Survey Results Quotes

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.

the nation's young men have been proved by surveys to be completely unmarriageable, and as a result there's a whole generation of single girls like me with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and don't need to wash anyone else's socks.

Veganism will come about as a result of the traits in humans that we are most proud of – ingenuity, intellectual honesty, progressiveness and self-reflection – while rejecting many of the traits that are most damaging – stubbornness, wilful ignorance, violence, selfishness and apathy. We are already seeing this in action, and though getting accurate population statistics is challenging, a clear theme is being revealed by polling and surveys: veganism is growing.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

Petra Ral, 10 kills, 48 assists. Oluo Bozado, 39 kills, 9 assists. Eld Jinn, 14 kills, 32 assists. Gunther Schultz, 7 kills, 40 assists. "Come back home alive, and you're a full-fledged member," is the common view in the Survey Corps... but *those people* have lived through hell again and again, producing results all the way. They've learned how to live... When facing a titan, you never know enough. Think all you want. A lot of the time, you're going into a situation you know nothing about. So what you need is to be quick to act... and make tough decisions in worst-case scenarios. Still, that doesn't mean they've got no heart. Even when they had their weapons pointed at you, they had strong feelings. However... they have no regrets.

By 1991, for instance, epidemiologist surverys in populations had revealed that high cholesterol was NOT associated with heart disease or premature death in women. Rather, the higher the cholesterol in women, the longer they lived, a finding that was so consistent across populations and surveys that it prompted an editorial in the American Heart Associations journal, Circulation: "We are coming to realize," the three authors, led by UC San Francisco epidemiologist Stephen Hulley, wrote, "the the results of cardiovascular research in men, which represents the great majority of the effort thus far, may not apply to women.

A perfect Judge will read each work of Wit With the same spirit that its author writ; Survey the WHOLE, nor seek slight faults to find Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind; .... In wit, as nature, what effects our hearts Is not th'exactness of peculiar parts; 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all.

The sad part is that a place’s popularity can actually destroy the elements that contribute to happiness. The more we flock to high-status cities for the good life—money, opportunity, novelty—the more crowded, expensive, polluted, and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that rich, high-status states in the United States are among the least happy in the country.

The popular belief that the rate of divorce is the same inside and outside the church is based on a deeply entrenched misunderstanding about the results of several George Barna surveys over the past decades. A misunderstanding that, Mr. Barna told me, he would love to correct in the public’s mind.

A survey taken by the association found that 45 percent of patients with autoimmune disease were labeled as chronic complainers early in their diagnostic journeys, with the resulting delay in diagnosis often leading to organ damage from lack of appropriate treatment.

It all fit. The love of power, the focus on Russia to the exclusion of the rest of the world—with an exception made perhaps only for a Napoleon or a Hitler, whose power trumped even their enemy status but who were made relevant by the fact that they had invaded Russia—this and other survey results added up to a totalitarian mind-set. The only consideration that gave Gudkov pause was what seemed like an utter lack of a concept of the future. He had been taught that totalitarianism presupposed the image of a glorious future. But as he researched both Communist and Nazi ideologies, he came to the conclusion that the appeal of the rhetoric in both cases lay in archaic, primitive images: a simple society, a world of “us,” a tribe. Fromm, in fact, rejected the very idea of an image of the future in Nazi ideology and stressed the “worship of the past.

Children must learn obedience, and parents must exact obedience from them. Love your children, let them know that you love them; but remember that it is no favor to a child to let him do things he should not do. I have seen the results of many surveys and know from personal experience that children want some direction and control in their lives and want to live up to the expectations of those who are responsible for directing their lives.

Where America really differs from other countries is in the colossal costs of its health care. An angiogram, a survey by The New York Times found, costs an average of $914 in the United States, $35 in Canada. Insulin costs about six times as much in America as it does in Europe. The average hip replacement costs $40,364 in America, almost six times the cost in Spain, while an MRI scan in the United States is, at $1,121, four times more than in the Netherlands. The entire system is notoriously unwieldy and cost-heavy. America has about 800,000 practicing physicians but needs twice that number of people to administer its payments system. The inescapable conclusion is that higher spending in America doesn’t necessarily result in better medicine, just higher costs.

A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.39 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black.

If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?

Given sufficient training, any intelligent person can learn to conduct surveys, but getting people to use the results requires salesmanship of a high order.

Results of two independent factor analyses of the survey responses of more than 2000 English and American citizens parallel these findings (19,33): - fear and exclusion: persons with severe mental illness should be feared and, therefore, be kept out of most communities; - authoritarianism: persons with severe mental illness are irresponsible, so life decisions should be made by others; - benevolence: persons with severe mental illness are childlike and need to be cared for." World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20. PMCID: PMC1489832 Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness PATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman ... Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk ... Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground ... Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER • As you survey your company-wide policies and procedures, ask: What is the purpose of this policy or procedure? Does it achieve that result? • Are there any approval mechanisms you can eliminate? • What percentage of its time does management spend on problem solving and team building? • Have you done a cost-benefit analysis of the incentives and perks you offer employees? • Could you replace approvals and permissions with analysis of spending patterns and a focus on accuracy and predictability? • Is your decision-making system clear and communicated widely?

On the last Sunday of March 1851, the Church of England conducted a national survey to see how many people actually attended church that day. The results were a shock. More than half the people of England and Wales had not gone to church at all, and only 20 percent had gone to an Anglican service.

As the dissimilar results from these two government surveys suggest, it is impossible to state with certainty how many women are raped each year. Quantifying the prevalence of sexual assault is a highly speculative exercise because at least 80 percent of those who are assaulted don’t report the crime to authorities.

In 2011, Mark Brooks, a consultant to online-dating companies, published the results of an industry survey titled “How Has Internet Dating Changed Society?” The survey responses, from 39 executives, produced the following conclusions: “Internet dating has made people more disposable.” “Internet dating may be partly responsible for a rise in the divorce rates.” “Low quality, unhappy and unsatisfying marriages are being destroyed as people drift to Internet dating sites.” “The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.” “Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.” From "A Million First Dates How online romance is threatening monogamy" in January/February 2013

I narrowed the focus of my research to examine a specific expression of the relational paradox: the psychosociology of eating animals, a phenomenon I named carnism. Seeking to understand how people who care about the well-being of nonhuman animals nevertheless consume (or kill) them, I conducted interviews and surveys, and coded and analyzed responses. I concluded that eating (certain) animals results from extensive social and psychological conditioning that causes naturally empathic and rational people to distort their perceptions and block their empathy so that they act against their values of compassion and justice without fully realizing what they're doing. In other words, carnism teaches us to violate the Golden Rule without knowing or caring that we're doing so.

The noise of the town some floors below was greatly muted. In a state of complete mental detachment, he went over the events, the circumstances and the stages of destruction in their lives. Seen in the frozen light of a restrictive past, everything seemed clear, conclusive and indisputable. Now it seemed unthinkable that a girl of seventeen shoudl be so naive; it was particularly unbelieveable that a girl of seventeen should set so much store by love. If the surveys in the magazines were to be believed, things had changed a great deal in the twenty-five years since Annabelle was a teenager. Young girls today were more sensible, more sophisticated. Nowadays they worried more about their exam results and did their best to ensure they would have a decent career. For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction motivated as much by narcissism as by sexual pleasure. They later would try to make a good marriage, basing their decision on a range of social and professional criteria, as well as on shared interests and tastes. Of course, in doing this they cut themselves off from any possibility of happiness--a condition indissociable from the outdated, intensely close bonds so incompatible with the exercise of reason--but this was their attempt to escape the moral and emotional suffering which had so tortured their forebears. This hope was, unfortunately, rapidly disappointed; the passing of love's torments simply left the field clear for boredom, emptiness and an anguished wait for old age and death. The second part of Annabelle's life therefore had been much more dismal and sad than the first, of which, in the end, she had no memory at all.

Clive, surveying the scene from the churchyard, was not particularly concerned with the how or why. It was typical of his unquestioning, uncomplicated nature, as well-meaning as the printed verse in a Christmas card. Like the card, too, he was a symbol of goodwill towards all men. His life was one perpetual effort to be liked. This had naturally resulted in considerable unpopularity. His late-autumn holiday was being spent alone.

