Short Controversial Quotes

good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

Reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential.

Following a private conversation with Harry, Minerva McGonagall later took the controversial decision to add a portrait of Severus Snape to the gallery of old headmasters and headmistresses in her tower office.

researchers discovered that people who have just consumed caffeinated drinks were more likely to be swayed by arguments about various controversial topics.55 In short, good evidence that there really is no such thing as a free lunch or an innocent cup of coffee.

compassion can be felt in the gut; mercy needs to be enacted with the body.

Satan's survival-of-the-fittest system appears to work- in the short run. But the great controversy is about the long run.

Religion has been defined as designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting. Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, 'I really like that' or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.

Residual marcionism, the view that God had a personality transplant somewhere between the pages of Malachi and Matthew, is still alive and well in churches today; it is also still a heresy.

It’s much safer, in many congregations, to assure the faithful how our souls are saved through divine grace rather than to suggest that our societies are saved through personal and corporate aid to the poor.

But I’m a businessman, and I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

The Gospels generally present sinners as wealthy people who have not attended to the poor. That is a dandy definition of the term. Thus,

Long-term solutions are more attractive and cause much less controversy than short-term solutions, which will affect people who are still alive and voting.

Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about Amanda Knox or Jerry Sandusky or KSM is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility. How many of the crises and controversies I have described would have been prevented had we taken those lessons to heart?

Jesus understood that God does not play by our rules. His God is a generous God, who not only allows the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust, but also gives us the ability to live into what should be rather than what is. The parables help us with their lessons about generosity: sharing joy, providing for others, recognizing the potential of small investments. His God wants us to be better than we are, because we have the potential to be. We are made but a little lower than the divine (Ps. 8.6; see Heb. 2.7); we should start acting in a more heavenly matter. Those who pray, “Your kingdom come,” might want to take some responsibility in the process, and so work in partnership with God. We too are to seek the lost and make every effort to find them. Indeed, we are not only to seek; we are to take notice of who might be lost, even when immediately present. The rich man ignores Lazarus at his gate, and the father of the prodigal ignored the elder son in the field. For the former, it is too late; for the latter, whether it is too late or not we do not know. But we learn from their stories. Don’t wait. Look now. Look hard. Count.

You and I live in a society that is so short on time and long on comfort that we have become too busy to notice we’re busy. Trading our time for material possessions and personal freedom, we know our time on this planet is limited, yet we continue to live as if we are going to last an eternity.

When church becomes a club, parables become pedestrian.

to Jesus’s Jewish audience as well as to Luke’s readers, the idea of a “good Samaritan” would make no more sense than the idea of a “good rapist” or a “good murderer.

There’s an old saying in biblical studies (I first heard it from Ben Witherington III) that a text without a context is just a pretext for making it say anything one wants.

When personal resentment overrides familial and cultural values, we all lose.

[M]embers of society with something of value to contribute neither seek nor want political office; only the bramble, which has nothing to offer, accepts the job, and he does so with a threat that he will destroy those who oppose him.

For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty’s dominions: besides, our histories of six thousand moons make no mention of any other regions than the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’ And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.

The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before.

It’s possible these men were afraid. . . . And so the first question that the priest [and] the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ . . . But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?

My friends were thin, pretty, naturally bronzed and accessorized with bug-eyed sunglasses. They slurped vodka straight from the bottle while they drove. They roamed the streets in bikinis by day and by night, skimpy dresses short enough to bare their ass cheeks when they bent over. They pushed up their breasts and snorted coke in the bathrooms of clubs before grinding their crotches into strangers until last call. And when the night came to an end, they romped through the filthy, gum-stained streets barefoot because they were too hammered to feel the glass shards beneath their soles. The PB girls were wild, edgy, and dangerously carefree.

he has served for three of his four short years at Payne in administration, directing the undergraduate writing center and the much contested/maligned composition program. (No reasonable person outside a university would believe the teaching of composition to be controversial, but of course it is.) Professor West has an open-door policy

West Country novelist Thomas Hardy almost did not survive his birth in 1840 because everyone thought he was stillborn. He did not appear to be breathing and was put to one side for dead. The nurse attending the birth only by chance noticed a slight movement that showed the baby was in fact alive. He lived to be 87 and gave the world 18 novels, including some of the most widely read in English literature. When he did die, there was controversy over where he should be laid to rest. Public opinion felt him too famous to lie anywhere other than in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, the national shrine. He, however, had left clear instructions to be buried in Stinsford, near his birthplace and next to his parents, grandparents, first wife and sister. A compromise was brokered. His ashes were interred in the Abbey. His heart would be buried in his beloved home county. The plan agreed, his heart was taken to his sister’s house ready for burial. Shortly before, as it lay ready on the kitchen table, the family cat grabbed it and disappeared with it into the woods. Although, simultaneously with the national funeral in Westminster Abbey, a burial ceremony took place on 16 January 1928, at Stinsford, there is uncertainty to this day as to what was in the casket: some say it was buried empty; others that it contained the captured cat which had consumed the heart.

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

courts may exercise jurisdiction: cases between states; cases between a state and citizens of another state, or between citizens of different states; “controversies to which the United States shall be a party”; admiralty and maritime disputes; cases involving ambassadors and other foreign diplomats; and cases between a state or its citizens and the government or residents of a foreign state.

Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes in which groups of creatures were wiped out. For religious people, including Cuvier himself, the idea raised uncomfortable

The Court usually begins to issue opinions in November and proceeds to hand down opinions throughout the term. But naturally, the least controversial cases, those that produce unanimous or near-unanimous decisions, get decided first. Complicated cases or those that, for one reason or another, produce numerous concurring and dissenting opinions take longer, perhaps much longer, and only the pressure of an impending July 4 weekend may spur the justices to make the last-minute compromises necessary to bring a decision out by the end of June.

