sigmund Freud got it right when he observed that “civilization” is built largely on erotic energy that has been blocked, concentrated, accumulated, and redirected.

In general, people accumulate knowledge gradually over a long period of time. However, there are extraordinary people all around us, who are capable of accumulating impressive amounts of knowledge within a relatively short period of time. Nevertheless, even the greatest genius possesses only a small fraction of all knowledge known by mankind. Finally, the following question arises: how large is all the existing knowledge in comparison to the space of ignorance?

It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth’s tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, ‘the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it’. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe.

By statute, a Supreme Court term begins on the first Monday of every October. But the justices’ active labor actually begins the week before, on the last Monday of September, when they meet in conference to consider the cert petitions that have accumulated over the summer months of recess.

Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run.

Most often in culture we see people who short-circuit the Current. They observe some phenomenon in culture or nature that makes them emotional and they run rampant with speculations, never taking the time to entertain possible explanations that could have been verified by further observation. They disconnect themselves from reality and can then imagine whatever they want. On the other hand, we see many people, particularly in academia or in the sciences, who accumulate mountains of information and data from studies and statistics but never venture to speculate on the larger ramifications of this information or connect it all into a theory. They are afraid to speculate because it seems unscientific and subjective, failing to understand that speculation is the heart and soul of human rationality, our way of connecting to reality and seeing the invisible. To them, it is better to stick to facts and studies, to keep a micro view, rather than possibly embarrassing themselves with a speculation that could be wrong.

Stress often produces short-term “fight-or-flight” responses; when the threat passes, the body tends to return to equilibrium. But evidence started to accumulate that trauma could cause long-lasting bodily change, including to brain neurocircuitry, the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.

The mechanical clock,” as Lewis Mumford wrote, “made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product.” In short, without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible.4 The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. In the eternal struggle between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter. Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions.

Maximum Sustained Power workouts are much less taxing on the cardio endurance component and instead focus on going for max power or going home. Literally, you end your mini-sets when you can’t lift the heavy bar again due to accumulated fatigue. Or, in the case of vertical jumps or calibrated exercise equipment, you stop the set when you fall materially short of your baseline absolute power performance standard that you started the workout with.

If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life. The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.

Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key. Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing? They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […] Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.

It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe. Climate is the product

He collected her punches as if they were presents. Her bony hands and elbows were accepted with nothing but a few short moans. He accumulated the loud, clumsy specks of saliva and tears as if they were lovely to his face, and more important, he was able to hold her down. On Munich Street, a boy and girl were entwined. They were twisted and comfortless on the road. Together, they watched the humans disappear. They watched them dissolve, like moving tablets in the humid air.

Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should for two reasons: one, there's a lot it. Eager to keep our short attention spans occupied. Two, we chase it down. Anxious to squeeze insight out of it before it loses relevance. Permanent information is harder to notice because it's buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But it's benefit is huge. It's not just hat permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it, it also compounds over it, leveraging off what you've already learned. Expiring information tells you what happened. Permanent information tells you WHY something happened and is likely to happen again. That WHY can translate into stuff you know about other topics, which is where the compounding comes in. I read newspapers and books everyday. I cannot recall one damn thing I read in a newspaper from say 2011, but I can tell you in great detail about books I read in 2011 and how they changed the way I think.

Noting that material poverty in the US was matched by an even greater “poverty of satisfaction, purpose, and dignity,” Kennedy decried GDP as a poor measure of the state of the nation. “Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things,” he said. The GDP was buoyed, he noted, by cigarette advertising, ambulances, home security, jails, the destruction of redwood forests, urban sprawl, napalm, nuclear warheads and the armoured vehicles used by police against riots in American cities. “It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile,” Kennedy said.

These memories, and the stories in these words, might appear to exist in the long ago. In the short-root mind, a kind of mind of a people whose children don't even know the names of their great-grandparents, there is no past. Everything is right now. This kind of mind has its roots in the material culture, in what can be accumulated. My great-grandfather reminds me that we need to keep within the long-rooted mind. Because of the longer roots we have a larger structure of knowing from which to take on understanding.

Science can be divided into an infinite number of disciplines, and the amount of knowledge that can be pursued in each discipline is limitless. The most critical piece of knowledge, then, is the knowledge of what is essential to learn and what isn’t. A huge amount of knowledge is accumulated at present. Soon our abilities will be too weak, and our lives too short, to study this knowledge. We have vast treasures of knowledge at our disposal but after we study them, we often do not use them at all. It would be better not to have this burden, this unnecessary knowledge, which we do not really need.

Tiny threads of time are the warp and woof of God’s redemptive tapestry: a series of todays, used well or poorly. God has ordained that the physical universe be composed of atoms, so also has God ordained that history be composed of moments. Personal and world history is an accumulation of todays, and how they were spent. At death, our window of opportunity will be closed, our time on earth finished. We can no longer store up treasure in heaven. We can no longer lead people to Christ. We can no longer suffer gladly for Christ. The time for all these things will be past. The call to every Christian is to make the most of this short segment of time, to make every day count for eternity.

Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.