The manner in which animals learn has been much studied in recent years, with a great deal of patient observation and experiment. Certain results have been obtained as regards the kinds ofproblems that have been investigated, but on general principles there is still much controversy. One may say broadly that all the animals that have been carefully observed have behaved so as to confirm the philosophy in which the observer believed before his observations began. Nay, more, they have all displayed the national characteristics of the observer. Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness. To the plain man, such as the present writer, this situation is discouraging. I observe, however, that the type ofproblem which a man naturally sets to an animal depends upon his own philosophy, and this probably accounts for the differences in the results. The animal responds to one type of problem in one way and to another in another; therefore the results obtained by different investigators, though different, are not incompatible. But it remains necessary to remember that no one investigator is to be trusted to give a survey of the whole field. -Bertrand Russell, Outline of Philosophy, 192731

Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism

that about two-thirds of parents do. In one small but astounding survey, 80 percent of mothers acknowledged favoring one child over the others. This was no secret to their children, 80 percent of whom agreed. Interestingly, however, when they were asked which child their mother loved most, they almost always got it wrong. Similar results are borne out in larger studies—two-thirds of children accurately perceive their parents’ favoritism, but less than half get the favorite right.

In a recent survey of selected urban communities in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, up to 60 percent of all households were just one person. Add to this the impact of screen time. At home, at work, at school, we spend hours and hours in front of a screen—on average, over 11 hours a day. We are having far fewer family meals; our conversational skills are fading. The art of storytelling and the capacity to listen are on the decline. The result is a more self-absorbed, more anxious, more depressed—and less resilient—population.

BRITAIN HAD NOT FOUGHT a major continental war in a century, and the high command exhibited a stubborn disconnection from reality so complete as to merge at times with the criminal. A survey conducted in the three years before the war found that 95 percent of officers had never read a military book of any kind. This cult of the amateur, militantly anti-intellectual, resulted in a leadership that, with noted exceptions, was obtuse, willfully intolerant of change, and incapable for the most part of innovative thought or action

The Korean private market had unbundled education down to the one in-school variable that mattered most: the teacher. It was about as close to a pure meritocracy as it could be, and just as ruthless. In hagwons, teachers were free agents. They did not need to be certified. They didm;t have benefits or even guaranteed base salary; their pay was determined by how many students signed up for their classes, by their students' test-score growth, and, in many hagwons, by the results of satisfaction surveys given to students and parents.

Many researchers have sought the secret of successful education by identifying the most successful schools in the hope of discovering what distinguishes them from others. One of the conclusions of this research is that the most successful schools, on average, are small. In a survey of 1,662 schools in Pennsylvania, for instance, 6 of the top 50 were small, which is an overrepresentation by a factor of 4. These data encouraged the Gates Foundation to make a substantial investment in the creation of small schools, sometimes by splitting large schools into smaller units. At least half a dozen other prominent institutions, such as the Annenberg Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust, joined the effort, as did the U.S. Department of Education’s Smaller Learning Communities Program. This probably makes intuitive sense to you. It is easy to construct a causal story that explains how small schools are able to provide superior education and thus produce high-achieving scholars by giving them more personal attention and encouragement than they could get in larger schools. Unfortunately, the causal analysis is pointless because the facts are wrong. If the statisticians who reported to the Gates Foundation had asked about the characteristics of the worst schools, they would have found that bad schools also tend to be smaller than average. The truth is that small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable. If anything, say Wainer and Zwerling, large schools tend to produce better results, especially in higher grades where a variety of curricular options is valuable. Thanks to recent advances in cognitive psychology,

During the 2012 election cycle, the Public Religion Institute, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on working-class whites. It found, among other things, that working-class whites worked more hours than college-educated whites. But the idea that the average working-class white works more hours is demonstrably false.13 The Public Religion Institute based its results on surveys—essentially, they called around and asked people what they thought.14 The only thing that report proves is that many folks talk about working more than they actually work.

Good Morning. This is Mr. Gold of Paramount Pictures Corporation. We are carrying out an authorized survey of the territory for a forthcoming "A" picture of the famous Confederate raid of 1861 which resulted in the capture of General Sherman at Muldraugh Hill. Yes, that's right. Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead. What's that? Clearance? Sure we've got clearance. Let me see now...yes, here it is. Signed by Chief of Special Services at the Pentagon. Sure, the Commanding officer at the Armored Center will have a copy. Okay and thanks. Hope you'll enjoy the picture. 'Bye.

Primitive man, living in communities of restricted extent, providing for his needs by his own production or by direct co-operation, limiting his spiritual interests to personal experience or to simple tradition, surveys and controls the material of his existence more easily and completely than the man of higher culture. In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. In a much wider degree than people are accustomed to realize, modern civilized life—from the economic system which is constantly becoming more and more a credit-economy, to the pursuit of science, in which the majority of investigators must use countless results obtained by others, and not directly subject to verification—depends upon faith in the honor of others. We rest our most serious decisions upon a complicated system of conceptions, the majority of which presuppose confidence that we have not been deceived. Hence prevarication in modern circumstances becomes something much more devastating, something placing the foundations of life much more in jeopardy, than was earlier the case.

Our exploration into advertising and media is at its root a critique of the exploitative nature of capitalism and consumerism. Our economic systems shape how we see our bodies and the bodies of others, and they ultimately inform what we are compelled to do and buy based on that reflection. Profit-greedy industries work with media outlets to offer us a distorted perception of ourselves and then use that distorted self-image to sell us remedies for the distortion. Consider that the female body type portrayed in advertising as the “ideal” is possessed naturally by only 5 percent of American women. Whereas the average U.S. woman is five feet four inches tall and weighs 140 pounds, the average U.S. model is five feet eleven and weighs 117. Now consider a People magazine survey which reported that 80 percent of women respondents said images of women on television and in the movies made them feel insecure. Together, those statistics and those survey results illustrate a regenerative market of people who feel deficient based on the images they encounter every day, seemingly perfectly matched with advertisers and manufacturers who have just the products to sell them (us) to fix those imagined deficiencies.18

The result of these many voices and general lack of agreement on what really are the biblical means to Christian maturity seems to be breeding two kinds of believers. There are some who are not quite sure that they are even on the right track of normal Christian living; there are others who are quite certain that they have arrived at the station. Or, to change the metaphor, there seem to be so many master chefs around that some are so confused by looking only at the various menus that they are starving to death, while others are sampling everything that is offered with resultant indigestion, and a few have sworn allegiance to one and are convinced that all the others are frauds.

Here it’s worth stepping back from Thomas and the Court to survey all this from the perspective of the framers, particularly that of Constitution architect James Madison and his argument in favor of adopting the new governmental framework in Federalist 10. We have designed a government that will protect our natural rights to life, liberty, and property, Madison says. But since men, though equal in rights, have different talents and ambitions, the Constitution’s protection of their freedom to employ those talents as they see fit will result in quite different—that is, unequal—outcomes. Some will be rich; some poor. That is not a flaw but a sign that the liberty we value is alive and well.

Assess The Environment Ask yourself these questions: How would you rate your own trustworthiness? How would you rate the trustworthiness of your co-workers? How would you rate your immediate supervisor? What about your company’s top management? My colleagues and I asked these questions in a survey where: on a scale of 1-10, where ten equals “can always be trusted in all situations” and one equals “can rarely or never be trusted. Respondents rated: Their own trustworthiness at an average 8.72; All of the other people they work with as a group averaging 7.59; Their immediate supervisors a bit higher, at an average 8.33; Their company’s top management the lowest, at an average 6.43. The results indicate that we generally judge others to be less trustworthy than ourselves. If most of the people you work with are also like our survey respondents, they are making the same judgments. That means it is very likely some of the people you work with judge you to be less trustworthy than you consider yourself to be. Your first thought may be that they are mistaken. Certainly you don’t intend to act in ways others view as untrustworthy, so they must be misinterpreting your intentions. But the fact is people act on their assessments of your trustworthiness, not yours. Your best intentions can’t change their opinion. Only by changing what you say and how you act can affect how others assess your trustworthiness.