The JFK assassination itself has been dissected to pieces by obsessed researchers like me. Suffice to say that a few days of intense study of the available record will convince any honest person, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Lee Harvey Oswald was not responsible for the crime. The coverup was so clear and obvious in nature, and so shabbily constructed, that the conclusion is inescapable that the conspirators who killed him wanted the kind of controversy that soon exploded, shortly after the first wave of private citizens began to look at the data.

If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'.

Discussion of psychological warfare remains controversial because reexamination of its record leads in short order to a heretical conclusion: The role of the United States in world affairs during our lifetimes has often been rapacious, destructive, tolerant of genocide, and willing to sacrifice countless people in the pursuit of a chimera of security that has grown ever more remote. Rethinking psychological warfare's role in communication studies, in turn, requires reconsideration of where contemporary Western ideology comes from, whose interests it serves, and the role that social scientists play in its propagation. Such discussions have always upset those who are content with the present order of things. For the rest of us, though, they permit a glimmer of hope.

They were speaking in Arabic. I enjoyed the comfort of understanding the talk, while the interrogators had to put up with the subtitles. After a short conversation between UBL and the other guy, a TV commentator spoke about how controversial the tape was. The quality was bad; the tape was supposedly seized by U.S. forces in a safehouse in Jalalabad. But that was not the point. “What do I have to do with this bullshit?” I asked angrily. “You see Usama bin Laden is behind September 11,” ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ said. “You realize I am not Usama bin Laden, don’t you? This is between you and Usama bin Laden; I don’t care, I’m outside of this business.” “Do you think what he did was right?” “I don’t give a damn. Get Usama bin Laden and punish him.” “How do you feel about what happened?” “I feel that I’m not a part of it. Anything else doesn’t matter in this case!

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses"). The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. It may also be divided among art music and folk music. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics. Music may be played and heard live, may be part of a dramatic work or film, or may be recorded. To many people in many cultures, music is an important part of their way of life. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound. Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez summarizes the relativist, post-modern viewpoint: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.

To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.

...Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media... Given that most of the hearings took place out of sight of the press, the following examples are taken from the recollection of child protection workers present in court. In one case, during a controversy that centred fundamentally around disputes over the meaning of RAD [reflex anal dilatation], a judge refused to allow ‘any evidence about children’s bottoms’ in his courtroom. A second judge — hearing an application to have their children returned by parents about whom social services had grave worries told the assembled lawyers that, as she lived in the area, she could not help but be influenced by what she read in the press. Hardly surprising then that child protection workers soon found courts not hearing their applications, cutting them short, or loosely supervising informal deals which allowed children to be sent back to parents, even in cases where there was explicit evidence of apparent abuse to be explained and dealt with. (p21) [reflex anal dilatation (RAD): a simple clue which is suggestive of anal penetration from outside. It had been recognised as a valuable weapon in the armoury of doctors examining children for many decades and was endorsed by both the British Medical Association and the Association of Police Surgeons. (p18)]

In short, the combined effects of lower infant mortality, higher longevity, and increased fertility have fueled an explosion in the world’s population, as figure 18 graphs. Since population growth is intrinsically exponential, even small increases in fertility or decreases in mortality spark rapid population growth. If an initial population of 1 million people grows at 3.5 percent per year, then it will roughly double every generation, growing to 2 million in twenty years, 4 million in forty years, and so on, reaching 32 million in a hundred years. In actual fact, the global growth rate peaked in 1963 at 2.2 percent per year and has since declined to about 1.1 percent per year,60 which translates into a doubling rate of every sixty-four years. In the fifty years between 1960 and 2010, the world’s population more than doubled, from 3 to 6.9 billion people. At current rates of growth, we can expect 14 billion people at the end of this century. FIGURE 21. The demographic transition model. Following economic development, death rates tend to fall before birth rates decrease, resulting in an initial population boom that eventually levels off. This controversial model, however, only applies to some countries. One major by-product of population growth plus the concentration of wealth in cities has been a shift to more urbanization. In 1800, only 25 million people lived in cities, about 3 percent of the world’s population. In 2010, about 3.3 billion people, half the world’s population, are city dwellers.

NOBEL PRIZE–WINNER, British poet laureate, essayist, novelist, journalist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote for both children and adults, with many of his stories and poems focusing on British imperialism in India. His works were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though many deemed his political views too conservative. Born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, Kipling had a happy early childhood, but in 1871 he and his sister were sent to a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, where he spent many disappointing years. He was accepted in 1877 to United Services College in the west of England. In 1882, he returned to his family in India, working as a journalist, associate editor, and correspondent for many publications, including Civil and Military Gazette, a publication in Lahore, Pakistan. He also wrote poetry. He found great success in writing after his 1889 return to England, where he was eventually appointed poet laureate. Some of his most famous writings, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, saw publication in the 1890s and 1900s. It was during this period that he married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend and publishing colleague. The couple settled in Vermont, where their two daughters were born. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law and grumblings from his American neighbors about his controversial political views, Kipling and his family returned to England. There, Caroline gave birth to a son in 1896. Tragically, their eldest daughter died in 1899. Later, Kipling’s son perished in battle during World War I. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died on January 18, 1936, and his ashes are buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the Gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly Father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die? That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can. And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable. And so there are conferences about how churches can be more “relevant” and “missional” and “welcoming,” and there are vast resources, many, many books and films, for those who want to “reach out” and “connect” and “build relationships” with people who aren’t part of the church. And that can be helpful. But at the heart of it, we have to ask: Just what kind of God is behind all this? Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.[32]

