“
In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.
[DEA Administrative Law Judge - 1988]
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Francis Young
“
Whoever controls the money controls you.
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Sharon Law Tucker (How to Be a BadAss - A Survival Guide for Women)
“
No,” I start, hesitantly. “Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense, prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that’s not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs. We also have to ensure that college education is affordable for the middle class and protect Social Security for senior citizens plus conserve natural resources and wilderness areas and reduce the influence of political action committees.” The table stares at me uncomfortably, even Stash, but I’m on a roll.
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Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries))
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When did other people's happiness start feeling like assault? But the answer comes quickly, and brings a bad taste to my mouth. Always. I didn't ever stop feeling excluded. I just started to wear it and pretend it was my choice. Maybe that's why I was drawn to the law of poisoned things, and hurt people, and scabby chemical earth. Maybe toxic is the only thing I really understand.
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Krysten Ritter (Bonfire)
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The police can be more corrupt than the criminals.
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Steven Magee
“
Threats from the street may be potentially lethal, but the threat from the "enemy within" is a far worse hazard to a law officers health and wellbeing.
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Steve Neal
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Thank you for inviting me here today " I said my voice sounding nothing like me. "I'm here to testify about things I've seen and experienced myself. I'm here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We've gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we've harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to enormous super-jets. We've even created new kinds of people, like me.
"But everything mankind" - I frowned - "personkind has accomplished has had a price. One that we're all gonna have to pay."
I heard coughing and shifting in the audience. I looked down at my notes and all the little black words blurred together on the page. I just could not get through this.
I put the speech down picked up the microphone and came out from behind the podium.
"Look " I said. "There's a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know what the world needs to know is that we're really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic was than anyone has ever imagined.
"I mean I've seen a lot of the world the only world we have. There are so many awesome beautiful tings in it. Waterfalls and mountains thermal pools surrounded by sand like white sugar. Field and field of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside like it's done for hundreds of thousands of years.
"I've also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now in my lifetime. Just recently I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge worldwide climatic changes caused by... us. We the people."
....
"A more perfect union While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want and other people live in subway tunnels Where's the justice of that Kids right here in America go to be hungry every night while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare Where's the General welfare in strip-mining toxic pesticides industrial solvents being dumped into rivers killing everything Domestic Tranquility Ever sleep in a forest that's being clear-cut You'd be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty Yes. I'm using one of the blessings of liberty right now my freedom of speech to tell you guys who make the laws that the very ground you stand on the house you live in the children you tuck in at night are all in immediate catastrophic danger.
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James Patterson (The Final Warning (Maximum Ride, #4))
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The Laws of Healing Through Pain:
1. Do not regret telling your deepest secrets to evil ears.
2. Do not regret exposing your deepest wound to the eyes of one million snakes.
3. Do not regret revealing your shame to broken mirrors.
4. Vulnerability is ought to be temporary. But, regret will bind you to it on a permanent basis.
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Mitta Xinindlu
“
This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse.
Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).
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Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
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Are the laws of nature inconveniencing your toxic business?
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Steven Magee
“
Any species that devours its natural environment will eventually fall victim to the resulting silence and I call the toxicity of silence: Extinction Silence
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Steven Magee (Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity)
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Toxic police officers? Hello video camera!
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Steven Magee
“
Delusional levels of grandiosity, impulsivity, and the compulsions of mental impairment, when combined with an authoritarian cult of personality and contempt for the rule of law, are a toxic mix.
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Bandy X. Lee (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President)
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If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.
If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.
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Thomas Sowell
“
A lot of mothers turn toxic when a divorce or separation takes place. In their bitterness, they use the child as a weapon against the father. And in too many places the law passively supports their toxic behavior and it's the child and the fathers relationship that suffers in the short term. But you can't go against the laws of nature. The importance of fatherhood is indisputable. And children always reach for their fathers.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Our bodies speak, if you would only listen. They speak another language: the mother tongue. It’s half the puzzle, the missing pieces you have been searching for, the how and why behind the symptoms you fixate on, the whole behind the healing, which cannot be found at the bottom of a bottle of pills.