Why do we care about measurements at all? There are just three reasons. The first reason—and the focus of this book—is that we should care about a measurement because it informs key decisions. Second, a measurement might also be taken because it has its own market value (e.g., results of a consumer survey) and could be sold to other parties for a profit. Third, perhaps a measurement is simply meant to entertain or satisfy a curiosity (e.g., academic research about the evolution of clay pottery). But the methods we discuss in this decision-focused approach to measurement should be useful on those occasions, too. If a measurement is not informing your decisions, it could still be informing the decisions of others who are willing to pay for the information.

And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.

Christianity opens up vital space in our imaginations by making a distinction between two kinds of poverty: what it terms voluntary poverty on the one hand and involuntary poverty on the other. We are at this point in history so deeply fixated on the idea that poverty must always be involuntary and therefore the result of a lack of talent and indigence, we can’t even imagine that it might be the result of an intelligent and skilled person’s free choice based on a rational evaluation of costs and benefits. It might sincerely be possible for someone to decide not to take the better-paid job, not to publish another book, not to seek high office – and to do so not because they had no chance, but because – having surveyed the externalities involved – they chose not to fight for them.

[M]ost Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. . . . Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement. . . . Many of the overlapping crises in American life . . . can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. . . . The boast of Christian orthodoxy . . . has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. . . . These [heretical] simplifications have usually required telling a somewhat different story about Jesus than the one told across the books of the New Testament. Sometimes this retelling has involved thinning out the Christian canon, eliminating tensions by subtracting them. . . . More often, though, it’s been achieved by straightforwardly rewriting or even inventing crucial portions of the New Testament account. . . . “Religious man was born to be saved,” [Philip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” . . . In 2005, . . . . Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” . . . An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes an end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. . . . For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging. This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. . . . Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensible Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. . . . We nod to God, and then we do as we please.

In 2005, Dr. Ronald Kessler and colleagues reported the results of the US National Comorbidity Survey Replication, a household survey that included a diagnostic interview of more than nine thousand representative people across the United States.16 Overall, 26 percent of people surveyed met criteria for a mental disorder in the last twelve months—that’s one in four Americans! Of those disorders, 22 percent were serious, 37 percent were moderate, and 40 percent were mild. Anxiety disorders were most common, followed by mood disorders, then impulse control disorders, which include diagnoses like ADHD. Of note, 55 percent of people had only one diagnosis, 22 percent had two diagnoses, and the rest had three or more psychiatric diagnoses. That means almost half the people met criteria for more than one disorder.

Effort is required to maintain simultaneously in memory several ideas that require separate actions, or that need to be combined according to a rule—rehearsing your shopping list as you enter the supermarket, choosing between the fish and the veal at a restaurant, or combining a surprising result from a survey with the information that the sample was small, for example. System 2 is the only one that can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes, and make deliberate choices between options. The automatic System 1 does not have these capabilities. System 1 detects simple relations (“they are all alike,” “the son is much taller than the father”) and excels at integrating information about one thing, but it does not deal with multiple distinct topics at once, nor is it adept at using purely statistical information.

Mark Twain didn’t dabble in psychological focus groups, but he certainly knew something about human nature when he wrote, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” A series of surveys explored the premise that time is an important variable in this equation. Researchers asked a random sampling of people, “When you look back on your experiences in life and think of those things that you regret, what would you say you regret more, those things that you did, but wish you hadn’t, or those things that you didn’t do, but wish you had?” The results found that regrettable “failures to act” outnumbered “regrettable actions” by a two-to-one margin and that this was true for both sexes.

Stress physiologists have found a biological explanation for this phenomenon as well. The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet. And in fact, when kindergarten teachers are surveyed about their students, they say that the biggest problem they face is not children who don’t know their letters and numbers; it is kids who don’t know how to manage their tempers or calm themselves down after a provocation.

The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey has been tracking trends, attitudes, and behaviors in American society since 1972. One section of the survey asks questions about income inequality. The results showed that Americans who strongly oppose redistribution by government to address this problem gave 10 times more to charity than those who strongly support government action: $1,627 annually versus $140. Similarly, compared to people who want more welfare spending, those who believe that the government spends too much money on welfare are more likely to give directions to someone on the street, return extra change to a cashier, and give food or money to a homeless person. Almost everyone wants to help the poor. But depending on whether they have a dopaminergic or H&N personality, they will go about it in different ways. Dopaminergic people want the poor to receive more help, while H&N people want to provide personal help on a one-to-one basis.

The three main mediaeval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. Realism, as the word is used in connection with the mediaeval controversy over universals, is the Platonic doctrine that universals or abstract entities have being independently of the mind; the mind may discover them but cannot create them. Logicism, represented by Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Church, and Carnap, condones the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities known and unknown, specifiable and unspecifiable, indiscriminately. Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made. Intuitionism, espoused in modern times in one form or another by Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl, and others, countenances the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities only when those entities are capable of being cooked up individually from ingredients specified in advance. As Fraenkel has put it, logicism holds that classes are discovered while intuitionism holds that they are invented—a fair statement indeed of the old opposition between realism and conceptualism. This opposition is no mere quibble; it makes an essential difference in the amount of classical mathematics to which one is willing to subscribe. Logicists, or realists, are able on their assumptions to get Cantor’s ascending orders of infinity; intuitionists are compelled to stop with the lowest order of infinity, and, as an indirect consequence, to abandon even some of the classical laws of real numbers. The modern controversy between logicism and intuitionism arose, in fact, from disagreements over infinity. Formalism, associated with the name of Hilbert, echoes intuitionism in deploring the logicist’s unbridled recourse to universals. But formalism also finds intuitionism unsatisfactory. This could happen for either of two opposite reasons. The formalist might, like the logicist, object to the crippling of classical mathematics; or he might, like the nominalists of old, object to admitting abstract entities at all, even in the restrained sense of mind-made entities. The upshot is the same: the formalist keeps classical mathematics as a play of insignificant notations. This play of notations can still be of utility—whatever utility it has already shown itself to have as a crutch for physicists and technologists. But utility need not imply significance, in any literal linguistic sense. Nor need the marked success of mathematicians in spinning out theorems, and in finding objective bases for agreement with one another’s results, imply significance. For an adequate basis for agreement among mathematicians can be found simply in the rules which govern the manipulation of the notations—these syntactical rules being, unlike the notations themselves, quite significant and intelligible.

The cosmic sculptor had felt compelled to dot pupils onto the universe, yet had a tremendous terror of granting it sight. This balance of fear and desire resulted in the tininess of the stars against the hugeness of space, a declaration of caution above all. “See how the stars are points? The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically.” “But there’s nothing concrete to study in your cosmic sociology, Dr. Ye. Surveys and experiments aren’t really possible.” “That means your ultimate result will be purely theoretical. Like Euclidean geometry, you’ll set up a few simple axioms at first, then derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a foundation.” “It’s all fascinating, but what would the axioms of cosmic sociology be?” “First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” The

I, having my previous impressions of awe deepened by these solemn trophies of chance and change amongst mighty nations, had suddenly been surprised by a dream, as profound as at present, in which a thought that often had persecuted me figured triumphantly. This thought turned upon the fatality that must often attend an evil choice. As an oracle of fear I remembered that great Roman warning, Nessit vox missa reverti (that a word once uttered is irrevocable), a freezing arrest upon the motions of hope too sanguine that haunted me in many shapes. Long before that fifteenth year of mine, I had noticed, as a worm lying at the heart of life and fleeting its security, the fact that innumerable acts of choice change countenance and are variously appraised at varying stage of life - shift with the shifting hours. Already at fifteen, I had become deeply ashamed of judgements which I had once pronounced, of idle hopes that I had once encouraged, false admirations or contempts with which once I had sympathized. And, as to the acts which I surveyed with any doubts at all, i never felt sure that after some succession of years I might not feel withering doubts about them, both as to principle and as to inevitable results.