What a joy this book is! I love recipe books, but it’s short-lived; I enjoy the pictures for several minutes, read a few pages, and then my eyes glaze over. They are basically books to be used in the kitchen for one recipe at a time. This book, however, is in a different class altogether and designed to be read in its entirety. It’s in its own sui generis category; it has recipes at the end of most of the twenty-one chapters, but it’s a book to be read from cover to cover, yet it could easily be read chapter by chapter, in any order, as they are all self-contained. Every bite-sized chapter is a flowing narrative from a well-stocked brain encompassing Balinese culture, geography and history, while not losing its main focus: food. As you would expect from a scholar with a PhD in history from Columbia University, the subject matter has been meticulously researched, not from books and articles and other people’s work, but from actually being on the ground and in the markets and in the kitchens of Balinese families, where the Balinese themselves learn their culinary skills, hands on, passed down orally, manually and practically from generation to generation. Vivienne Kruger has lived in Bali long enough to get it right. That’s no mean feat, as the subject has not been fully studied before. Yes, there are so-called Balinese recipe books, most, if I’m not mistaken, written by foreigners, and heavily adapted. The dishes have not, until now, been systematically placed in their proper cultural context, which is extremely important for the Balinese, nor has there been any examination of the numerous varieties of each type of recipe, nor have they been given their true Balinese names. This groundbreaking book is a pleasure to read, not just for its fascinating content, which I learnt a lot from, but for the exuberance, enthusiasm and originality of the language. There’s not a dull sentence in the book. You just can’t wait to read the next phrase. There are eye-opening and jaw-dropping passages for the general reader as Kruger describes delicacies from the village of Tengkudak in Tabanan district — grasshoppers, dragonflies, eels and live baby bees — and explains how they are caught and cooked. She does not shy away from controversial subjects, such as eating dog and turtle. Parts of it are not for the faint-hearted, but other parts make you want to go out and join the participants, such as the Nusa Lembongan fishermen, who sail their outriggers at 5.30 a.m. The author quotes Miguel Covarrubias, the great Mexican observer of the 1930s, who wrote “The Island of Bali.” It has inspired all writers since, including myself and my co-author, Ni Wayan Murni, in our book “Secrets of Bali, Fresh Light on the Morning of the World.” There is, however, no bibliography, which I found strange at first. I can only imagine it’s a reflection of how original the subject matter is; there simply are no other sources. Throughout the book Kruger mentions Balinese and Indonesian words and sometimes discusses their derivations. It’s a Herculean task. I was intrigued to read that “satay” comes from the Tamil word for flesh ( sathai ) and that South Indians brought satay to Southeast Asia before Indonesia developed its own tradition. The book is full of interesting tidbits like this. The book contains 47 recipes in all, 11 of which came from Murni’s own restaurant, Murni’s Warung, in Ubud. Mr Dolphin of Warung Dolphin in Lovina also contributed a number of recipes. Kruger adds an introduction to each recipe, with a detailed and usually very personal commentary. I think my favorite, though, is from a village priest (pemangku), I Made Arnila of the Ganesha (Siwa) Temple in Lovina. water. I am sure most will enjoy this book enormously; I certainly did.” Review published in The Jakarta Globe, April 17, 2014. Jonathan Copeland is an author and photographer based in Bali. thejakartaglobe/features/spiritual-journey-culinary-world-bali

This book is an act of listening anew, of imagining what the parables would have sounded like to people who have no idea that Jesus will be proclaimed Son of God by millions, no idea even that he will be crucified by Rome. What would they hear a Jewish storyteller telling them? And why, two thousand years later, are these questions not only relevant, but perhaps more pressing than ever?

In short, the peace, prosperity and power once enjoyed will be taken from them and be replaced with fear, lack and weakness. That is just the beginning. The text goes on to say that, if still unrepentant, the nation will suffer attacks by wild beasts, loss of livestock, deserted highways and, eventually, “the sword” that “will execute the vengeance of the covenant” and “pestilence” (Leviticus 26:25). Any of these curses would be bad enough, but these last two, in light of recent events, are terrifyingly familiar when considering today’s world. Before examining the present, though, let us look back and see specifically what God told Israel would happen when they abandoned the covenant, why it happened, and how it actually unfolded.

Around a hundred Texans faced 3,000 Mexican Government troops. According to the account that long filled patriotic Americans’ schoolbooks, Crockett died a hero defiantly swinging the butt of his rifle, Old Betsy, at oncoming Mexicans after running out of ammunition. A Different Story Surfaces In 1975, a previously untranslated diary written by José Enrique de la Peña, senior Mexican officer at the battle, revealed that Crockett and six other survivors had actually surrendered. According to this account, they were executed shortly afterwards. The revelation did not come without controversy. Historians still dispute whether the diary is genuine, pointing to the unclear circumstances of its emergence in the mid-1950s in Mexico, just at the height of Disney’s fictionalisation of Crockett’s story across the border in the United States. Advocates cite a supporting pamphlet that was lodged in the archives of Yale University long before the Crockett fad began, which they suggest point to the diary being genuine. A crude Mexican attempt at Party pooping? Or bursting the bubble of a fabled tale? The truth may never be known, but the episode once more demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s observation of the truth being rarely pure and never simple.

In short, a nation in covenant with God is assured peace, prosperity and power. In sharp contrast, look at what befalls the nation that abandons the covenant.

AS IF THE abstracting qualities of numbers and scale aren’t enough to deal with when trying to run an organization, these days we have the added complication of the virtual world. The Internet is nothing short of awe inspiring. It gives the power to operate at scale or spread ideas to anyone, be it a small business or a social movement. It gives us the ability to find and connect with people more easily. And it is incredible at speeding the pace of commercial transactions. All of these things are good. But, just as money was developed to help expedite and simplify transactions by allowing payment to be rendered without barter, we often use the Internet as a means to expedite and simplify communication and the relationships we build. And just as money can’t buy love, the Internet can’t buy deep, trusting relationships. What makes a statement like that somewhat tricky or controversial is that the relationships we form online feel real. We can, indeed, get bursts of serotonin when people “like” our pictures, pages or posts or when we watch ourselves go up in a ranking (you know how much serotonin loves a ranking). The feelings of admiration we get from virtual “likes” or the number of followers we have is not like the feelings of admiration we get from our children, or that a coach gets from their players. It is simply a public display of “like” with no sacrifice required—a new kind of status symbol, if you will. Put simply, though the love may feel real, the relationship is still virtual. Relationships can certainly start online, but they only become real when we meet face-to-face.