But you do not speak our language. My sick sisterhood, whose bodies have been felled by mysterious illnesses, bearing the arcane names of men long dead, to signify their suffering with no cure, no hope. The mothers who long for answers to the questions that their bodies are living, for soul-utions to the protest against this cold, hard world.
Into their dry hungry mouths are dropped pills not answers. Prescriptions and descriptions of symptoms – not cures or laws to halt the toxic corporate world that is allowed to carry on felling us like trees in the Amazon…
Each woman is an Amazon. But she does not know it. Instead she is treated. Separately. Her pile of notes, her bills, growing higher. Each one believes the sickness is hers alone. Each is sent home, ignored, tolerated.
Alone. In the darkness.
Until one day Medicine Woman arises within her.
And there in the centre of her pain she finds her outrage, her strength, her persistence as she searches for answers. She finds the will to die to this world and the right to live a different life where she is honoured for the value of her soul, not the sweat of her brow.
She begins to understand the messages her body is sending…
Things are not right. In here… out there.
She begins to remember there is magic in her: the power to heal, the power to transform.
Medicine Woman rises.
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Lucy H. Pearce (Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing)
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If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.
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Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
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To the Druids, a man was not separate from the universe or born into it from elsewhere. He was, like the trees and their leaves and blooms, part of nature. As a flower breaks out from a twig, so does man appear in the world from the womb of the universal mother. Man is an embodiment and emanation of nature. Consequently, a man who felt himself apart from nature was considered unsane. This was the law of the Druids and of Shaman everywhere. Perverted men were sacrificed to save the tribe from calamity. Trees are capable of producing sour and rotten fruit and, likewise, civilizations produce sour and rotten men and women who constitute a hazard to themselves and everyone around them. Thus rites of initiation were instigated to make sure the impure had no chance of attaining positions of power. The removal of these strict telestic rites gave mentally and morally toxic men access to the thrones of the world. Once in command, such types were wont to promote others of their kind and conspire against the morally and spiritually superior men they despise.
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Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
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But historically, “white” is a catchall with one very important, toxic difference, in America especially: We’re the good ones. The normal ones. The not yous. Even if we’re poor, even if we’re servants, even if we have no education, even if we’re Jewish, we’re the ones you can’t enslave. We’re the ones you can’t beat without repercussion, who get to vote, and are protected by laws no matter what.
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Phoebe Robinson (You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain)
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Social media is not toxic. Social media sites are not toxic. It might just be that you've allowed the toxic people you follow on social media to make it toxic for you. There is no rule, no law or no condition on any of these sites that says you must continue to follow or stay connected with someone you don't want to on social media. Unfollow, disconnect and block if need be and as often as you like.
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Loren Weisman
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The Universal Laws still make it criminal for them to prey on children, take trackers away, or jeopardize the world with toxic chemicals, or fire, or religion, but they feel in their hearts that humans are a predator, and predators need the right to tear out each other’s throats. You must not think they rape and murder daily. Most rarely more than duel, and it is a strong deterrent knowing you have no armor in this wide world but the goodwill of peers who could kill you where you stand.
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Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1))
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THREE LEVELS OF LAW
America's Declaration of Independence names three kinds of law: the laws of man, of nature and nature’s God.
The Book of Change is based on the laws of natural change. They emanate from and depend on divine law and serve as the rightful foundation of civil law. Clearly, laws legislated in ignorance of or in opposition to natural and divine law are not likely to work out well. Policy makers at all levels would do well to give this point careful thought.
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote about the relationship of divine, natural and human law in a way that inspired readers at the time of the American Revolution to fight for freedom from tyranny.
Approaching natural law from the deeper understanding of the ancients could inspire a reinvention of democracy now.
Sages say that freedom from tyranny begins with dispelling ignorance and overcoming toxic, negative emotions. Inalienable freedom starts with the self-awareness and self-mastery which can be gained by diligent use of the I Ching. pp. 3-4.