SELKIE Alone, the cold body of the selkie man lay upon the sand, so like the drowned one the widow had called for. For her longing, he was hauled upon the sand, exposed to the moonlight. The selkie strained in fraught movements and human form broke from the gleaming seal fur. Undeniably he bore the image of the widow’s lost husband and spoke with the sounds of the dead man’s voice. She hailed back from the rocks. Shadows accumulating beyond the moon’s ability to reform. Colours were washed from sight and silver crashed through her, colder than snow dreams of being. In the dark, the ocean became the rolling flanks of a great beast drifting back across the horizon. Out deep soon, the land’s drop sharp.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it—99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system—went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations,

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it—99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system—went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they traveled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of miles across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.5 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet. Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot. The theory, incidentally, is almost always presented as a recent one, but in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard. The only recent thing about it is people paying any attention to it. When Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, and sulfur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently, and life might never have gotten a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites, and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later people began to wonder how it had all happened. And it is there that our story next takes us.

The guy was about forty years old, give or take, right up there on a hard-won plateau in the center of his life, not a dumb kid anymore, but not yet an old man either, and full of accumulated competence and confidence and capability, all wrapped up in experience. He looked to be dead-on six feet tall, and about two hundred pounds. He was wearing blue jeans, coarse and high-waisted, not stylish at all, with a belt, and a white open-neck shirt, and a blue satin baseball jacket. He had fair hair cut short and neatly brushed, and a pink slabby face, and small blue eyes, and an inquiring expression. He could have been a neighborhood electrical contractor, showing up in person to prepare a detailed estimate for a difficult job. Except for the

Snowbound up here with you. Without books or business to occupy my time, I wonder what I’ll do,” he added with a leer. She blushed gorgeously, but her voice was serious as she studied his face. “If things hadn’t gone so well for you-if you hadn’t accumulated so much wealth-you could have been happy up here, couldn’t you?” “With you?” “Of course.” His smile was as somber as hers. “Absolutely.” “Although,” he added, linking her hands behind her back and drawing her a little closer, “you may not want to remain up here when you learn your emeralds are back in their cases at Montmayne.” Her head snapped up, and her eyes shone with love and relief. “I’m so glad. When I realized Robert’s story had been fabrication, it hurt beyond belief to realize I’d sold them.” “It’s going to hurt more,” he teased outrageously, “when you realize your bank draft to cover their cost was a little bit short. It cost me $45,000 to buy back the pieces that had already been sold, and $5,000 to buy the rest back from the jeweler you sold them to.” “That-that unconscionable thief!” she burst out. “He only gave me $5,000 for all of them!” She shook her head in despair at Ian’s lack of bargaining prowess. “He took dreadful advantage of you.” “I wasn’t concerned, however,” Ian continued teasing, enjoying himself hugely, “because I knew I’d get it all back out of your allowance. With interest, of course. According to my figures,” he said, pausing to calculate in his mind what it would have taken Elizabeth several minutes to figure out on paper, “as of today, you now owe me roughly $151,126.” “One hundred and- what?” she cried, half laughing and half irate. “There’s the little matter of the cost of Havenhurst. I added that in to the figure.” Tears of joy clouded her magnificent eyes. “You bought it back from that horrid Mr. Demarcus?” “Yes. And he is ‘horrid.’ He and your uncle ought to be partners. They both possess the instincts of camel traders. I paid $100,000 for it.” Her mouth fell open, and admiration lit her face. “$100,000! Oh, Ian-“ “I love it when you say my name.” She smiled at that, but her mind was still on the splendid bargain he’d gotten. “I could not have done a bit better!” she generously admitted. “That’s exactly what he paid for it, and he told me after the papers were signed that he was certain he could get $150,000 if he waited a year or so.” “He probably could have.” “But not from you!” she announced proudly. “Not from me,” he agreed, grinning. “Did he try?” “He tried for $200,000 as soon as he realized how important it was to me to buy it back for you.” “You must have been very clever and skillful to make him agree to accept so much less.” Trying desperately not to laugh, Ian put his forehead against hers and nodded. “Very skillful,” he agreed in a suffocated voice. “Still, I wonder why he was so agreeable?” Swallowing a surge of laughter, Ian said, “I imagine it was because I showed him that I had something he needed more than he needed an exorbitant profit.” “Really?” she said, fascinated and impressed. “What did you have?” “His throat.

Sheep and cattle now graze side by side, but actually have very different mineral requirements. Modern cattle need quite a lot of copper because they evolved in parts of Europe and Africa where copper was abundant. Sheep, on the other hand, evolved in copper-poor areas of Asia Minor. As a rule, and not surprisingly, our tolerance for elements is directly proportionate to their abundance in the Earth’s crust. We have evolved to expect, and in some cases actually need, the tiny amounts of rare elements that accumulate in the flesh or fiber that we eat. But step up the doses, in some cases by only a tiny amount, and we can soon cross a threshold. Much of this is only imperfectly understood. No one knows, for example, whether a tiny amount of arsenic is necessary for

Now, ideals, conventions, even truth itself, are continually changing things so that the milk of one generation may be the poison of the next. The young Americans of my time have seen one of these transformations with their own eyes, and for this reason they will not make the initial mistake of trying to teach their children too much. Before a man is thirty he has already accumulated, along with a little wisdom, a great quantity of dust and rubbish in his mind, and the difficulty is to let the children profit by what is wise without unloading the dust and rubbish on them too. We can only try to do better at it than the last generation did - when a generation succeeds in doing it completely, in handing down all its discoveries and none of its delusions, its children shall inherit the earth.