In the Brhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad7 the first form of the doctrine of transmigration is given. The souls of those who have lived lives of sacrifice, charity and austerity, after certain obscure peregrinations, pass to the World of the Fathers, the paradise of Yama; thence, after a period of bliss, they go to the moon; from the moon they go to empty space, whence they pass to the air, and descend to earth in the rain. There they “become food,… and are offered again in the altar fire which is man, to be born again in the fire of woman”, while the unrighteous are reincarnated as worms, birds or insects. This doctrine, which seems to rest on a primitive belief that conception occurred through the eating by one of the parents of a fruit or vegetable containing the latent soul of the offspring, is put forward as a rare and new one, and was not universally held at the time of the composition of the Upaniṣad. Even in the days of the Buddha, transmigration may not have been believed in by everyone, but it seems to have gained ground very rapidly in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Thus the magnificently logical Indian doctrines of saṃsāra, or transmigration, and karma, the result of the deeds of one life affecting the next, had humble beginnings in a soul theory of quite primitive type; but even at this early period they had an ethical content, and had attained some degree of elaboration. In

People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own Communist Parties, to think about a subject that one day will be a subject for sociologists. Which is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of the existence of a Communist Party. People or groups of people who don’t even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the Communist Party, and this is true of all countries where there has been even a tiny Communist Party. In our own small town, a year after Russia entered the war, and the left had recovered because of it, there had come into existence (apart from the direct activities of the Party which is not what I am talking about) a small orchestra, readers’ circles, two dramatic groups, a film society, an amateur survey of the conditions of urban African children which, when it was published, stirred the white conscience and was the beginning of a long-overdue sense of guilt, and half a dozen discussion groups on African problems. For the first time in its existence there was something like a cultural life in that town. And it was enjoyed by hundreds of people who knew of the communists only as a group of people to hate. And of course a good many of these phenomena were disapproved of by the communists themselves, then at their most energetic and dogmatic. Yet the communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions.

If we survey the relation of survivors to the dead through the course of the ages, it is very evident that the ambivalent feeling has extraordinarily abated. We now find it easy to suppress whatever unconscious hostility towards the dead there may still exist without any special psychic effort on our part. Where formerly satisfied hate and painful tenderness struggled with each other, we now find piety, which appears like a cicatrice and demands : De mortuis nil nisi bene.Only neurotics still blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive reproaches which psychoanalysis reveals as the old ambivalent emotional feeling. How this change was brought about, and to what extent constitutional changes and real improvement of familiar relations share in causing the abatement of the ambivalent feeling, need not be discussed here. But this example would lead us to assume that the psychic impulses of primitive man possessed a higher degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized human beings. Withthe decline of this ambivalence the taboo, as the compromise symptom of the ambivalent conflict, also slowly disappeared. Neurotics who are compelled to reproduce this conflict, together with the taboo resulting from it, may be said to have brought with them an atavistic remnant in the form of an archaic constitution the compensation of which in the interest of cultural demands entails the most prodigious psychic efforts on their part.

Starting a little over a decade ago, Target began building a vast data warehouse that assigned every shopper an identification code—known internally as the “Guest ID number”—that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a customer used a Target-issued credit card, handed over a frequent-buyer tag at the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a survey, mailed in a refund, phoned the customer help line, opened an email from Target, visited Target.com, or purchased anything online, the company’s computers took note. A record of each purchase was linked to that shopper’s Guest ID number along with information on everything else they’d ever bought. Also linked to that Guest ID number was demographic information that Target collected or purchased from other firms, including the shopper’s age, whether they were married and had kids, which part of town they lived in, how long it took them to drive to the store, an estimate of how much money they earned, if they’d moved recently, which websites they visited, the credit cards they carried in their wallet, and their home and mobile phone numbers. Target can purchase data that indicates a shopper’s ethnicity, their job history, what magazines they read, if they have ever declared bankruptcy, the year they bought (or lost) their house, where they went to college or graduate school, and whether they prefer certain brands of coffee, toilet paper, cereal, or applesauce. There are data peddlers such as InfiniGraph that “listen” to shoppers’ online conversations on message boards and Internet forums, and track which products people mention favorably. A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.

Numbers express quantities. In the submissions to my online survey, however, respondents frequently attributed qualities to them. Noticeably, colors. The number that was most commonly described as having its own color was four (52 votes), which most respondents (17) said was blue. Seven was next (28 votes), which most respondents (9) said was green, and in third place came five (27 votes), which most respondents (9) said was red. Seeing colors in numbers is a manifestation of synesthesia, a condition in which certain concepts can trigger incongruous responses, and which is thought to be the result of atypical connections being made between parts of the brain. In the survey, numbers were also labeled “warm,” “crisp,” “chagrined,” “peaceful,” “overconfident,” “juicy,” “quiet” and “raw.” Taken individually, the descriptions are absurd, yet together they paint a surprisingly coherent picture of number personalities. Below is a list of the numbers from one to thirteen, together with words used to describe them taken from the survey responses. One Independent, strong, honest, brave, straightforward, pioneering, lonely. Two Cautious, wise, pretty, fragile, open, sympathetic, quiet, clean, flexible. Three Dynamic, warm, friendly, extrovert, opulent, soft, relaxed, pretentious. Four Laid-back, rogue, solid, reliable, versatile, down-to-earth, personable. Five Balanced, central, cute, fat, dominant but not too much so, happy. Six Upbeat, sexy, supple, soft, strong, brave, genuine, courageous, humble. Seven Magical, unalterable, intelligent, awkward, overconfident, masculine. Eight Soft, feminine, kind, sensible, fat, solid, sensual, huggable, capable. Nine Quiet, unobtrusive, deadly, genderless, professional, soft, forgiving. Ten Practical, logical, tidy, reassuring, honest, sturdy, innocent, sober. Eleven Duplicitous, onomatopoeic, noble, wise, homey, bold, sturdy, sleek. Twelve Malleable, heroic, imperial, oaken, easygoing, nonconfrontational. Thirteen Gawky, transitional, creative, honest, enigmatic, unliked, dark horse. You don’t need to be a Hollywood screenwriter to spot that Mr. One would make a great romantic hero, and Miss Two a classic leading lady. The list is nonsensical, yet it makes sense. The association of one with male characteristics, and two with female ones, also remains deeply ingrained.

The experience of the common worship of God is such a moment. It is in this connection that American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost beyond redemption. Churches have been established for the underprivileged, for the weak, for the poor, on the theory that they prefer to be among themselves. Churches have been established for the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean, the Mexican, the Filipino, the Italian, and the Negro, with the same theory in mind. The result is that in the one place in which normal, free contacts might be most naturally established—in which the relations of the individual to his God should take priority over conditions of class, race, power, status, wealth, or the like—this place is one of the chief instruments for guaranteeing barriers. It is in order to quote these paragraphs from a recently published book, The Protestant Church and the Negro, by Frank S. Loescher: There are approximately 8,000,000 Protestant Negroes. About 7,500,000 are in separate Negro denominations. Therefore, from the local church through the regional organizations to the national assemblies over 93 per cent of the Negroes are without association in work and worship with Christians of other races except in interdenominational organizations which involves a few of their leaders. The remaining 500,000 Negro Protestants—about 6 per cent—are in predominantly white denominations, and of these 500,000 Negroes in “white” churches, at least 99 per cent, judging by the surveys of six denominations, are in segregated congregations. They are in association with their white denominational brothers only in national assemblies, and, in some denominations, in regional, state, or more local jurisdictional meetings. There remains a handful of Negro members in local “white” churches. How many? Call it one-tenth of one per cent of all the Negro Protestant Christians in the United States—8,000 souls—the figure is probably much too large. Whatever the figure actually is, the number of white and Negro persons who ever gather together for worship under the auspices of Protestant Christianity is almost microscopic. And where interracial worship does occur, it is, for the most part, in communities where there are only a few Negro families and where, therefore, only a few Negro individuals are available to “white” churches. That is the over-all picture, a picture which hardly reveals the Protestant church as a dynamic agency in the integration of American Negroes into American life. Negro membership appears to be confined to less than one per cent of the local “white” churches, usually churches in small communities where but a few Negroes live and have already experienced a high degree of integration by other community institutions—communities one might add where it is unsound to establish a Negro church since Negroes are in such small numbers. It is an even smaller percentage of white churches in which Negroes are reported to be participating freely, or are integrated