But as the church approaches her final deliverance, Satan is to work with greater power. He comes down “having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a [pg x] short time.” Rev. 12:12. He will work “with all power and signs and lying wonders.” 2 Thess. 2:9.

I’ve never been inside a gaming club before. It will be a novel experience.” “They won’t let you inside. You’re a lady. And even if they did allow it, I wouldn’t.” Lowering her hand, Amelia glanced at him in surprise. It was rare that Merripen forbade her to do anything. In fact, this may have been the first time. She found it annoying. Considering that her brother’s life might be at stake, she was hardly going to quibble over social niceties. Besides, she was curious to see what was inside the privileged masculine retreat. As long as she was doomed to remain a spinster, she might as well enjoy the small freedoms that came with it. “Neither will they let you inside,” she pointed out. “You’re a Roma.” “As it happens, the manager of the club is also a Roma.” That was unusual. Extraordinary, even. Gypsies were known as thieves and tricksters. For one of the Rom to be entrusted with the accounting of cash and credit, not to mention arbitrating controversies at the gambling tables, was nothing short of amazing. “He must be a rather remarkable individual to have assumed such a position,” Amelia said. “Very well, I will allow you to accompany me inside Jenner’s. It’s possible your presence will induce him to be more forthcoming.” “Thank you.” Merripen’s voice was so dry one could have struck a match off it.

Maybe it was the aftermath of a dream that he couldn’t remember – so he told me – but Theophilus Baxter woke up one morning in the middle of October 1658, with an unpleasant sensation of trouble. The second session of the General Court of Sagadac Bay would begin its final meeting later in the day. Although the discussions had been uproarious, Theophilus believed that his presentiment related to matters beyond the court’s jurisdiction He shook his head vigorously and walked barefoot across the cold floor to a water basin on a small table in the corner. A splash of water on his face drove away tiny fragments of sleep. While still in his nightshirt, he took his leather-bound Bible – one Elizabeth gave when they were married – from its shelf next to the door and brought it to the edge of his bed, where he sat down to say a short prayer and to read a passage from Paul’s writings. He then dressed and went down the narrow pine stairs to the kitchen, where Elizabeth was setting the table for breakfast. During a pause in their talk about the needs of the day, his premonition of eventfulness returned. Elizabeth noticed the look in his eyes, a look of happiness cut short. (You’ll find scholarly summaries of our controversy in other places. I want to tell the personal side now, so I’ll add and subtract, embroider and elaborate. I’ll invent conversations. Some will complain about the liberties I’m taking, but our colony, an experiment in living, invites adventures that work to create understanding.) “What is it now?” Elizabeth brought a tray of biscuits from the hearth to the table. “We’ve had too much talk lately about God and the Bible,” Theophilus said. “I don’t understand much of the chatter, and I doubt anyone else does either. It’s bad for the country. I had a dream last night about Lydia Bowstreet.” “What would you want to dream about that troublemaker for?” “Things stick in our minds sometimes in the strangest way.

In one notable incident, the feminism and pop culture blog Jezebel publicly called out a dozen teenagers who tweeted racist remarks after Barack Obama’s reelection. The site went beyond posting the tweets by researching the students, writing short bios for each, and contacting their schools. While the students’ conduct was abhorrent, they were minors, and the manner in which Jezebel went about publicizing their own behavior offered the impression that the act was more about allowing Jezebel to grandstand as a moral authority and to rack up page views based on the resulting controversy. Jezebel could as easily have contacted the students’ schools—the kind of institution of authority that might be able to positively influence the children’s behavior, or, perhaps, enact some punishment in concert with the children’s families—and written a story about the experience while also keeping the students anonymous. Instead, the site ensured that, for many of these students, they would spend years trying to scrub the Internet of their bad behavior, while likely nursing a (perhaps understandable) grievance toward Jezebel, rather than reforming their own racist attitudes. It’s easy to forgo self-examination when you, too, feel like a victim.

The opportunity to show some humanity or to receive some expression of humanity from others, even if you never experience that person outside a few messages, some fluffed towels, and a welcome note, has become rare in our disconnected world. This is another element about Airbnb (and other short-term-rental services) that makes it uniquely different from other aspects of the so-called “sharing economy.” At its core, Airbnb involves the most intimate human interactions—visiting people in their homes, sleeping in their beds, using their bathrooms. (Even in the listings that are run by professionals, there is still the semblance of this one-to-one intimacy.) That is of course precisely what makes it polarizing and objectionable to so many people who can never imagine using it. But it’s also what makes it unique. This kind of “sharing”—this hyperpersonal opening up of the most intimate and safest aspect of one’s life to a stranger

In short, money with strings is worth less than money without strings—sometimes a lot less.

Mankiw himself had ignited a short-lived media controversy by speaking favorably about outsourcing jobs to other countries

We might understand each other better if we had more rank conversations between britons and Americans," [Murrow] observed during one BBC broadcast. "You must bear in mind that we are, on the whole, more emotional, vociferous and intolerant than you. We'll go to a baseball game or a football match and shout for the blood of the referee, and on occasion, fling beer bottles at him. Our domestic controversies are conducted in strong language, with much name-calling--in short, we're inclined to say what we think, even when we have not thought very much.

(one always goes “up” to Jerusalem; one could be on the moon and still go “up” to Jerusalem

The audience, surprised at this lack of compassion, would have presumed both that the third person would be an Israelite and that he would help.