In the longer term, by bringing together enough data and enough computing power, the data giants could hack the deepest secrets of life, and then use this knowledge not just to make choices for us or manipulate us but also to reengineer organic life and create inorganic life-forms. Selling advertisements may be necessary to sustain the giants in the short term, but tech companies often evaluate apps, products, and other companies according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate. A popular app may lack a business model and may even lose money in the short term, but as long as it sucks data, it could be worth billions.4 Even if you don’t know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future. I don’t know for certain that the data giants explicitly think about this in such terms, but their actions indicate that they value the accumulation of data in terms beyond those of mere dollars and cents. Ordinary humans will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset—their personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they might find it increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival.

There are two types of information: permanent and expiring. Permanent information is: “How do people behave when they encounter a risk they hadn’t fathomed?” Expiring information is: “How much profit did Microsoft earn in the second quarter of 2005?” Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should, for two reasons. One, there’s a lot of it, eager to keep our short attention spans occupied. Two, we chase it down, anxious to squeeze insight out of it before it loses relevance. Permanent information is harder to notice because it’s buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But its benefit is huge. It’s not just that permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it. It also compounds over time, leveraging off what you’ve already learned. Expiring information tells you what happened; permanent information tells you why something happened and is likely to happen again. That “why” can translate and interact with stuff you know about other topics, which is where the compounding comes in.

I accumulate rash acts: getting into stolen cars, walking in front of stores where I have operated, showing obviously fake papers. I have the feeling that in a very short time everything is bound to break wide open. My rash acts are serious matters and I know that airy-winged catastrophe will emerge from a very, very slight mistake. 1 But while I hope for misfortune as an act of grace, it is well for me to plunge fully into the usual ways of the world. I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve, slightly bent toward evening, but a hitherto unseen beauty, lovely because of the danger which works away at it, overwhelms it, undermines it. Oh let me be only utter beauty! I shall go quickly or slowly, but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances, the casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand, quiet and pure, like a glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

I have identified patterns in the technology and civilisational behaviour that confirms to me, with great certainty, that approximately thirty thousand human years ago, about ten thousand years after the date of the ceephays’ fall, a new center of data and physical traffic accumulated at the Keijir System. Ten thousand years correlates closely with how long I estimate a ceephay vessel would have taken to travel some feasible sublight to avoid detection using jump engines, until being discovered by reeh vessels, possibly in some kind of hibernation. The accumulation of technologies at the Keijir System was very rapid, and was responded to by several of the species who were recording this data. There are even several surviving speculations from their academia at the time, wondering what was happening at Keijir. I believe these events are entirely consistent with the discovery, by an organic species of lesser intelligence and capability, of an entity of greater intelligence and capability. Great technological advances appear to have followed, and the expansion of what became the Reeh Empire commenced shortly thereafter.

Alzheimer’s disease, which is associated with the production and accumulation of amyloid-β in the brain. That means he has serious neural damage all over the brain. While for the past twenty years or so amyloid has been considered the “cause” of Alzheimer’s, there is recent evidence against that hypothesis, and others are being entertained.1 At any rate, the disease results in the slow destruction of the brain, commencing particularly with the loss of neurons in the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus, resulting in short-term memory loss. The disease can become so debilitating that it can completely reshape Grandpa’s personality, transforming him from a lively and caring person into a listless shell of his former self. Yet, though he may not recognize me, he is still cognizant of social niceties and shakes my hand. He may wander off, but he will still feel fear when confused and lost, and anger when frustrated. His conscious experience of the world is brought to him through whatever operational neural circuitry continues to function, and as he loses function, it becomes more restricted. The contents of that conscious experience most likely are odd, very different from those of the normal brain or his past self. As a result, odd behavior follows.

3. ‘Standing armies (miles perpetuus) will gradually be abolished altogether.’ For they constantly threaten other states with war by the very fact that they are always prepared for it. They spur on the states to outdo one another in arming unlimited numbers of soldiers, and since the resultant costs eventually make peace more oppressive than a short war, the armies are themselves the cause of wars of aggression which set out to end burdensome military expenditure. Furthermore, the hiring of men to kill or to be killed seems to mean using them as mere machines and instruments in the hands of someone else (the state), which cannot easily be reconciled with the rights of man in one’s own person. It is quite a different matter if the citizens undertake voluntary military training from time to time in order to secure themselves and their fatherland against attacks from outside. But it would be just the same if wealth rather than soldiers were accumulated, for it would be seen by other states as a military threat; it might compel them to mount preventive attacks, for of the three powers within a state—the power of the army, the power of alliance and the power of money—the third is probably the most reliable instrument of war. It would lead more often to wars if it were not so difficult to discover the amount of wealth which another state possesses.