PATTERNS OF THE “SHY” What else is common among people who identify themselves as “shy?” Below are the results of a survey that was administered to 150 of my program’s participants. The results of this informal survey reveal certain facts and attitudes common among the socially anxious. Let me point out that these are the subjective answers of the clients themselves—not the professional opinions of the therapists. The average length of time in the program for all who responded was eight months. The average age was twenty-eight. (Some of the answers are based on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest.) -Most clients considered shyness to be a serious problem at some point in their lives. Almost everyone rated the seriousness of their problem at level 5, which makes sense, considering that all who responded were seeking help for their problem. -60 percent of the respondents said that “shyness” first became enough of a problem that it held them back from things they wanted during adolescence; 35 percent reported the problem began in childhood; and 5 percent said not until adulthood. This answer reveals when clients were first aware of social anxiety as an inhibiting force. -The respondents perceived the average degree of “sociability” of their parents was a 2.7, which translates to “fair”; 60 percent of the respondents reported that no other member of the family had a problem with “shyness”; and 40 percent said there was at least one other family member who had a problem with “shyness.” -50 percent were aware of rejection by their peers during childhood. -66 percent had physical symptoms of discomfort during social interaction that they believed were related to social anxiety. -55 percent reported that they had experienced panic attacks. -85 percent do not use any medication for anxiety; 15 percent do. -90 percent said they avoid opportunities to meet new people; 75 percent acknowledged that they often stay home because of social fears, rather than going out. -80 percent identified feelings of depression that they connected to social fears. -70 percent said they had difficulty with social skills. -75 percent felt that before they started the program it was impossible to control their social fears; 80 percent said they now believed it was possible to control their fears. -50 percent said they believed they might have a learning disability. -70 percent felt that they were “too dependent on their parents”; 75 percent felt their parents were overprotective; 50 percent reported that they would not have sought professional help if not for their parents’ urging. -10 percent of respondents were the only child in their families; 40 percent had one sibling; 30 percent had two siblings; 10 percent had three; and 10 percent had four or more. Experts can play many games with statistics. Of importance here are the general attitudes and patterns of a population of socially anxious individuals who were in a therapy program designed to combat their problem. Of primary significance is the high percentage of people who first thought that “shyness” was uncontrollable, but then later changed their minds, once they realized that anxiety is a habit that can be broken—without medication. Also significant is that 50 percent of the participants recognized that their parents were the catalyst for their seeking help. Consider these statistics and think about where you fit into them. Do you identify with this profile? Look back on it in the coming months and examine the ways in which your sociability changes. Give yourself credit for successful breakthroughs, and keep in mind that you are not alone!

Finding out how much food actually is consumed is a challenging task, and neither dietary recalls nor household expenditure surveys yield accurate results.

The most comprehensive survey yet of research into the impacts of payments to promote ecological conservation—whether to collect more litter and plant more trees or harvest less timber and catch fewer fish—finds that most of the schemes studied were unintentionally crowding out, rather than crowding in, people’s intrinsic motivation to act.57 Instead of engaging existing intrinsic commitments, such as pride in cultural heritage, respect for the living world, and trust in the community, some schemes inadvertently serve to erode those very values and replace them with financial motivation. ‘Using money to motivate people can throw up surprising results,’ says Erik Gómez-Baggethun, one of the study’s authors. ‘We often don’t understand the complex interplay of human values and motivations well enough to anticipate what will happen, and so that calls for caution’.

A team of sociologists used survey results to argue that Christian nationalism was the foundation of Trump’s religious support. Opposition to Islam and keeping the United States a “Christian nation” was found to be more significant than biblical convictions.

As the social sciences became increasingly central to the formulation of public policy, this doctrine reinforced the political and legal drive for school desegregation. So powerful was the presumption that when Congress in 1964 ordered a survey on “the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin,” James Coleman, the study’s director, could tell an interviewer even before the field work was done: “… the study will show the difference in the quality of schools that the average Negro child and the average white child are exposed to. You know yourself that the difference is going to be striking.” So Coleman and most of the academic establishment were startled and dismayed eight months later by just how little difference his survey detected. When the results were in from this, the second-largest social science research project in history, they produced conclusions sharply at variance with the reigning doctrine. Popular impressions to the contrary, Coleman’s investigators found little difference between physical facilities and curricula at black and white schools. Moreover, the differences they did recognize had little effect on black and white performance. Even racial integration had relatively little impact on student achievement, as measured by standardized tests. The significant variables lay, not in the schools at all, but in the homes from which the children came and the cultural and class influences surrounding those homes. If the Coleman Report—as it came to be known—was a thunderclap in the cloistered world of social science research, its implications for public policy were even more earthshaking. Science magazine called it “a spear pointed at the heart of the cherished American belief that equality of educational opportunity will increase the equality of educational achievements.” But its implications went even deeper than that. For if the family, not the school, made the difference; if the poor, the black, and the disenfranchised were less susceptible to educational influence than hitherto believed; if differences between Americans were rooted in the bedrock of class—then social progress would be far more difficult to achieve than most people of goodwill had assumed.

Islam and science are not at odds as commonly perceived. According to World Values Survey Sixth Wave results for 2010-2014, 32.73% Muslim respondents completely agreed that science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable as compared to 24.89% others citing the same opinion. The opinion was asked from respondents on a 10-point rating scale where 1 represented completely disagreed and 10 represented completely agreed. It is interesting to note that 80.13% of Muslim respondents chose response between 6 and 10 on the scale as compared to 78.25% others choosing a similar response.

Even if Democrats do succeed, it won’t save us. While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I have described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one. We have surveyed this party’s thoughts and deeds from the Seventies to the present, we have watched them abandon whole classes and regions and industries, and we know now what the results have been. Their leadership faction has no intention of doing what the situation requires.

His ambition was for the company to be the employer of choice wherever it had facilities. He had personally trained Kaye Jorgensen, a personnel clerk who went on to become senior vice president of human resources, with that goal in mind. As a result, the company was on the cutting edge of workplace management practices from flexible schedules and job sharing to occupational health services to the employee recognition programs it was known for to regular employee attitude surveys intended to “ensure the work day is the best part of their day,” as Jorgensen put it.

A 2019 survey sponsored by The Washington Post and Mexico’s newspaper Reforma gathered information on public opinion regarding illegal immigration to Mexico. It was conducted through July 9 to July 14, 2019, among 1,200 Mexicans adults and was done across the country in 100 election districts by way of face-to-face interviews. According to the survey, Mexicans are profoundly frustrated with illegal immigrants following a year of increased migration through their country from Central America. The survey demonstrates that only 7% of Mexicans say that Mexico should provide residency to Central American immigrants, while another 33% support allowing them to temporarily stay in Mexico while the United States comes to a decision regarding their admittance. However, a 55% majority say that illegal immigrants should be deported back to their home countries.[18] These findings disprove the perception that Mexico is supportive towards the swell of Central Americans. The data results instead suggest that Mexicans are opposed against the migrants traversing through their country, a sentiment shared by numerous supporters of President Trump. The Post-Reforma survey finds that more than 6 in 10 Mexicans say that migrants pose a burden on their country because they take jobs as well as benefits that should belong to Mexicans; and a 55% majority of Mexicans support deporting migrants traveling through Mexico to reach the United States.

Wikipedia: The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy The role of genetics in the black-white IQ gap has been particularly controversial. The question regarding this in the survey asked "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" Amongst the 661 returned questionnaires, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% said that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% said that the gap was "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it was "due entirely to environmental variation" and 45% said that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". According to Snyderman and Rothman, this contrasts greatly with the coverage of these views as represented in the media, where the reader is led to draw the conclusion that "only a few maverick 'experts' support the view that genetic variation plays a significant role in individual or group difference, while the vast majority of experts believe that such differences are purely the result of environmental factors.