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Patricia E. West (The Common Sense Book of Change)
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In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues for the existence of a universal moral law that all human beings, regardless of culture, inherently aim to follow. Without it, we have no right to feel outrage toward horrors like slavery or the Holocaust. But we do. That’s because there is a sense of morality embedded in each of us, given to us by a Moral Lawgiver. Without a Moral Lawgiver, there is no moral law. With no transcendent moral law or lawgiver, we are all our own gods, and no one can say who’s right and who’s wrong. This puts our lives into a tailspin of chaos.
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Allie Beth Stuckey (You're Not Enough (and That's Ok): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love)
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Third, the Laws will empower you to take on and outthink the toxic types who inevitably cross your path and who tend to cause long-term emotional damage. Aggressive, envious, and manipulative people don’t usually announce themselves as such. They have learned to appear charming in initial encounters, to use flattery and other means of disarming us. When they surprise us with their ugly behavior, we feel betrayed, angry, and helpless. They create constant pressure, knowing that in doing so they overwhelm our minds with their presence, making it doubly hard to think straight or strategize.
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Robert Greene (The Laws of Human Nature)
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Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet. Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become. Yet, like
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Chris Hedges (Wages of Rebellion)
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Game Over! In this country, we outnumber them by the hundreds of millions, yet in the end, they’ll win. They’ve already won. Over decades, with the appetite of the greedy and the cunning of the wicked, their hired agents have built up a national archetype that’s now unstoppable. While we were distracted by our own shadows, their needles pierced the national psyche, slow dripping the poison of mendacity into our nation’s bloodstream. They contaminated the law with toxic corruption, and while invoking the name of freedom, they crushed any opposition with bone-cracking efficiency. When we finally peel away the submissive bandages that wrapped our imaginary wounds and promised us safety, we’ll find our flesh gone to dust, leaving only a willowy skeleton of hopelessness and surrender.
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Anonymous
“
If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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Is there something uniquely dangerous about beans? I posed this question to plant scientist Ann Filmer, recently retired from the University of California, Davis. In her reply, she included a link for a website she had put together on poisonous garden plants. I was taken aback to note that nine of the 112 plants in Category 1 (Major Toxicity: “may cause serious illness or death”) were currently, or had recently been, growing in our yard: oleander, lantana, night-blooming jasmine, lobelia, rhododendron, azalea, toyon, pittosporum, and hellebore. Another, the houseplant croton, was growing in an orange ceramic pot in my office. In other words, it’s not beans. It’s plants, period. If you can’t flee or maul or fire a gun, evolution may help you out with other, quieter ways to avoid being eaten. Over the millennia, natural selection favors eaters who turn up their proboscis at you, and eventually they all steer clear.
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Mary Roach (Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law)
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There has been a revolution in the way people think. They have just noticed, without daring to say it, that the old paradigm, according to which ‘the fate of humanity, individual and collective, is getting better every day, thanks to science, democratisation, and egalitarian emancipation’, is false. The age that believed it is over. This illusion has fallen. This progress (debatable anyhow according to people like Ivan Illich)[203] lasted probably less than a century. Today, the unintended consequences of mass technology are beginning to be felt: new resistant viruses, the toxicity of processed food, the exhaustion of the soil and the shrinking of the world’s agricultural production, the general and rapid degradation of the environment, the threat of the invention of new weapons of mass destruction to add to nuclear weapons, and so on. In addition, technology is entering its baroque age. The fundamental inventions were discovered by the end of the 1950s. The improvements to them made in later decades have contributed fewer and fewer concrete ameliorations, like so many useless decorative motifs added to the superstructure of a monument. The Internet has probably had fewer revolutionary effects than the telegraph or the telephone. The Internet is a significant improvement applied to a pan-communication that was already substantially realised. Techno-science is following the ‘80-20’ power law. At the beginning it takes 20 units of energy to obtain 60 units of force. Later it takes 80 units of energy to realise only 20 units of force.