Philosophers have long regarded intentionality as a puzzling phenomenon, for it is hard to see how it can arise in a purely physical world. After all, mental states presumably depend ultimately on the brain, and thus on neurons and their interconnections, but neurons do not seem to be ‘about’ anything, nor to have representational content. So how can intentionality fit into the world that modern science describes? In the 1980s, the philosopher Ruth Millikan suggested an ingenious solution to this puzzle by drawing on Darwinism. To illustrate her basic idea, consider the honey bee’s waggle-dance. This is the complex figure-of-eight dance that honey bees use to signal to their hive mates the location of a food source. Since the bee’s dance has been shaped by natural selection for a particular purpose—correctly indicating where the food is—this allows us to discern a kind of proto-intentionality in the waggle-dance. We can sensibly say that a particular dance routine means that the food is located 30 metres away in the direction of the sun, in the sense that the biological function of the dance is to induce its hive mates to fly to this location. The bee’s waggle-dance is thus capable of misrepresentation—for the food may not actually be in this location, for example if the bee has accidentally performed the wrong routine. In short, Millikan’s idea is that representational content may be rendered scientifically respectable by reducing it to biological function, a notion which plays a bona fide role in evolutionary biology. This bold attempt to naturalize intentionality is controversial, but it illustrates how a biological perspective can help illuminate an old philosophical issue.

Jesus has to explain that dropping bombs is not the proper response to a lack of hospitality.

anti-Jewish material is repeated, because no one questions it.

It is often said that philosophy makes no progress, but to a large extent the creation of autonomous disciplines is how philosophy progresses. Mathematics in antiquity; physics in the Renaissance; biology after Darwin; logic in the early 20th century; computer science in mid-20th century; cognitive science still more recently; in each case, so much progress was made, so many controversies resolved, so many confusions clarified, that a self-contained subject was created and equipped to progress further. The philosopher Daniel Dennett defines philosophy as what we do when we don’t know what questions to ask; when we understand enough to work out what the questions are and can start answering them, a new science buds off from philosophy.

In 2018 the British Labour Party found itself embroiled in controversy inside and outside the party when it attempted to amend the examples—not the working definition, it must be said—to ensure that legitimate criticism of Israel was not prevented by adopting the definition and all its examples. After lengthy debate the Labour Party has now accepted in full all the examples as well as the working definition.

Humans had an intrinsic psychological tendency to form groups, and those groups had a tendency to compete. It was a side effect of consensus reality. Each group had a slightly different consensus, and so a slightly different reality, and the terms of reality are the one thing humans will always fight and die over, escalating these differences into crime, violence, inequality, war and hate—the very things the System was intended to eradicate. Human nature could not be entirely cured of these compulsions, but they could be channeled. The designers of the System permitted it to stage conflicts using astroturf, so long as the conflict did not undermine its non-negotiable long-term outcomes. What they had in mind were the cyclical controversies that play out on Social as we know it today. The System identifies some especially meaningless dispute—over favorite foods, popular storystreams, fashionable clothes, or the celebrity imposters who constitute our faux political system. It then amplifies the dispute until it becomes very heated, leading people to separate into opposing camps. After a short time, the System swoops in with a coup de grâce—some tidy resolution that brings everyone back together in harmony. A few weeks later, it finds a new controversy to amplify. Rinse, repeat, forever. It’s quite brilliant, really, effectively neutering the human tendency toward intergroup conflict.

Most comb jellies have little direct effect on humans, except through a minor role in marine food webs. One species, however, stands apart as the villain of the basal invertebrates. In the 1980s, the Atlantic comb jelly Mnemiopsis was accidentally introduced into the Black Sea, probably in ballast water carried by commercial shipping. Once in its new environment, away from natural competitors and predators, it reproduced rapidly – all the while consuming vast quantities of larval fish and crustaceans. Some (controversial) estimates placed the total seething mass of diminutive comb jellies in the Black Sea at over half a billion tonnes. The local anchovy fishery, already under heavy fishing pressure, was decimated. While ecologists debated what to do, a possible solution arrived, unplanned, in the shape of another accidental introduction. The newcomer was a second comb jelly, this time the voracious Beroe. Fortuitously, Beroe does not eat fish or crustaceans, but is instead a specialist predator of other comb jellies and nothing else. As the invading Beroe now feast on the Mnemiopsis, the fish stocks are showing gradual and welcome signs of recovery.

Frame control creates power and power attracts. BY JOSH (JETSET) KING MADRID WHAT DO KANYE WEST AND ELON MUSK HAVE IN COMMON? When you put the two together, there may be few similarities, but I believe one trait they share is the ability to control their frame, also known as frame control. Frame control is a little-known underlying phenomenon that may be one of the reasons they are so influential and successful despite the controversy. Nonetheless, they maintain their status as some of our culture's most powerful figures. The power of how we frame our personal realities is referred to as frame control. A frame is a tool that you can use to package your power, authority, strength, information, and status. Standing firm in your beliefs can persuade and influence. I first discovered frame control in 2016 after coming across the book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. I was hooked instantly. I was a freshman in college at UC Irvine at the time and was earning a few thousand dollars a month in my online business. In just a few short months after applying the concept of frame control in my life and business, everything changed — I started dating the girl of my dreams, cleared my first $27,000 in one month and dropped out of college to go all in on my business. Since then, I've read every book, watched every video, and studied every expert-written blog I can find on the subject. This eventually led me to obtain NLP and neuro-marketing certifications, both of which explain the underlying psychology of how our brains frame social interactions and provide techniques for controlling these frames in oneself and others in order to become more likable, influential, and lead a better life overall. Frame control is about establishing your own authority, but it isn't just some self-help nonsense. It is about true and verified beliefs. The glass half-empty or half-full frame is a popular analogy. If you believe the glass is half-empty, that is exactly what it will be. But someone with a half-full frame can come in and convince you to change your belief, simply by backing it up with the logic of “an empty glass of water would always be empty, but having water in an empty glass makes it half-full.” Positioning your view as the one that counts does take some practice because you first have to believe in yourself. You won’t be able to convince anyone of your authority if you are not authentic or if you don’t actually believe in what you’re trying to sell. Whether they realize it or not, public figures are likely to engage in frame control. When you're in the spotlight, you have to stay focused on the type of person you want the rest of the world to see you as. Tom Cruise, for example, is an example of frame control because of his ability to maintain dominance in media situations. In a well-known BBC interview, Tom Cruise assertively puts the interviewer in his place when he steps out of line and begins probing into his personal life. Cruise doesn't do it disrespectfully, which is how he maintains his own dominance, but he does it in such a way that the interviewer is held accountable. How Frame Control Positions the User as Influential or Powerful Turning toward someone who is dominant or who seems to know what they are doing is a natural occurrence. Generally speaking, we are hard-wired to trust people who believe in themselves and when they are put on a world stage, the effects of it can be almost bewildering. We often view comedians as mere entertainers, but in fact, many of them are experts in frame control. They challenge your views by making you laugh. Whether you want to accept their frame or not, the moment you laugh, your own frame has been shaken and theirs have taken over.