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task; it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion a year, but that Gross National Product … counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

It is often said that the separation of the present reality from transcendence, so commonplace today, is pernicious in that it undermines the universe of fixed values. Because life on Earth is the only thing that exists, because it is only in this life that we can seek fulfillment, the only kind of happiness that can be offered to us is purely carnal. Heavens have not revealed anything to us; there are no signs that would indicate the need to devote ourselves to some higher, nonmaterial goals. We furnish our lives ever more comfortably; we build ever more beautiful buildings; we invent ever more ephemeral trends, dances, one-season stars; we enjoy ourselves. Entertainment derived from a nineteenth-century funfair is today becoming an industry underpinned by an ever more perfect technology. We are celebrating a cult of machines—which are replacing us at work, in the kitchen, in the field—as if we were pursuing the idealized ambience of the royal court (with its bustling yet idle courtiers) and wished to extend it across the whole world. In fifty years, or at most a hundred, four to five billion people will become such courtiers. At the same time, a feeling of emptiness, superficiality, and sham sets in, one that is particularly dominant in civilizations that have left the majority of primitive troubles, such as hunger and poverty, behind them. Surrounded by underwater-lit swimming pools and chrome and plastic surfaces, we are suddenly struck by the thought that the last remaining beggar, having accepted his fate willingly, thus turning it into an ascetic act, was incomparably richer than man is today, with his mind fed TV nonsense and his stomach feasting on delicatessen from exotic lands. The beggar believed in eternal happiness, the arrival of which he awaited during his short-term dwelling in this vale of tears, looking as he did into the vast transcendence ahead of him. Free time is now becoming a space that needs to be filled in, but it is actually a vacuum, because dreams can be divided into those that can be realized immediately—which is when they stop being dreams—and those that cannot be realized by any means. Our own body, with its youth, is the last remaining god on the ever-emptying altars; no one else needs to be obeyed and served. Unless something changes, our numerous Western intellectuals say, man is going to drown in the hedonism of consumption. If only it was accompanied by some deep pleasure! Yet there is none: submerged into this slavish comfort, man is more and more bored and empty. Through inertia, the obsession with the accumulation of money and shiny objects is still with us, yet even those wonders of civilization turn out to be of no use. Nothing shows him what to do, what to aim for, what to dream about, what hope to have. What is man left with then? The fear of old age and illness and the pills that restore mental balance—which he is losing, inbeing irrevocably separated from transcendence.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 – went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less22, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet. Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core23, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot. The theory, incidentally, is almost always presented as a recent one, but in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard24. The only recent thing about it is people paying any attention to it. When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing, because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently25, and life might never have got a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment, and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later, people began to wonder how it had all happened. And it is there that our story next takes us.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 – went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less22, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet.

The insensitivity of Roosevelt’s reply startled Churchill. The subtext seemed clear: Roosevelt was concerned only about assistance that would directly help sustain the safety of the United States from German attack, and cared little whether the Middle East fell or not. Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, “It seems to me as if there has been a considerable recession across the Atlantic, and that quite unconsciously we are being left very much to our fate.” Colville noted how the accumulation of bad news that night left Churchill “in worse gloom than I have ever seen him.” Churchill dictated a reply to Roosevelt in which he sought to frame the importance of the Middle East in terms of the long-range interests of the United States itself. “We must not be too sure that the consequences of the loss of Egypt and the Middle East would not be grave,” he told Roosevelt. “It would seriously increase the hazards of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and could hardly fail to prolong the war, with all the suffering and military dangers that this would entail.” Churchill was growing weary of Roosevelt’s reluctance to commit America to war. He had hoped that by now the United States and Britain would be fighting side by side, but always Roosevelt’s actions fell short of Churchill’s needs and expectations. It was true that the destroyers had been an important symbolic gift, and that the lend-lease program and Harriman’s efficient execution of its mandate were a godsend; but it had become clear to Churchill that none of it was enough—only America’s entry into the war would guarantee victory in any reasonable period of time. One result of Churchill’s long courtship of Roosevelt, however, was that now at least the prime minister felt able to express his concerns and wishes with more candor, directly, without fear of driving America away altogether.

Our attachments to whom we think we’re supposed to be are like chains around our necks. Our identities get wrapped up in the external roles, titles, and accomplishments that we put value on … A wealthy businessman values how much he’s worth financially. A research scientist values the cure she is working on. A writer values the books he writes and publishes. In my case, I valued how much social change I could create through my advocacy for women’s rights and my humanitarian work. At first, it might seem that one pursuit or identity is more valuable than another. Surely, the cure for a disease is more important than how many books an author sells. Surely, creating social change that improves thousands—if not millions—of lives is more important than increasing the wealth of one individual. At a fundamental level, though, no matter what our vocation is, our accomplishments are where we find our core self-value and feel affirmed. Attachments are attachments, I realized, no matter who we are or what we identify with. When we value ourselves because of what we accomplish and how much we accomplish, our souls are forever held hostage to these attachments. No matter how much we do, how many dollars we accumulate, cures we discover, books we sell, or people we help, it is never going to be enough to permanently fulfill us.… I was completely identified with my work, and in my own mind, I could never be successful enough at it. That was a very big chain around my soul, a huge weight on my being. Realizing this was like cutting the umbilical cord to my shame.… One short silent retreat couldn’t instantly change the shape of my life—or my mind. It had just given me a taste of what freedom from attachments could be like. It was like tasting chocolate for the first time: we can’t describe how good it tastes until we’ve actually tasted it, and then we can’t ever forget that taste. Now that I had seen the source of my pain and the route to my freedom, I had a clear path to follow. As Zainab’s story so powerfully illustrates, we can learn to recognize assumptions for the thoughts that they are, rather than cleaving to them as an ultimate defining reality we’re bound to. We get to choose, “Do I want to take this to heart or let it go?” EXPANSION