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Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
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When you contribute to a safer world for the truth, contribute to help stop violence and help end impunity: be vigilant, be alert, stay safe, protect your emotions and health from aggressive troublemakers and manipulators, and have a strong, diplomatic, clear and firm boundaries.
Be honest, be factual, and have an indestructible firm coping mechanism ways while you could experience waves of digital aggression as they would like to silence you, discredit you, and they try to ruin your integrity, persona, reputation and credibility.
The deceptive, evil manipulators plant lies and create intrigues, polemics mongering, gossip-mongering, and calumny committed by abusive political harridans, bitches and assholes who can shame you privately and publicly.
Group cyber lynching, group cyberbullying, defamatory libellous slander is committed by these cyber aggressors who are also financial-political abusive parasites, pathological liar cyberbullies toxic manipulators, and repetitive abusers. Usually when the stakes are high, these manipulative, deceptive, dishonest, unscrupulous aggressive and vindictive, abusive toxic people would resort to any forms of aggression/abuse: digital or cyber aggression, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and psychological abuse, financial/economic abuse, and/or physical aggression.
When a group of habitual, deceptive, toxic netizens, digital aggressors send you threats, disturb your family member with their concocted destructive lies, and they took hold a copy of your passport or ID - change it immediately.
Document the threats, the libellous slander, done by these aggressive and abusive people who took advantage of you, used you, and abused you, and do not hesitate to report them to the right authorities.
You have to learn how to handle these scammers, habitual offensive abusive offenders/perpetrators, manipulators, bullies, digital aggressors/aggression, cyber lynchers, coward, pathological liars, opportunistic users, economic/financial abusers, emotional, psychological and verbal abusers, and repetitive abusers without breaking the law.
Even if they dehumanised you, shamed you and abused you for several years, do not and never dehumanise them.
Always remember the three Rs of life:
1. Respect for self
2. Respect for others
3. Responsibility for all your actions
~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from The S. Trilogy
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Angelica Hopes (Life Issues)
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Effect On Culture Organizations are made up of people. Those people work and “live” there with other people at least 40 hours per week. Like the connective tissue that begins to form when we are injured or when we are healing and becomes a part of who we are, team members are a part of the connective tissue of the organization. What happens when we remove or tear out a piece of that tissue? Not only does it hurt a lot, it causes heavy bleeding. If it doesn’t heal properly, there are complications. We may never regain our function in that area. When good productive people leave, we feel the pain and so does the culture of the team. The only way to mend the tissue permanently is to do the right things to engage and retain them. Spillover Effect We don’t talk about this much, but there is a psychological impact on other productive and engaged employees when they are forced to work with disengaged employees. Whether it is during water cooler talk or just in combined work spaces, the negative energy that disengaged employees pass to the entire team and organization can be toxic. Oftentimes, the disengaged employees are the scapegoats to deeper organizational issues. When we do not look at what is causing them to be disengaged, we enable the spillover effect to continue. Organizations that want a thriving workplace must rid themselves of disengaged employees, not necessarily by termination, but by living by the Laws found in this book. Negative Word Of Mouth Remember that unhappy employees don’t make for good promoters of your brand. In fact, disengaged employees are likely to tell more people and blurt it out all over social media and at every party. Reputationally, this negative word of mouth works against your brand promise. Who are you out in the world to your customers? Whatever that is, it must match who you are to your employees. Loss Of Organizational Stability Stop for a minute and think about what it says to your customers, partners, and investors when your employees keep walking out the door. Potentially, they could be in the middle of a complex project implementation and having a consistent point of contact through that process is key.
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Heather R. Younger (The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty: Fascinating Truths About What It Takes to Create Truly Loyal and Engaged Employees)
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The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s administrative law judge, Francis Young, says users cannot die from using marijuana:[27] In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.
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Paula Mallea (The War on Drugs: A Failed Experiment)
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The police have turned into a health and safety issue for the general public.