FIND CORROBORATING EVIDENCE Are you dealing with a pebble or a boulder? How expensive, risky, time-consuming, or controversial is the change you’re asking people to make? How can you provide more proof? Like interventionists, by making sure people hear from multiple sources saying similar things? What similar but independent sources can you call on to help provide more evidence? How can you concentrate them close in time? Making sure people hear from multiple others in a short period? For larger-scale change, should you use a fire hose or a sprinkler? Concentrate scarce resources or spread them out?

This might be illustrated by the way in which, for example, John Owen’s work Of the Mortification of Sin has undoubtedly been read by many more younger ministers than either his Glory of Christ or Communion with God. That may be understandable because of the deep pastoral insight in Owen’s short work; but it may also put the practical cart before the theological horse. Owen himself would not have been satisfied with hearers who learned mortification without learning Christ. A larger paradigmatic shift needs to take place than only exchanging a superficial subjectivism for Owen’s rigorous subjectivism. What is required is a radical recentering in a richer and deeper knowledge of Christ, understood in terms of his person and work. There can be little doubt that Owen himself viewed things this way.

A third reason for auditory atrophy is the expectation of congregations, who have come to believe that the sermon is monologue, not motivation, that it is designed for entertainment. The service becomes less an opportunity for reconciliation, restoration, and renewal and more a Sunday morning version of what Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and now Jimmy Fallon provide on weekday nights: a monologue to make us laugh, music to amuse or bemuse us (having paid singers in the choir doesn’t hurt, nor does an organ that cost more than most

Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion (1938) was painted shortly after Kristallnacht—the horrifying, widespread Nazi raid on German Jews. The painting shows a world swallowed up by violence, including the figure of Christ on the cross with a Jewish prayer shawl draped around his loins.

There are two methods of delivering a blow. First is a boxing-like movement, and the second is the traditional karate strike. While equal in force, the boxing-style strike has a greater range and is easier to execute. The boxing-style strike uses gravity and shift of weight to support the strike, while the traditional karate-style strike uses a sudden tightening of your body’s muscles to deliver a short blow. The longer range of the boxing blow facilitates greater acceleration to a higher speed and is more efficient in creating a knockout effect. The traditional karate-style strike is more suitable for breaking boards of wood, but the composition of wood fibers is quite different from the human body's protective tissues. The traditional straight karate strike takes longer to execute and requires slight preparation. Since even a split second is of the essence and the force used is more efficient with the boxing style, it has won popularity in the martial arts field. From the split second you decide to move your body and deliver the strike, all you need is to aim at the opponent’s chin. You then need to accelerate your arm to maximum speed, and maintain that speed as your fist lodges in your opponent’s face. The opponent’s skull will then shake the brain and nerves to a concussion. The ancient Olympics had fighting sports. Sparta is believed to have had boxing around 500 BC. Spartans used boxing to strengthen their fighters’ resilience. Boxing matches were not held since Spartans feared that it would lead to internal competitions, which could reduce the morale of the losers. Sparta did not want low morale on the battlefield. For many years the question of Bodhidharma’s existence has been a matter of controversy among historians. A legend prevails that the evolution of karate began around 5 BC when Bodhidharma arrived to the Shaolin temple in China from India, and taught Zen Buddhism. He introduced a set of exercises designed to strengthen the mind and body. This marked the roots of Shaolin-style temple boxing. This type of Chinese boxing, also called kung fu, concentrates on full-body energy blows and improving acrobatic level. Indian breathing techniques are incorporated, providing control of the muscles of the whole body while striking. This promotes self-resistance that helps achieve balance and force when striking and kicking. Krav Maga shows that it is not the most efficient approach. It is certainly forceful, but cannot be mastered quickly enough, and also does not promote a natural and fast reach to the opponent's pressure points, nor does it adhere to the principle of reaction time.

This is an age of science and technology, and to oversimplify a little, you can’t have an Einstein and a Bach at the same time. People are far more interested in technology than they are in the arts. The Himalayas of arts lie in the past … at least at the moment. The coming generations are interested in other things. Music now is the most endangered of all the arts because it doesn’t exist as a painting, a book, or even a film exists. You can’t touch it, and people are interested in tangible things these days. Strauss himself once said that he was the last chapter in the greatness of German music, and he added modestly that it was, for whatever it was worth, a short chapter.18

From the #1 bestselling War/Action Adventure/Men's Adventure/Techno-thriller author, Carolyn McCray comes the blockbuster, ultimate Betrayed Omnibus collection. Containing all of the Betrayed series from the first prequel short story to the post-Shiva exclusive short story, Mayhem, you can read the extremely controversial historical thriller saga in one place! ***Warning*** This book is an extremely controversial religious/historical thriller. Please do NOT purchase this book if you were at all disturbed by DaVinci's revelations. However, if you like your fiction to challenge historical events, read on… Praise for The Betrayed Series…