Keeping hold of Larson as if he were a disobedient puppy, Kingston berated him quietly. “After the hours I just spent with you, providing excellent advice, this is the result? You decide to start shooting guests in my club? You, my boy, have been a dismal waste of an evening. Now you’re going to cool your heels in a jail cell, and I’ll decide in the morning what’s to be done with you.” He released Larson to the care of one of the hulking night porters, who ushered him away expediently. Turning to West, the duke surveyed him with a quicksilver glance, and shook his head. “You look as though you’d been pulled backward through a hedgerow. Have you no standards, coming to my club dressed like that? For the wrinkles in your coat alone, I ought to have you thrown into a cell next to Larson’s.” “I tried to have him spruced up,” Severin volunteered, “but he wouldn’t.” “A bit late for sprucing,” Kingston commented, still looking at West. “At this point I would recommend fumigation.” He turned to another night porter. “Escort Mr. Ravenel up to my private apartments, where it seems I’ll be giving counsel to yet another of my daughter’s tormented suitors. This must be a penance for my misspent youth.”` “I don’t want your counsel,” West snapped. “Then you should have gone to someone else’s club.” West sent an accusing glare at Severin, who shrugged slightly. Struggling up from his chair, West growled, “I’m leaving. And if anyone tries to stop me, I’ll knock them flat.” Kingston seemed rather less than impressed. “Ravenel, I’m sure when you’re sober, well-rested and well-nourished, you can give a good account of yourself. At the moment, however, you are none of those things. I have a dozen night porters working here tonight, all of whom have been trained in how to manage unruly patrons. Go upstairs, my lad. You could do worse than to spend a few minutes basking in the sunshine of my accumulated wisdom.” Stepping closer to the porter, the duke gave him a number of quiet instructions, one of them sounding suspiciously like, “Make sure he’s clean before he’s allowed on the furniture.

Surveys show that most African Americans prefer integrated neighborhoods. So do whites. But African Americans define an integrated community as one in which from 20 to 50 percent of residents are African American. Whites define it as one where they dominate—and in which only 10 percent of residents are African American. When a neighborhood exceeds an African American presence of more than 10 percent, whites typically start to leave, and soon it becomes overwhelmingly African American. If this is the likely result of attempts to integrate, it is hardly worth the bother.

If you any doubts regarding the disapproval of 5 Aug 2019 by JAMMU AND KASHMIR CITIZENS then please look at the recent DDC elections results. It was the first electoral exercise after 5 Aug 2019 and PAGD- People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration won entire Kashmir and even won 35 seats in Jammu. Poor BJP could only secure half of Jammu. This essentially means that the majority of J&Kites are against 5 Aug 2019. Or if this doesn’t suffice then please come to J&K and speak to every section of J&Kites and find out the truth for yourself. Go ahead do a survey!

According to an August 18, 2021, Pew Research Center Survey, 65 percent of Democrats currently support government censorship of unauthorized opinions.2 That astonishing result suggests that Democrats have lost their faith not only in their party traditions, but also in democracy.

GALATIANS—NOTE ON 5:22–23 The Spirit fights against sin not merely in defense but also in attack by producing in Christians the positive attributes of godly character, all of which are evident in Jesus in the Gospels. Love appears first because it is the greatest quality (1 Cor. 13:1–13; 2 Pet. 1:5–7) in that it most clearly reflects the character of God. Joy comes in at a close second, for in rejoicing in God’s salvation Christians show that their affections are rightly placed in God’s will and his purpose (see John 15:11; 16:24; Rom. 15:13; 1 Pet. 1:8; Jude 24; etc.). Peace is the product of God having reconciled sinners to himself, so that they are no longer his enemies, which should result in confidence and freedom in approaching God (Rom. 5:1–2; Heb. 4:16). Patience shows that Christians are following God’s plan and timetable rather than their own and that they have abandoned their own ideas about how the world should work. Kindness means showing goodness, generosity, and sympathy toward others, which likewise is an attribute of God (Rom. 2:4). Goodness means working for the benefit of others, not oneself; Paul mentions it again in Gal. 6:10. Faithfulness is another divine characteristic; it means consistently doing what one says one will do. Gentleness is a quality Jesus attributes to himself in Matt. 11:29; it enables people to find rest in him and to encourage and strengthen others. Self-control is the discipline given by the Holy Spirit that allows Christians to resist the power of the flesh (cf. Gal. 5:17). Against such things there is no law, and therefore those who manifest them are fulfilling the law—more than those who insist on Jewish ceremonies, and likewise more than those who follow the works of the flesh surveyed

What you believe about climate change doesn’t reflect what you know,” said Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School who studies risk perception. “It expresses who you are." To illustrate this point, Kahan cited the results of yet another survey by the Pew Research Center. This survey was designed to test basic scientific knowledge and it posed questions like “What is the main function of red blood cells?” When respondents were asked what gas “most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise,” 58 percent chose the correct answer: “carbon dioxide.” There was little difference in the proportion of Democrats and Republicans who gave the right response; among the former it was 56 percent, among the latter 58 percent. (Among Independents, 63 percent chose correctly.) But polls that ask Americans about their own beliefs about global warming show a significant partisan divide; in another Pew survey, 66 percent of Democrats said they believed that human activity was the “main cause” of global warming, while only 24 percent of Republicans did. This suggests there are many Democrats who don’t know what’s causing climate change but still believe humans are responsible for it and many Republicans who do know, yet still deny that humans play a role. And what this shows, according to Kahan, is that people’s views on climate change are shaped less by their knowledge of the science than by their sense of group identity. To break the political logjam, he argues, Americans need to find ways of talking about climate change that don’t require members of one group or the other to renounce their cultural identity. “If you show people there is some way of responding to the problem that’s consistent with who they are, then they’re more likely to see the problem,” Kahan told me. Kari Marie Norgaard is a sociologist at the University of Oregon who has studied how people talk about climate change. She, too, believes there’s a strong cultural component to Americans’ attitudes, but she sees the problem as reflecting the strategies people use to avoid painful subjects. Norgaard argues that it’s difficult even for people who are privately worried about climate change to discuss the issue in public because on the one hand they feel guilty about the situation and on the other they feel helpless to change it. “We have a need to think of ourselves as good people,” she told me. Meanwhile, the very lack of discussion about the issue feeds itself: people feel that if it really were a serious problem, others would be dealing with it: “It’s difficult for people to feel that climate change is really happening in part because we’re embedded in a world where no one else around us is talking about it.” “It becomes a vicious cycle between the political gridlock and the cultural and individual gridlock,” Norgaard went on. What could possibly break this cycle? Norgaard argues that if the nation’s political leaders would candidly discuss the issue “it could be very powerful. It could free up a lot of the hopelessness people feel and allow them to mobilize.” “I think there are probably multiple levels at which we could break this cycle,” she went on. And though, after more than thirty years of ignored warnings, the challenge has grown all the more daunting, she said, “I don’t believe we get to give up.

When you choose a big life, by default, you’ll have to go small to get there. You must survey your choices, narrow your options, line up your priorities, and do what matters most. You must go small. You must find your ONE Thing.

One researcher involved with the study said that a survey of economists revealed that more than a third admitted to “searching for control variables until you get the desired results.

She transferred the baby and his Tupperware into the playpen for safety, stormed into the well-equipped garage, and searched frantically for a screwdriver. With an exultant cry of victory, she punched the button to the garage door opener and waited impatiently for it to rise. Resolutely, Aggie charged out of the gaping hole left by the door only to return moments later for a ladder. This posed a bigger problem than she’d anticipated. There wasn’t a ladder in sight. She searched corners and behind cabinets. In sheer exasperation, she threw her hands into the air and looked up as if to say, “I can’t take much more, Lord,” but the sight of a ladder hanging horizontally from the rafters halted her internal ranting. Now, she spoke aloud, her voice tinged with disgust. “Who would put a ladder up so high that you need a ladder to get the ladder down in the first place?” After a moment’s pause, she dashed into the kitchen and banged around the room, searching for the step stool. Ian squealed his slobbery encouragement as Aggie dragged the stool through the room, ruffling the few ruddy curls atop his bald little baby head. She teetered on the step stool, barely avoiding a collapse, and finally managed to jerk the ladder from its hooks. Hauling her prize out the garage door, Aggie surveyed the tattered basketball net she had remembered hanging deserted over the garage. The uncooperative ladder fought her at every step. After several frustrating minutes, where every swear word she’d ever heard filled her brain and threatened to overtake her self-control, Aggie realized that the ladder was upside down. Righting it, she climbed to the mounting bracket, the ladder teetering with every step. She eventually managed to unscrew one side of the apparatus and then the other. With a few jerky movements, the backboard lay on the ground beneath the swaying ladder, hardly worse for the fall. Aggie felt like a housekeeping genius as she wobbled through the house carrying her conquest upstairs to the wall above the hamper at the end of the hallway. The backboard was heavy and cumbersome; she found it difficult to hold in place and screw it into the wall at the same time, but several minutes later, she stood back and surveyed the results of her efforts. Though nearly satisfied, the lid on the hamper mocked her brilliant idea. Undaunted, she gave a swift jerk and ripped the cover off the offending hamper. “There. That’ll work,” she muttered as she trudged back downstairs, fighting the compulsion to pick up all the dirty laundry herself.