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Steven Magee
“
Tap water is another example of a legally condoned public health hazard. As early as the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) in China, the imperial government strictly enforced laws which required the public to clean their wells and water storage facilities regularly in order to maintain the purity of public drinking water. These laws also specified that pipes, vats, and basins used to transport and store drinking water must be made of clay, not metal, because the health hazards of heavy metals werw well known to Chinese health authorities. Today, public water utilities poison our drinking water with chlorine, fluoride, aluminum salts, and other substances which they call 'purifiers', then run it through metal pipes which further contaminate the water with lead, iron, nickel, cadmium, and other metals that are extremely toxic to the human system. Public utilities and private corporations combine to poison the food, air, and water upon which we must all rely to stay alive. Orthodox Western medical practice compounds these public health hazards by ignoring them as causes of disease, then further aggravates the situation by prescribing toxic drugs, injections, vaccines, and radical surgery as cures for the ills they cause.
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Daniel Reid
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In the months since leaving my husband’s home, I asked this question of myself almost every day. So many of the labels that I had accepted over the years described relationships: daughter, sister, wife, daughter-in-law, mother. In the in-between phase of separation, was I still a wife? Could I check the box for “married” even though I didn’t (and did not want to) share a house with my estranged spouse? If I stripped off the labels that did not fit, who or what would I be? I was still a daughter, a sister, and a mother. Why then did I feel so bereft?
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Ranjani Rao (Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery)
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With superior sentience, come superior screw-ups. And this holds particularly true for industrialization. Even if we put aside carbon emission, in the year 2020 alone humankind has produced over 2 billion tonnes of trash, which is expected to rise over 70% by the year 2050.
Thus, in the name of progress we the gadget-mad gargoyles keep acting as the true eco-terrorists of the glorious dumping ground, called the planet earth. 2% of all our waste is e-waste. And the alarming bit here is that, that 2% e-waste comprises over 70% of our overall toxic waste.
So, what can you do, you ask? Simple - reject less, repair more. Try to make things last as long as possible, or pass them on to those who have need for them. Don't let things go to waste, just because you can afford new ones.
For example, my kid cousin's laptop has been acting up for some time now. But instead of buying them a new pc, I ordered the replacement for the faulty part and repaired the laptop myself. This way, we not only reduce our e-waste footprint on the planet, but in the process, we teach kids to value things.
The point is, whether you do it yourself or get it done by a professional, by practicing repair, you are actively participating in the making of a greener, cleaner and healthier world.
It's not enough to be just a consumer, you gotta be a conscious consumer, otherwise there is no difference between a consumer and a slave. That is why, right-to-repair is not only a human rights issue, it is also an environmental issue. Repairing and recycling are the bedrock of sustainability. So I say again - reject less, repair more.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament)
“
My journey through Magee’s Disease was difficult and brought an understanding about what is wrong with the USA. Any company that is hiring workers into known toxic jobs that require them to use company supplied medications and oxygen to treat their “Summit Brain” needs to be shut down by the USA government. Instead, we see the USA government facilitating their toxic corporate culture for the foreseeable future with their construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This is being done with the full support of USA government law enforcement, even though working on the very high altitude Mauna Kea makes some of them sick! To build it, they need to arrest the native Hawaiians that regard Mauna Kea as their sacred temple that is being desecrated by corporate science. The main finance to start the TMT project has come from Gordon Moore, the founder of the USA based semiconductor manufacturer Intel.
”
”
Steven Magee (Magee’s Disease)
“
There is one variety of this type, however, that is more dangerous and toxic, because of the levels of power he or she can attain—namely the narcissistic leader. (This type has been around for a long time. In the Bible, Absalom was perhaps the first recorded example, but we find frequent references in ancient literature to others—Alcibiades, Cicero, and Emperor Nero, to name a few.) Almost all dictator types and tyrannical CEOs fall into this category. They generally have more ambition than the average deep narcissist and for a while can funnel this energy into work. Full of narcissistic self-confidence, they attract attention and followers. They say and do things that other people don’t dare say or do, which seems admirable and authentic. They might have a vision for some innovative product, and because they radiate such confidence, they can find others to help them realize their vision. They are experts at using people.