Collateral Capacity or Net Worth? If young Bill Gates had knocked on your door asking you to invest $10,000 in his new company, Microsoft, could you get your hands on the money? Collateral capacity is access to capital. Your net worth is irrelevant if you can’t access any of the money. Collateral capacity is my favorite wealth concept. It’s almost like having a Golden Goose! Collateral can help a borrower secure loans. It gives the lender the assurance that if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the collateral. For example, car loans are secured by cars, and mortgages are secured by homes. Your collateral capacity helps you to avoid or minimize unnecessary wealth transfers where possible, and accumulate an increasing pool of capital providing accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding. It is the amount of money that you can access through collateralizing a loan against your money, allowing your money to continue earning interest and working for you. It’s very important to understand that accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding are the key components of collateral capacity. It’s one thing to look good on paper, but when times get tough, assets that you can’t touch or can’t convert easily to cash, will do you little good. Three things affect your collateral capacity: ① The first is contributions into savings and investment accounts that you can access. It would be wise to keep feeding your Golden Goose. Often the lure of higher return potential also brings with it lack of liquidity. Make sure you maintain a good balance between long-term accounts and accounts that provide immediate liquidity and access. ② Second is the growth on the money from interest earned on the money you have in your account. Some assets earn compound interest and grow every year. Others either appreciate or depreciate. Some accounts could be worth a great deal but you have to sell or close them to access the money. That would be like killing your Golden Goose. Having access to money to make it through downtimes is an important factor in sustaining long-term growth. ③ Third is the reduction of any liens you may have against these accounts. As you pay off liens against your collateral positions, your collateral capacity will increase allowing you to access more capital in the future. The goose never quit laying golden eggs – uninterrupted compounding. Years ago, shortly after starting my first business, I laughed at a banker that told me I needed at least $25,000 in my business account in order to borrow $10,000. My business owner friends thought that was ridiculously funny too. We didn’t understand collateral capacity and quite a few other things about money.

Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t - a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Esperanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers … One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of coloured cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.” It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and town sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said that this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza … My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural cliches, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about woman’s horrible accumulations.

Every person has short-term goals. Some are modest, such as setting aside money for a vacation next month or paying for medical bills. Other short-term goals are more ambitious, such as accruing funds for a down payment to purchase a new home within six months. Whatever the expense or purchase, you need a predictable accumulation of cash soon. If this sounds like your situation, stay away from the stock market!

The massive breakdown of disaster relief with Hurricane Katrina was rooted in state and local governmental agencies’ and elected officials’ lying to the public for decades. Read the Brookings Institution’s list “Government’s Most Visible Failures, 2001–2014”; it is a heartbreaking accumulation of avoidable tragedies and misery in just that short period, almost all rooted in some large, fundamental miscalculation.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

There is a wonderful story of a group of American car executives who went to Japan to see a Japanese assembly line. At the end of the line, the doors were put on the hinges, the same as in America. But something was missing. In the United States, a line worker would take a rubber mallet and tap the edges of the door to ensure that it fit perfectly. In Japan, that job didn’t seem to exist. Confused, the American auto executives asked at what point they made sure the door fit perfectly. Their Japanese guide looked at them and smiled sheepishly. “We make sure it fits when we design it.” In the Japanese auto plant, they didn’t examine the problem and accumulate data to figure out the best solution—they engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning. If they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, they understood it was because of a decision they made at the start of the process. At the end of the day, the doors on the American-made and Japanese-made cars appeared to fit when each rolled off the assembly line. Except the Japanese didn’t need to employ someone to hammer doors, nor did they need to buy any mallets. More importantly, the Japanese doors are likely to last longer and maybe even be more structurally sound in an accident. All this for no other reason than they ensured the pieces fit from the start. What the American automakers did with their rubber mallets is a metaphor for how so many people and organizations lead. When faced with a result that doesn’t go according to plan, a series of perfectly effective short-term tactics are used until the desired outcome is achieved. But how structurally sound are those solutions? So many organizations function in a world of tangible goals and the mallets to achieve them. The ones that achieve more, the ones that get more out of fewer people and fewer resources, the ones with an outsized amount of influence, however, build products and companies and even recruit people that all fit based on the original intention. Even though the outcome may look the same, great leaders understand the value in the things we cannot see. Every instruction we give, every course of action we set, every result we desire, starts with the same thing: a decision. There are those who decide to manipulate the door to fit to achieve the desired result and there are those who start from somewhere very different. Though both courses of action may yield similar short-term results, it is what we can’t see that makes long-term success more predictable for only one. The one that understood why the doors need to fit by design and not by default.

Glucose and fructose are two kinds of sugars that contain equal amounts of calories (400 calories per 100 grams). Both are unhealthy in large amounts, but fructose even more so than glucose. Glucose can be processed by all organs in the body, whereas fructose is processed mainly in the liver. Consequently, fructose causes an even greater risk of fat accumulation in the liver, resulting in a potbelly, more fats in the blood, and insulin resistance. In addition, fructose creates cross-links with proteins much faster than glucose does. Fructose also sends fewer saturation hormones to the brain than does glucose, making you eat more of it and gain more weight. In short, although all these substances contain equal amounts of calories, they have completely different effects on your metabolism and your health, certainly in the long term.