Many of us would say we’re not surprised by these findings. After all, it seems rather obvious. Or does it? Grant surveyed several thousand executives to find out how important it was to them that they feel their work has value. The results: only 1 percent of the executives said managers should bother showing employees that their work makes a difference. If anything, many companies try to explain the value our work will have in our own lives, the benefits we will reap if we hit a goal, as opposed to the benefit that others will derive. But remember our biology: we are naturally cooperative animals that are biologically more inspired and motivated when we know we are helping others. This

The New York Times’ pro-gun control results seem to stem from a heavy reliance on public health researchers. Furthermore, the Times only asks questions calling for more government regulations of gun ownership. But the Times’ panel was even more supportive of gun control than was the average public health researcher in our survey, so it is hard to believe that there wasn’t bias at work in the selection of the panel’s membership.

A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.37 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black. There

And while Jesus’ disciples wanted to learn how to pray above all else, our priorities are precisely the opposite. A nationwide survey asked pastors to identify their highest ministry priorities. Among the top results were evangelism and outreach (46%) and preaching (35%). Prayer ranked dead last (3%).1

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Results of a recent survey of 74 chief executive officers indicate that there may be a link between childhood pet ownership and future career success. Fully 94% of the CEOs, all of them employed within Fortune 500 companies, had possessed a dog, a cat, or both, as youngsters. The respondents asserted that pet ownership had helped them to develop many of the positive character traits that make them good managers today, including responsibility, empathy, respect for other living beings, generosity, and good communication skills. For all we know, more than 94% of children raised in the backgrounds from which chief executives come had pets, in which case the direction of dependency would be negative. Maybe executive success is really related to tooth brushing during childhood. Probably all chief executives brushed their teeth, at least occasionally, and we might imagine the self-discipline thus acquired led to their business success. That seems more reasonable than the speculation that “communication skills” gained through interacting with a childhood pet promote better relationships with other executives and employees.

Public surveys showed that, just as Fox News audiences were shockingly misinformed following the 9/11 bombings, CNN viewers and New York Times readers were catastrophically misinformed about the facts of COVID-19 during 2020. Successive Gallup polling showed that the average Democrat believed that 50 percent of COVID infections resulted in hospitalizations. The real number was less than one percent.30 Trust

The incarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in a falsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measures exclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters—which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on.[14]

Prioritizing Your Email Roadmap Chances are you’ll need a Hail Mary. And a Net Promoter Score survey email. And a newsletter. And… And… And… If you are getting started with your email program, the list of emails you’ll need will probably be very long. Do you need to do everything at once? Definitely not. In fact, it’s best to start your program by aligning with business priorities and getting results before thinking about expanding. What areas are most troublesome in your business right now? What metric are you expected to move with email? Is it: Engagement? Retention? Conversion? Revenue? Signups? If none of those stick out above the rest, start from the top. Welcome and onboarding emails set the tone for product usage. Better onboarding and value communication lead to reductions in churn and disengagement down the road. Welcome and onboarding emails are also sent to most, if not all, of your users, thus they have a greater potential to influence user behaviors. At Highlights, for example, we set up a welcome email, five onboarding emails, and an upsell email the week before we launched the product. The goal was to maximize the number of people in a position to convert. It also allowed us to start getting some data to optimize performance. In general, you’ll want to prioritize emails that: send a lot (large volume of sends); send consistently (every day, or every week at least); and have the potential to have a big impact on a key business goal. In the beginning especially, you want to make sure that you have a clear goal or metric to monitor with the aim of evaluating performance with user data. Start implementing a first sequence, test, gather data, and move on to the next sequence.

A few years later, researchers at Yale University School of Medicine quantified this risk. They reviewed the records of 87,290 patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety between 1997 and 2001 and determined those treated with antidepressants converted to bipolar at the rate of 7.7 percent per year, which was three times greater than for those not exposed to the drugs.17 As a result, over longer periods, 20 to 40 percent of all patients initially diagnosed with unipolar depression today eventually convert to bipolar illness.18 Indeed, in a recent survey of members of the Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association, 60 percent of those with a bipolar diagnosis said they had initially fallen ill with major depression and had turned bipolar after exposure to an antidepressant.19 This is data that tells of a process that routinely manufactures bipolar patients. “If you create iatrogenically a bipolar patient,” explained Fred Goodwin, in a 2005 interview in Primary Psychiatry, “that patient is likely to have recurrences of bipolar illness even if the offending antidepressant is discontinued. The evidence shows that once a patient has had a manic episode, he or she is more likely to have another one, even without the antidepressant stimulation.”20 Italy’s Giovanni Fava put it this way: “Antidepressant-induced mania is not simply a temporary and fully reversible phenomenon, but may trigger complex biochemical mechanisms of illness deterioration.”21

People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. During the 2012 election cycle, the Public Religion Institute, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on working-class whites. It found, among other things, that working-class whites worked more hours than college-educated whites. But the idea that the average working-class white works more hours is demonstrably false.13 The Public Religion Institute based its results on surveys—essentially, they called around and asked people what they thought.14 The only thing that report proves is that many folks talk about working more than they actually work.

Will hypothetical human beings with an unlimited memory, who use words only as invariant signs for definite elements and for definite relations between elements of pure mathematical systems which they have constructed, have room in their verbal reasonings for the logical principles for tacking together mathematical affirmations? Or what comes to the same: Will human beings with an unlimited memory, while surveying the strings of their affirmations in a language which they use for an abbreviated registration of their constructions, come across the linguistic images of the logical principles in all their mathematical transformations. A conscientious rational reflection leads to the result that this may be expected for the principles of identity, of contradiction and of syllogism, but for the principium tertii exclusi only in so far as it is restricted to affirmations about part of a definite, finite mathematical system, given once and for all whilst a more extensive use of the principle would not occur, because in general its application to purely mathematical affirmations would produce word complexes devoid of mathematical sense . . . . It follows that the language of daily intercourse between people with a limited memory, being necessarily imperfect, limited and of insecure effect, even if it is organized with the utmost practically attainable refinement and precision, will only be suitable for its task of mnemotechnic, economy of thought and understanding in mathematical research and mathematical intercommunication, if any application of the principium tertii exclusi which is not restricted to a well defined system is avoided.

Total retail sales rose 0.7 percent in November, as holiday shopping began, and that came despite a sharp tumble in gasoline prices that reduced the dollar value of sales at gas stations by 0.8 percent. Analysts had expected a rise of only 0.4 percent. Read narrowly, the results show that some survey data suggesting weak post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales was misleading at best; retail trade groups said at the time that they believed consumers spread their spending more evenly through November than they have in the past, and that appears to hold up.

Nelson and Winter had spent more than a decade examining how companies work, trudging through swamps of data before arriving at their central conclusion: “Much of firm behavior,” they wrote, is best “understood as a reflection of general habits and strategic orientations coming from the firm’s past,” rather than “the result of a detailed survey of the remote twigs of the decision tree.”6.15