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”
Robert Greene (The Laws of Human Nature)
“
And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices resentment, and thereby renounces something that had been dear to his heart.”5 All true, and all urgently needed today in a nation of pent-up frustrations and grievances. Mercy is a central lesson of the Gospel. So is forgiveness. But then what happens to justice? The difficult fact about pursuing justice is this: it’s vital to a humane and well-ordered society; it’s the cornerstone of all credible law; and yet it can rarely be fully achieved. The tangle of humans’ interlocking wounds, fears, poisoned memories, and debts is too old and too vast for anyone to unravel. But enough justice—even if imperfect—can be had when it’s leavened with a measure of mercy, the free act of forgiving, and the letting go of some debts that we know others owe to us. Letting go allows others to do the same. It heals and gives peace. It breaks up and washes away the toxic ice of resentment that chokes the heart. And in doing so, it takes on a Godly irony that gives life.
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Charles J. Chaput (Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living)
“
Any movement toward wholeness begins with the acknowledgment of our own suffering, and of the suffering in the world. This doesn’t mean getting caught in a never-ending vortex of pain, melancholy, and, especially, victimhood; a new and rigid identity founded on “trauma”—or, for that matter, “healing”—can be its own kind of trap. True healing simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We acknowledge where we were wounded and, as we are able, perform an honest audit of the impacts of those injuries as they have touched both our own lives and those of others around us. This can be exceptionally difficult, for myriad understandable reasons. No matter what degree of discomfort our illusions cover over, the truth hurts, and we don’t like hurting if we can help it—even if we sense that something better could lie on the far side of the pain. As Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her searing memoir of life under Stalinism, Hope Against Hope, “It is very difficult to look life in the face.” Many of us will be ready to seek the truth only once we have concluded that the cost of not doing so is too high, or once we become sufficiently acquainted with our own ache of longing for the real. The Greek playwright Aeschylus was exquisitely on point when he had his chorus declare: Zeus has led us on to know the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth.[1] There are exceptions, but I myself have never encountered anyone who was not spurred along their path of growth and change by some setback or loss, some illness, anguish, or alienation. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how we choose to see it—life has a way of delivering the requisite suffering right to our doorstep.
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”
Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
“
When is the Denver Police Department going to start prosecuting Denver based fraudulent Frontier Airlines and its toxic employees for its illegal activities it blatantly engages in with law abiding passengers?
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Steven Magee
“
Multiple threats of arrest is how toxic police officers harass you.
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”
Steven Magee
“
People that have fully complied with toxic police officers have ended up dead.
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”
Steven Magee
“
When toxic police officers are threatening you with arrest when you have done nothing wrong, you have to think to yourself: What are they up to?
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”
Steven Magee
“
In a toxic encounter with police officers, I was threatened with arrest and jail eleven times!
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”
Steven Magee
“
When interacting with toxic police officers, you need to keep in mind that it is unlikely you are their first victim and their previous victims may have been assaulted or shown up dead.
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”
Steven Magee
“
Less than 6 percent of the NIH budget is devoted to exploring environmental effects of chemicals on humans. Chemical regulation in the United States is abysmal: the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which introduced legislation aimed at regulating the use of toxic chemicals, grandfathered in 62,000 chemicals without testing them and set the bar very low for future regulation. Chemical companies in the United States are not compelled to disclose whether the substances they work with cause immunological dysfunction. A 2016 amendment to the law means that the EPA now is required to determine whether a new chemical poses a risk to humans or the environment. But the United States continues to use chemicals and pesticides banned by Europe as known carcinogens and pollutants.