Fasten your seatbelts; I’m going to be even more controversial here. I am deeply persuaded that for many people, it is their commitment to ministry that constantly gets in the way of doing what God has called them to do as parents. Perhaps this is the most deceptive treasure temptation of all. There are many, many ministry fathers and mothers who ease their guilty consciences about their inattention and absence by telling themselves that they are doing “the Lord’s work.” So they accept another speaking engagement, another short-term missions trip, another ministry move, or yet another evening meeting thinking that their values are solidly biblical, when they are consistently neglecting a significant part of what God has called them to. Sadly, their children grow up thinking of Jesus as the one who over and over again took their mom and dad from them. This is a conversation that parents in ministry need to have and to keep open. It is very interesting that if you listen to people who are preparing couples for a life of ministry, they will warn them about the normal and inescapable tensions between ministry demands and parental calling. But I propose that two observations need to be made here. First, the New Testament never assumes this tension. It never warns you that if you have family and you’re called to ministry that you will find yourself in a value catch-22 again and again—that it’s nearly impossible to do both well. There is not one warning like this in the Bible. The only thing that gets close to it is that one of the qualifications for an elder is that he must lead his family well. Perhaps this tension is not the result of poor planning on God’s part, but because we are seeking to get things out of ministry that we were never meant to get, and because we are, we make bad choices that are harmful to our families. If you get your identity, meaning and purpose, reason for getting up in the morning, and inner peace from your ministry, you are asking your ministry to be your own personal messiah, and because you are, it will be very hard for you to say no, and because it is hard for you to say no, you will tend to neglect important time-relationship commitments you should be making to your children.

The most famous child survivor of the Holocaust in the 1950s was not Anne Frank—after all, she didn’t survive—but a young woman named Hannah Bloch Kohner. NBC television’s This Is Your Life was one of television’s first reality shows, in which host Ralph Edwards surprised a guest, often a celebrity, by reuniting him or her with friends and family members the guest hadn’t heard from in years. The program didn’t shy away from either political controversy or questionable sentimentality, as when guest Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who had survived the atomic bombing of Hirsohima in 1945, was introduced to the copilot of the Enola Gay. On May 27, 1953, This Is Your Life ambushed a beautiful young woman in the audience, escorted her to the stage, and proceeded, in a matter of minutes, to package, sanitize, and trivialize the Holocaust for a national television audience. Hannah Bloch Kohner’s claim to fame was that she had survived Auschwitz before emigrating, marrying, and settling in Los Angeles. She was the first Holocaust survivor to appear on a national television entertainment program. “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy,” host Edwards said to Kohner in his singsong baritone. “You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” He then reunited a stunned Kohner with Eva, a girl with whom she’d spent eight months in Auschwitz, intoning, “You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren’t you, Hannah? You were sent to the so-called showers, and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some of the showers had regular water and some had liquid gas, and you never knew which one you were being sent to. You and Eva were fortunate. Others were not so fortunate, including your father and mother, your husband Carl Benjamin. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz.” It was an extraordinary lapse of sympathy, good taste, and historical accuracy—history that, if not common knowledge, had at least been documented on film. It would be hard to explain how Kohner ever made it on This Is Your Life to be the Holocaust’s beautiful poster girl if you didn’t happen to know that her husband—a childhood sweetheart who had emigrated to the United States in 1938—was host Ralph Edwards’s agent. Hannah Bloch’s appearance was a small, if crass, oasis of public recognition for Holocaust survivors—and child survivors especially—in a vast desert of indifference. It would be decades before the media showed them this much interest again.

The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.

Hutchison Effect The Canadian inventor John Hutchison is an enigma. He is credited with one of science's most unusual and controversial discoveries. It is described as a "highly-anomalous electromagnetic effect which causes the jellification of metals, spontaneous levitation of common substances, and other effects." It is known as the Hutchison Effect, or the H-Effect for short. What the H-Effect is purported to do is nothing short of extraordinary. It is said to cause objects to defy gravity, cause metal to spontaneously fracture, cause dissimilar materials to fuse (such as metal and wood), and other strange phenomena.

Also most helpful was Fawn M. Brodie, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, well-known in Mormon circles as the author of a controversial 1945 biography on Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. Brodie had put forth her own historical analysis of Mormonism’s black ban in a short but influential 1970 monograph, “Can We Manipulate the Past?”16 After carefully reading my unrevised dissertation, Brodie offered a mixed evaluation. She praised my dissertation as “written up with care,” confessing that she had “learned much from it.” But she pointed out certain deficiencies. In particular, the writing style, she opined, reflected a “non-professional quality” akin that of “a jack-Mormon who is afraid of offending devout Mormons.” The narrative, she further noted, projected a “disembodied quality” most evident in the work’s discussion of “the Book of Mormon as if Joseph Smith was nowhere in the neighborhood.

mentor of his business career, attorney Roy M. Cohn. Short and sallow-skinned with deep-set droopy blue eyes and a receding hairline, Cohn was one of the most controversial legal minds of his time. As

This was in the early 1970s, and the controversy had been about the ‘revealing’ autobiography written by one of Kerala’s finest literary authors, Madhavikutty (Kamala Das). However, no two authors could be so differently located. Madhavikutty was born into an aristocratic Nair family, was the daughter of an eminent poet in Malayalam, and the niece of a prominent intellectual. She was already well known as a short story writer in Malayalam and as a poet and writer in English when Ente Katha appeared. Jameela came from a lower-middle class, lower caste (Ezhava) family, was removed from school at nine, and worked as a labourer and a domestic worker before becoming a sex worker. Later she became an activist and a filmmaker, but was not very well known outside a narrow sphere.