Short-term price fluctuation is not the real risk. It is an opportunity.

Unless you do not understand that loss in profits is a loss, you will not accumulate wealth

Essentially, life is a game. There are natural and manmade laws that serve as rules. There is a beginning and an end. There is a game board we play on that we call planet Earth. And there are decisions and moves that we make that determine where and how we move on the board. Of course, we all want to win. Some of us do, and some of us don’t. But that begs the question, how DOES one win? Unlike a normal game, there is no time afterlife for us to bask in and enjoy a victory. And so, if we wish to truly experience winning the game of life, we must frame our definition of how we win accordingly so that we win while the game is still in play. Winning the game of life is not predicated merely by the quantity of material successes that we have accumulated by the end of it. Sure, it is enjoyable and important to acquire things within the game of life, but the accumulation of things like wealth, material excess, fame, or status tends to easily be confused as the ultimate endgame. But they are not. They are just parts of the game. And furthermore. Each win of this kind is generally short-lived. It is just like how winning a board game, video game, or sports game might feel good when it occurs and for a little while after, but the feeling soon fades and you return to your normal state. And so it is important that the state that you return to is a victory in it of itself. In the case of the game of life, not only is the sense of fulfillment from material wins short-lived, but the accumulation of material points does not matter much at the end of it. These points don’t go anywhere with you when you are dead and gone. Instead, it is about how much you enjoyed the game of pursuing the points in the first place. Ironically, you truly win the game of life when you realize and embrace that it IS a game. When you become aware that against all odds, you were somehow rendered into this existence and are now able to play and enjoy the most enthralling, sophisticated, and entertaining game ever to exist. A game that is so complex and uncertain that you can never completely predict what’s going to happen next. A game that is always updating. A game that you can come up with rules for, change existing ones, unlock new levels, and uncover hidden settings. And the quality of your life experience truly maximizes when you realize that you have already won by being able to do any of this.

REVERSAL The reversal to mastery is to deny its existence or its importance, and therefore the need to strive for it in any way. But such a reversal can only lead to feelings of powerlessness and disappointment. This reversal leads to enslavement to what we shall call the false self. Your false self is the accumulation of all the voices you have internalized from other people—parents and friends who want you to conform to their ideas of what you should be like and what you should do, as well as societal pressures to adhere to certain values that can easily seduce you. It also includes the voice of your own ego, which constantly tries to protect you from unflattering truths. This self talks to you in clear words, and when it comes to mastery, it says things like, “Mastery is for the geniuses, the exceptionally talented, the freaks of nature. I was simply not born that way.” Or it says, “Mastery is ugly and immoral. It is for those who are ambitious and egotistical. Better to accept my lot in life and to work to help other people instead of enriching myself.” Or it might say, “Success is all luck. Those we call Masters are only people who were at the right place at the right time. I could easily be in their place if I had a lucky break.” Or it might also say, “To work for so long at something that requires so much pain and effort, why bother? Better to enjoy my short life and do what I can to get by.” As you must know by now, these voices do not speak the truth. Mastery is not a question of genetics or luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desire that stirs you from within. Everyone has such inclinations. This desire within you is not motivated by egotism or sheer ambition for power, both of which are emotions that get in the way of mastery. It is instead a deep expression of something natural, something that marked you at birth as unique. In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society. It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures. Alienating yourself from your inclinations can only lead to pain and disappointment in the long run, and a sense that you have wasted something unique. This pain will beexpressed in bitterness and envy, and you will not recognize the true source of your depression.

For all purposes except capital accumulation, the promise of family falls abjectly short of itself. Often, this is nobody's "fault" per se: simply, too much is being asked of too few. On the other hand, the family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder. No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family.

Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should, for two reasons. One, there’s a lot of it, eager to keep our short attention spans occupied. Two, we chase it down, anxious to squeeze insight out of it before it loses relevance. Permanent information is harder to notice because it’s buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But its benefit is huge. It’s not just that permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it. It also compounds over time, leveraging off what you’ve already learned.

My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. Looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural clichés, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about a woman’s horrible accumulations.

All humans discount the future. We would rather have a million dollars today than in 30 years from now. We’d rather a flimsy bridge today, rather than a sturdy, durable bridge 5 years from now. We’d rather eat all the fish in the waters tonight, than to go a little hungry and leave fish for others in the future. To delay instant gratification requires cultural training. To be convinced of the value of investing into the future requires a kind of wisdom, knowledge, patience and trust that is gained from history, elders, and system thinking. It requires collective action and collaboration on a large and long scale. It requires civilization. Civilization is a system of trust, both in the goodness of humans today, but also in the ingenuity of humans in the future. It’s a way for humans to trust the future. Civilization is a social machine accumulated over many generations and is constantly being tested by new events. American society over emphasizes the individual's self-interest, and over-relies on the marketplace to solve social problems, and so coddles the short term. Modern Americanism tends to ignore the government which can take the long view because it is inefficient. But the calculus of efficiency is shifted when taking the long view. Storing adequate supplies for a population that are only used in an emergency is inefficient in the short term and this inefficiency is not something companies can afford to do. That short-term inefficiency, however, makes total sense in the long view because it is highly efficient over time. Investing into a communal project that may not pay off until you are long gone is not a natural reflex of modern Americans, whether liberal or conservative. The antidote to this natural focus on the short term is education and a shift in norms. As we continue to civilize ourselves, we can appreciate the gifts of past long-term work, and the need in our fast-moving world today to pay the gifts forward by investing into work that will likely pay off in future generations.