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
“
Having a bank account in the United States or China won't make any difference as a business owner but people who don't have enough money and time to travel long distances and test the system for themselves, want to believe in illusions. Many banks are actually happy to steal people's money due to their nationality, like they did with Russian people now. And this while the masses consider it to be normal. Imagine if countries stole your money every time your government did something they don't like! Actually they do, which is why your government promises one thing before being elected and then does another. The employees of these governments and big companies are like little Nazis. They will simply repeat: it's the "policy of the company" or "it's the law". Nobody cares to question laws or policies because they think smart people are the ones who obey. Well, you will get nowhere in life by obeying a system that is manipulated against you, which is why so many frustrated people, seeing others in jet planes and traveling the world, are turning to crime and prostitution. This tendency will keep increasing. Yet if I tell people to learn to use a gun, they will say that a spiritual guru would never say such things. Well, I would never trust any guru or religious person who said to me to wait until someone knocks me off with a hammer or that I must accept the misfortunes of life as an opportunity to meditate on karma. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I got in all religions where I sought answers to this problem, which means even religions have been corrupted by illusions and ignorance. They empower a very toxic demon around these lies called guilt. But this demon is kept alive with dogma.
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Dan Desmarques
“
Left now in a state of dull, cold bitterness, knowing just how close he had been to saving her, he stared, still lost in the ebbing and flowing toxic delirium of krite venom, at roiling grey clouds — but eventually hope rose again within him, bringing a recollection of the natural mutability of the sky that allowed the suggestion of truth and beauty back into his mind.
Ellaras was a jewel of a world covered by vast oceans and clear skies and the elements lent great power and mystery to her existence. If there were elemental spirits, as druid lore told, there was great hope for the world’s ultimate redemption.
That was the beauty.
Beset with conflict now at almost every turn in his waking life, Thor could normally afford little time for any lament over his world’s anguish.
Some key incidents affected him more deeply than others, however, and this incident had remained raw within for an unusually long time. Undoubtedly, it had higher meaning in delivering the awareness of truth, if not in envisioning a higher existence, as the tenth primary precept of Mindcraft asked.
Yet reliving the episode now told him that something important could yet be achieved despite the death of that unusually principled young Law Keeper. The key factor, only obvious to him now, was that the individual behind her abduction seemed more like a machine than an Ellaran.
That was the truth.
”
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Martel The Hammer (At the Rising of the Star (The Dragon Wars Book 4))
“
The cell phone video camera is revealing the toxicity of the police.
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Steven Magee
“
My policy of always recording police encounters saved me from toxic police officers in Denver International Airport.
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Steven Magee
“
Hello toxic police officer, hello 911 call for a police supervisor!
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Steven Magee
“
Police internal affairs is probably one of the most toxic jobs a person can do.
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Steven Magee
“
Don't Let The Devil Hear You Weeping by Stewart Stafford
Don't let the Devil hear you weeping,
Or darkness comes as your friend,
Saying God sent it to save you,
And be with you until the end.
Tail wrapped around you snugly,
Gripped firmly in meaty claws,
Only then get its beastly odour,
Against which there should be laws.
Dancing the inferno's fiery rim,
Spitting bile in your begging bowl,
Paper cut, a blood pact union,
To steal away your purest soul.
© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General (1645 – 1647) by Stewart Stafford
‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ – Exodus,
Nor allow legalised killing too cheaply,
Twenty shillings of blood money per witch,
A charlatan’s extortion for ‘cleansing.’
Witchcraft, the capital crime of the age,
Lawyer Hopkins, parasitising laws,
Self-appointed Witchfinder General,
A reign of terror brought to God-fearing doors.
Evildoing’s hunter was its embodiment;
A Judas purse wed brutality’s handmaiden,
With Stearne, stoked Essex witch hunt mania,
Puritanical zeal’s sadistic cruelty.
His victims were cast into dungeon pits;
Bloodied and broken in outcast desperation;
Disease helped some cheat the hangman;
The only fortune anyone deemed fair.
Extracting confessions through torture’s pain;
Their skin pricked to find Satan’s mark,
Victims, forced to run until collapse,
Sleepless starvation hastened their bleak end.
Then to the wicked ducking stool gauntlet,
Lowered into muddy ditches or icy water,
A survivor’s noose or drowned exoneration?
None met the Witchfinder’s imperious eyes.
“I, John Lowes, a minister of God,
Was martyred so. Hopkins, thou pestilent knave!
Bade me to run, held aloft by mocking hands,
Funeral rites as I dug mine own grave.”