The properties of the renewal tissues enabled the original definition of stem cell behaviour in terms of the ability to self-renew and to generate differentiated progeny. But the most famous stem cell of them all is now the embryonic stem cell (ES cell). In one sense, the ES cell is the iconic stem cell. It is the type of stem cell that has attracted all of the ethical controversy, and it is what lay people are thinking of when they refer to ‘stem cell research’. But ironically, the embryonic stem cell does not exist in nature. It is a creature that has been created by mankind and exists only in the world of tissue culture: the growth of cells in flasks in the laboratory, kept in temperature-controlled incubators, exposed to controlled concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and nourished by complex artificial media. Cells grown in culture are often referred to by the Latin phrase in vitro (in glass, since the relevant containers used to be made of glass) and distinguished from in vivo (inside the living body).

But suddenly, he was firmly resolved about declining the UCLA alternative. A little while before, there had been a storm of controversy about Mickey Mantle and the kind of priority treatment he had received. DeForest suspected he was getting the celebrity treatment, that he might in effect take someone else’s opportunity to live longer. In the end, he refused all treatment short of the medication designed to slow the growth of his cancer and the drugs for the pain.

In order to make way for one of the world’s most luxurious buildings…’ Even though the publicity was almost entirely negative, there was a great deal of it, and that drew a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower. Almost immediately we saw an upsurge in the sales of apartments. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, and in truth it probably says something perverse about the culture we live in. But I’m a businessman, and I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

For what was the great controversy permitted to continue throughout the ages? Why was it that Satan’s existence was not cut short at the outset of his rebellion? It was that the universe might be convinced of God’s justice in His dealing with evil; that sin might receive eternal condemnation.

I’m a businessman, and I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

To grasp the implications of the comparison—the term “parable” comes from the Greek para, “along side, together with,” as in “parallel” or “paradox,” and balo, “to cast,” “to throw”—we need to understand the nuances of each side of the equation. We immediately realize that, with such comparisons, no single meaning can ever be determined, just as no single metaphor or simile can be restricted.

Harry S. Truman, said Krock, might seem to many a controversial figure. But to those who had the chance to talk with him intimately, his faith in the future had a “luminous” quality. He sits in the center of the troubled and frightened world. . . . But the penumbra of doubt and fear in which the American nation pursues its great and most perilous adventure . . . stops short of him. Visitors find him undaunted and sure that, whether in his time or thereafter, a way will be discovered to preserve the world from the destruction which to many seems unavoidable. . . .

The law of 11 June 1842 establishing the French railroad system was passed in the same year as a train accident killed forty persons on the short line to Versailles. The controversial new legislation provided government guarantees to private investors, as well as state aid for the construction of a rail network radiating out from Paris. The law of 11 June also sparked a railway boom that attracted investors and was popular with the public. A second railway bill was passed in 1846, promising additional expansion. The father of the teenage artist Gustave Dore, for example, was a state- trained and -paid civil engineer assigned to survey the route of a future line between Lyon and Geneva. (...) ...during the 1840s writers such as George Sand began to predict that the commercial impact of the railroad would quickly destroy the local customs and traditions that still regulated the culture of most of rural France.

Lennon’s behaviour became ever more unpredictable. In the first week of May, with Cynthia on holiday abroad, he spent an evening with Shotton in his music room at Kenwood. Both took LSD, smoked cannabis and made some experimental recordings. Shortly before dawn they fell into silence, which was eventually punctuated by Lennon’s solemn announcement: ‘Pete, I think I’m Jesus Christ.’ Shotton was more than familiar with his friend’s bizarre flights of fancy, but this was a revelation too far. He attempted to pour cold water on Lennon’s sudden eagerness to tell the world of his new identity, perhaps mindful of the ‘More popular than Jesus’ controversy of 1966. ‘They’ll fucking kill you,’ he told Lennon. ‘They won’t accept that, John.’ Lennon grew agitated, telling Shotton that it was his destiny, and that he would inform the other Beatles at Apple. A board meeting was hastily convened that day, attended by the Beatles, Shotton, Taylor and Aspinall. Lennon opened the meeting by solemnly telling the others that he was the second coming of Jesus. ‘Paul, George, Ringo and their closest aides stared back, stunned,’ Shotton said. ‘Even after regaining their powers of speech, nobody presumed to cross-examine John Lennon, or to make light of his announcement. On the other hand, no specific plans were made for the new Messiah, as all agreed that they would need some time to ponder John’s announcement, and to decide upon appropriate further steps.’ The meeting came to an abrupt close, and all agreed to go to a restaurant. As they waited to be seated, a fellow diner recognised Lennon and exchanged pleasantries. ‘Actually,’ Lennon told him, ‘I’m Jesus Christ.’ ‘Oh, really,’ the man replied, seemingly unfazed by the news. ‘Well, I loved your last record. Thought it was great.’328

For years the CIA had run a 3,000-man top secret covert army in Afghanistan. The CTPT, short for Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were Afghans paid, trained and controlled by the CIA. They were the best Afghan fighters, the cream of the crop. They killed or captured Taliban insurgents and often went into tribal areas to eliminate them. They conducted dangerous and highly controversial cross-border operations into neighboring Pakistan.

There are those in positions of power who malign the pursuit of justice by intentionally associating the word “conspiracy” with the delirious hallucinations of unbalanced minds. They’re wrong. The real-world definition of conspiracy is simply two or more persons agreeing to commit a crime. In short, they are everywhere, a constant component of daily events throughout our history, and are by no means the restless imaginings of an over-attentive audience.

The stage is fast becoming a drama-soaked series following the misadventures of a business tycoon navigating Washington in search of power and popularity, stirring up new controversies to capture the short attention span of a glass-eyed, zombie-like mob of spectators.

decided that I would write a personal response to 9/11 to be published on the first anniversary. It was called The Dignity of Difference. It was a very strong book and a very controversial book. Members of my own community believed that I had simply gone too far, and that I had actually been guilty of heresy.