_____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” If habits are repeated actions and actions are manifested convictions and convictions just accumulated thought, why can’t we just think our way to excellency? “It

Most of us, when we think of volcanoes, think of the classic cone shapes of a Fuji or Kilimanjaro, which are created when erupting magma accumulates in a symmetrical mound. These can form remarkably quickly. In 1943, at Paricutin in Mexico, a farmer was startled to see smoke rising from a patch on his land. In one week he was the bemused owner of a cone five hundred feet high. Within two years it had topped out at almost fourteen hundred feet and was more than half a mile across. Altogether there are some ten thousand of these intrusively visible volcanoes on Earth, all but a few hundred of them extinct.

one of the key hallmarks of aging is the accumulation of senescent cells. These are cells that have permanently ceased reproduction. Young human cells taken out of the body and grown in a petri dish divide about forty to sixty times until their telomeres become critically short, a point discovered by the anatomist Leonard Hayflick that we now call the Hayflick limit. Although the enzyme known as telomerase can extend telomeres—the discovery of which afforded Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak a Nobel Prize in 2009—it is switched off to protect us from cancer, except in stem cells. In 1997, it was a remarkable finding that if you put telomerase into cultured skin cells, they don’t ever senesce.

Advaita   You may be asking: how am I responsible for my karma? How can I change it? One popular Western theory is that when we are born, our lives are like a clean slate where nothing is written. Each life develops as a result of its surroundings and the forces acting on it such as parents, friends, society, their dominant culture, etc. However, TransZendental Introspection teaches the eternity of life – that I’ve lived countless lives before this current manifestation. This means that when I am born, I am not a collection of blank pages, but rather pages with countless impressions. In TransZentalism, life is forever existing in the cosmos. At times, it is manifested; at other times, latent. When I sleep and awaken, my conscious mind awakens and my body is refreshed. My consciousness carries on in a sub-conscious state between sleeping and awakening. Similarly, my life continues eternally in alternating states of life and death. Therefore, death is a part of the process of living.  Karma is a Sanskrit word that means ‘action.’ It is the accumulation of effects from the positive and negative causes I brought with me from my former lives, together with the causes I make in this life, thus shaping my future. My thoughts, words and deeds are manifested in my appearance, behavior, attitudes, good and bad fortune, where I’m born or live - in short, everything about me is the effect of my karma. Unlike some philosophies, TransZendental Introspection does not consider one’s karma or destiny to be fixed; since my mind changes from moment to moment, even the habitual and destructive tendencies I possess can be altered. In other words, I have in me the potential to change my destiny.  Last but not least, Advaita is the non-duality - The Oneness, the fundamental quality of everything conscious.

The key parts you’ve hopefully learned are the following: 1. There are four rules to investing. All four must be met in order to purchase an asset. 2. Financial markets move on emotion in the short term but follow value in the long term. As a result, always possess patience, knowledge, and think for yourself. 3. Every month you need to purchase assets in order to increase cash flow. Use that compounding cash flow to always reinvest in the most undervalued assets. In the end, it’s all about share accumulation. 4. When you don’t understand terms or concepts, do the research. That’s the only way you’ll ever know.

He hesitated, then arranged the gold medallion of the Cetagandan Order of Merit on its colorful ribbon, properly, around the tunic’s high collar. It was cool and heavy under his hand. He could be one of the few soldiers in history ever to be decorated by both sides in the same war . . . though to be truthful, the Order of Merit had come later, and actually had been presented to Lord Vorkosigan, not the little Admiral for a change. When they were all arranged, the effect was just short of loony. Separated into all the little secret compartments, he hadn’t realized just how much he’d accumulated, till he put it all together again. No, not again. For the first time. Let’s lay it all on the line. Smiling grimly, he fastened them down. He donned the white silk shirt that went underneath, the silver-embroidered suspenders, the brown trousers with the silver side-piping, the gleaming riding boots. Lastly, the heavy tunic. He fastened his grandfather’s dagger in its cloisonné sheath, with the Vorkosigan seal in the jeweled hilt, on its proper belt around his waist. He combed his hair, and stepped back to regard himself, glittering in his mirror. Going native, are we? The sarcastic voice was growing fainter. “If you expect to open a can of worms,” he spoke aloud for the first time, “you’d best trouble to pack a can-opener.” *

While the squire pulled out a flat weed she was beside herself with pity for humanity. This short, this fearful loveliness, in which men and women, heroic and baffled, struggling to wisdom, age as they struggle; wrestle upwards and drop into the ground. This marriage, this association, with matter, what a high-handed experiment, but what admirable victims! Man, with his eye on death, draws his foot from the womb. There is not time for anything, yet there is time for everything. No sooner appreciate love than skin withers, no sooner grow wise than we are unfit for wisdom. Learning to live and defeated by death. Discovery succeeds discovery, and nothing accumulates. We live haunted. We grasp and grasp; what we hold dissolves, our very hands dissolve.