Consequently, the 20th century witnessed the start of significant grassroots movements to protect workers and limit work hours. Still, the term “work-life balance” wasn’t coined until the mid-1980s when more than half of all married women joined the workforce. To paraphrase Ralph E. Gomory’s preface in the 2005 book Being Together, Working Apart: Dual-Career Families and the Work-Life Balance, we went from a family unit with a breadwinner and a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and no homemaker. Anyone with a pulse knows who got stuck with the extra work in the beginning. However, by the ’90s “work-life balance” had quickly become a common watchword for men too. A LexisNexis survey of the top 100 newspapers and magazines around the world shows a dramatic

and John explained that Christ would baptize with the Holy Spirit. In the broader context of Isaiah 40–55, there is a close connection between the outpouring of the Spirit and the resulting new creation: “For I will pour water on him who is thirsty, and floods on the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit on your descendants, and My blessing on your offspring” (Isa. 44:3; cf. Gen. 49:25; Ezek. 34:26–27; Joel 2:14; Mal. 3:10–11). Here the dry and thirsty land receives the outpouring of water, which brings rejuvenation, and this imagery is tied to the outpouring of the Spirit. Concerning this verse, though, John Goldingay explains, “Yhwh’s renewal of the people is an act of new creation.”46 This conclusion seems warranted, especially in light of Isaiah 44:2: “Thus says the LORD who made you and formed you from the womb [עשך ויצרך], who will help you.” E. J. Young explains, “The expression Creator [יצר] used of God as the Creator of His people is found only in Isaiah, as also the parallels Maker and Former.”47 This language is used, for example, in the creation account of man (Gen. 2:7). All of this imagery comes with a kaleidoscope of ideas that ties together creation, exodus, new creation, and the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit.48 These observations are not new. J. Luzarraga, commenting on Isaiah 31:5, explains that this verse, as well as the others thus far surveyed, refer to: a “return,” a second exodus, a new exodus, which…comes described with features taken from the first exodus, projecting upon an eschatological future, for the gifts that God has granted in the past are only a symbol of his provision in the future. As in the days past, so also in the ones to come, “Like birds hovering, so the LORD of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it; he will spare and rescue

End June 2012 In response to Dr. Arius’ questions for his research, I wrote: Dr. A.S., As always it is a delight to receive your emails. I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. I’ll respond to them one at a time. Please bear with me if my answers are lengthy at times. If I veer off into a tangent, please feel free to eliminate or edit my response. I’m eager to find out the results your research will yield when you are done with the survey. I’m ready to begin. Question one: * In “Initiation,” you said that as far as you can remember, even as a baby, you disliked your father. What was it that you didn’t like about the man? Did he have a certain smell that repelled you or something conscious or subconscious that blocked your connection towards him? Answers: Although I cannot provide you with definitive answers, I’ll do my best to remember how I felt when I was with my dad. a) Mr. S.S. Foong was a heavy smoker since the day I was born. I presume as a baby, the cigarette smell on his person repelled me. His aggressively loud booming voice did nothing to my gentle ears, either. Although he never shouted at me when I was a child, his stern demeanor deterred me from wanting to be near him. Moreover, his angry reprimands toward his subordinates when they had done nothing wrong challenged my respect for the man I called Father. b) Maybe unconsciously I was imbued with a glamorized portrayal of the “ideal” family from western magazines, movies, and periodicals of the mid-20th century. I wanted a father whom I could look up to: a strong, kind man who understands the needs of his family and children. But this was a Hollywood invention. It doesn’t exist, or it exists empirically in a small sector of the global population. c) Since my dad was seldom at home (he was with his mistress and their children), it was difficult to have a loving relationship with the man, especially when he roared and rebuked me for my effeminate behavior over which I had no control. I was simply being who I was. His negative criticisms damaged my ego badly. d) I could not relate to his air of superiority toward my mother. I resented that aspect of my father. I swore to myself that I would not grow up to be like my old man.

A survey was done on people who LIE, but the results were unreLIEable

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

people aren’t born with a propensity for evil, whatever they become in life, whatever choices they make along the way, perhaps as a result of injustices they’ve suffered, perhaps not, once they were good and that goodness remains at core, even if it does become buried under layers and layers of crud.” Cash raised an eyebrow at this but remained silent. Ruby

Addiction is a human problem that resides in people, not in the drug or in the drug’s capacity to produce physical effects,” writes Lance Dodes, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions. It is true that some people will become hooked on substances after only a few times of using, with potentially tragic consequences, but to understand why, we have to know what about those individuals makes them vulnerable to addiction. Mere exposure to a stimulant or narcotic or to any other mood-altering chemical does not make a person susceptible. If she becomes an addict, it’s because she’s already at risk. Heroin is considered to be a highly addictive drug — and it is, but only for a small minority of people, as the following example illustrates. It’s well known that many American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s were regular users. Along with heroin, most of these soldier addicts also used barbiturates or amphetamines or both. According to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1975, 20 per cent of the returning enlisted men met the criteria for the diagnosis of addiction while they were in Southeast Asia, whereas before they were shipped overseas fewer than 1 per cent had been opiate addicts. The researchers were astonished to find that “after Vietnam, use of particular drugs and combinations of drugs decreased to near or even below preservice levels.” The remission rate was 95 per cent, “unheard of among narcotics addicts treated in the U.S.” “The high rates of narcotic use and addiction there were truly unlike anything prior in the American experience,” the researchers concluded. “Equally dramatic was the surprisingly high remission rate after return to the United States.” These results suggested that the addiction did not arise from the heroin itself but from the needs of the men who used the drug. Otherwise, most of them would have remained addicts. As with opiates so, too, with the other commonly abused drugs. Most people who try them, even repeatedly, will not become addicted. According to a U.S. national survey, the highest rate of dependence after any use is for tobacco: 32 per cent of people who used nicotine even once went on to long-term habitual use. For alcohol, marijuana and cocaine the rate is about 15 per cent and for heroin the rate is 23 per cent. Taken together, American and Canadian population surveys indicate that merely having used cocaine a number of times is associated with an addiction risk of less than 10 per cent. This doesn’t prove, of course, that nicotine is “more” addictive than, say, cocaine. We cannot know, since tobacco — unlike cocaine — is legally available, commercially promoted and remains, more or less, a socially tolerated object of addiction. What such statistics do show is that whatever a drug’s physical effects and powers, they cannot be the sole cause of addiction.

A feistiness of spirit girds us in the most treacherous of moments. A metamorphosis of spirit often occurs after a person conscientiously surveys the resultant outcome of surviving a momentous ordeal and they transfigure personal heartache into a magnanimous manner of living in a just and righteous manner.

The first basic income pilot in a developing country was implemented in the small Namibian village of Otjivero-Omitara in 2008–9, covering about 1,000 people.40 The study was carried out by the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition, with money raised from foundations and individual donations. Everyone in the village, including children but excluding over-sixties already receiving a social pension, was given a very small basic income of N$100 a month (worth US$12 at the time or about a third of the poverty line), and the outcomes compared with the previous situation. The results included better nutrition, particularly among children, improved health and greater use of the local primary healthcare centre, higher school attendance, increased economic activity and enhanced women’s status.41 The methodology would not have satisfied those favouring randomized control trials that were coming into vogue at the time. No control village was chosen to allow for the effects of external factors, in the country or economy, because those directing the pilot felt it was immoral to impose demands, in the form of lengthy surveys, on people who were being denied the benefit of the basic income grants. However, there were no reported changes in policy or outside interventions during the period covered by the pilot, and confidence in the results is justified both by the observed behaviour, and by recipients’ opinions in successive surveys. School attendance went up sharply, though there was no pressure on parents to send their children to school. The dynamics were revealing. Although the primary school was a state school, parents were required to pay a small fee for each child. Before the pilot, registration and attendance were low, and the school had too little income from fees to pay for basics, which made the school unattractive and lowered teachers’ morale. Once the cash transfers started, parents had enough money to pay school fees, and teachers had money to buy paper, pens, books, posters, paints and brushes, making the school more attractive to parents and children and raising the morale and, probably, the capacity of its teachers. There was also a substantial fall in petty economic crime such as stealing vegetables and killing small livestock for food. This encouraged villagers to plant more vegetables, buy more fertilizer and rear more livestock. These dynamic community-wide economic effects are usually overlooked in conventional evaluations, and would not be spotted if cash was given only to a random selection of individuals or households and evaluated as a randomized control trial. Another outcome, unplanned and unanticipated, was that villagers voluntarily set up a Basic Income Advisory Committee, led by the local primary school teacher and the village nurse, to advise people on how to spend or save their basic income money. The universal basic income thus induced collective action, and there was no doubt that this community activism increased the effectiveness of the basic incomes.

The whole issue of the effects of trash like this is awash in confucion. Studies sow that men who watch porn commit fewer rapes. It also has bad affects on young children, who mostly watch it on the internet around page 11, and later and try to emulate what they saw, with disastrous results. Reduces people to objects. Same with that kind of writing. I wrote a book (Selling Sex In The 21st Century) after years of research, including these subjects, and science and surveys are not consistent, do not explain the reality. Variety is the reality. Most theories are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. It's easy to gab on to a position andchapmion it, but the truth isn't so simple. .