The Woman" I have never clearly given to you the associations you have for me, you with such divided presence my dream does not show you. I do not dream. I have compounded these sensations, the accumulation of the things left me by you. Always your tits, not breasts, but harsh sudden rises of impatient flesh on the chest--is it mine--which flower against the vagueness of the air you move in. You walk such a shortness of intent strides, your height is so low, in my hand I feel the weight of yours there, one over one of both, as you pivot upon me, the same weight grown as the hair, the second of your attributes, falls to cover us. We couple but lie against no surface, have lifted as you again grow small against myself, into the air. The air the third of the signs of you are known by: a quiet, a soughing silence, the winds lightly moved. Then your mouth, it opens not speaking, touches, wet, on me. Then I scream, I sing such as is given to me, roar- ing unheard, like stark sight sees itself inverted into dark turned. Onanistic. I feel around myself what you have left me with, wetness, pools of it, my skin drips.

Despite the differences in their ages, I still thought of them as adventurous girls. It never occurred to me that they might be related, that is until I heard Connie refer to Rita as “Mom”?? Now at least I knew their names, but the relationship confused me.… They acted more like friends and equals, than mother and daughter. Didn’t I detect flirtation in Connie’s comments, and didn’t Rita give me the eye? As we walked through this typical small town market, they picked up many more items, “just in case we get snowed in.” I expressed my regret for not being able to help in defraying the ever-increasing cost of the groceries, but it didn’t seem to bother them. “We picked you up and it’s our treat,” Rita explained. “Come on, let’s get going before we get stuck here,” Connie said, with a sound of urgency, to her mother who was still looking around. Picking up two economy-sized bags of potato chips along with some pretzels didn’t impress me as being staples, but to be fair, she did also pick up bacon, eggs, English muffins and a container of milk. Getting back into the car, we turned north again, past where they first picked me up, and then left onto Mountain Street. I knew from the many times that I had come through Camden that Mount Battie was back up here somewhere, but after a short distance of about a mile or so, we turned left again and pulled into the driveway of a big old farmhouse connected to a barn, which looked very much like many other houses in Maine. By this time the snow was coming down in big wet flakes, accumulating fast. It wouldn’t take long before the roads would become totally impassable. I knew that this could become a worse mess than I had anticipated, especially on the back roads. The coastal towns in Maine don’t usually get as cold as the towns in the interior, thus allowing the air to hold more moisture. In turn, they are apt to get more big wet snowflakes that accumulate faster. However, the salt air also melts the snow more rapidly. I seldom had to worry about the weather, but this time I was lucky to have been picked up by these “Oh So Fine Ladies” and was glad that I decided to accept their offer to stay with them.

For Longs: 1)  The Bollinger Bands constrict within the lines of the Keltner Channel, indicating price contraction within the trading range (snake coil), and the Chaikin Oscillator is below the zero baseline.   2)  When the Chaikin oscillator passes back up through the zero baseline, this indicates that the stock is under accumulation and you should go long (the "rattle" indicating that an upside breakout move is about to happen). For Shorts: 1)  The Bollinger Bands constrict within the lines of the Keltner Channel, indicating price contraction within the trading range (snake coil), and the Chaikin Oscillator is above the zero baseline. 2)  When the Chaikin Oscillator passes back down through the zero baseline, this indicates that the stock is under distribution and you should go short (the "rattle" that a downside breakout move is about to happen).

Camden in the winter of 1954 was a bleak place. It is difficult to see it this way if you’ve only been there in the summer, but most of Maine can be dismal, especially along the coast, during the long nights and short days. Once the colorful leaves have fallen from the majestic maple trees, and the last tourist has gone home, things become grim. So it was, during that cold January day, when I was on the road hoping to get a ride to New Jersey. On the radio, the weather forecasters predicted an overnight blizzard, but here it was only late afternoon and snow was already accumulating on the road. This would be my last opportunity to get home to see my family and friends, before cruising back on down to the Caribbean. I had really hoped to get an earlier start, to get far enough south to miss the brunt of the storm. Maine is known for this kind of weather, and the snowplows and sanders were ready. In fact, I didn’t see many other vehicles on the road any longer. Schools had let out early and most businesses were closed in anticipation of the storm. My last ride dropped me off in Belfast, telling me that he was trying to get as far as Augusta, before State Road 3 became impassable. Standing alongside the two-lane coastal highway with darkness not far off, I was half thinking that I should turn back. My mind was made up for me when I stepped back off the road, making room for a big State DOT dump truck with a huge yellow snowplow. His airbrakes wheezed as he braked, coming to a stop, at the same time lifting his plow to keep from burying me. The driver couldn’t believe that I was out hitchhiking in a blizzard. This kind of weather in Maine is no joke! The driver told me that the year before a body had been found under a snow bank during the spring thaw. Never mind, I was invincible and nothing like that could happen to me, or so I thought. He got me as far as Camden and suggested that I get a room. “This storm is only going to get worse,” he cautioned as I got off. I waved as he drove off. Nevertheless, still hoping that things would improve, I was determined to continue…