Sensing his gaslit flames turn back on him,
Hopkins went to ground with his ill-gotten gains,
Slowly he faded, from infamous to obscure,
Scars linger on 300 unmarked graves.
Some say that Hopkins was executed as a witch,
Or faced a tubercular end in his village,
Where he is buried, no one knows or cares,
Hexed in a barren field for karmic tillage.
Rat-catcher to an imagined pestilence,
Communities, not covens, he did churn,
A toxic chalice for New World lips,
Fanning Salem’s pernicious turn.
© 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.
”
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Stewart Stafford
“
Your addiction has been your false secure base—your primary relationship. You have to give up your false idol if you want to rejoin the human race. Healing your toxic shame demands that you surrender to your powerlessness over it. This surrendering is the core of the spiritual paradox that tells us we can only win by losing. This is hard for any hard-driving American. As with most spiritual laws, it is paradoxical. To find one’s life, one must lose one’s life. This is a literal truism for shame-based people. We must give up our delusional false selves and ego defenses to find the vital and precious core of ourselves. In our neurotic shame lies our vulnerable and sensitive self. We must embrace the darkness to find the light. Hidden in the dark reservoirs of our toxic shame lives our true self.
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”
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
“
Arguably insane utility workers that blatantly harass law abiding customers is likely to become more frequent as the long term effects of biologically toxic radio frequency (RF) radiation exposures from their transmitting smart meters continues to emerge.
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Steven Magee
“
The hubbub subsided somewhat. Everyone wanted to know what Charlie Swim thought. “The problem here is that Washington politicians haven’t had the guts to impeach Soetoro. And I’ll tell you why. He’s black. They’re afraid of being called racists. If Soetoro had been white, he’d have been thrown out of office years ago. Rewriting the immigration laws; refusing to enforce the drug laws; siccing the IRS on conservatives; having his spokespeople lie to the press, lie to Congress, lie to the UN; rewriting the healthcare law all by himself; thumbing his nose at the courts; having the EPA dump on industry regardless of the costs; admitting hordes of Middle Eastern Muslims without a clue who they were. . . . Race in America—it’s a toxic poison that prevents any real discussion of the issues. It’s the monkey wrench Soetoro and his disciples have thrown into the gears that make the republic’s wheel turn. And now this! Already the liberals are screaming that if you are against martial law, you’re a racist; if anyone calls me a racist, he’s going to be spitting teeth.
”
”
Stephen Coonts (Liberty's Last Stand (Tommy Carmellini #7))
“
In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency’s database revealed Koch Industries to be the number one producer of toxic waste in the country. Producing 950 million pounds of toxic waste, it topped the list of 8,000 companies required by law to account for their handling of 650 toxic and carcinogenic chemicals spun off by industrial processes.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
“
Intuitive toxicology is the term that Slovic uses for the way most people assess the risk of chemicals. His research reveals that this approach is distinct from the methods used by toxicologists, and that it tends to produce different results. For toxicologists, “the dose makes the poison.” Any substance can be toxic in excess. Water, for instance, is lethal to humans in very high doses, and overhydration killed a runner in the 2002 Boston Marathon. But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful. In exploring this thinking, Slovic suggests that people who are not toxicologists may apply a “law of contagion” to toxicity. Just as brief exposure to a microscopic virus can result in lifelong disease, we assume that exposure to any amount of a harmful chemical will permanently contaminate our bodies. “Being contaminated,” Slovic observes, “clearly has an all-or-none quality to it—like being alive or pregnant.” Fear of contamination rests on the belief, widespread in our culture as in others, that something can impart its essence to us on contact. We are forever polluted, as we see it, by contact with a pollutant. And the pollutants we have come to fear most are the products of our own hands. Though toxicologists tend to disagree with this, many people regard natural chemicals as inherently less harmful than man-made chemicals. We seem to believe, against all evidence, that nature is entirely benevolent.
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Eula Biss (On Immunity: An Inoculation)
“
One might think that the exposure of unsanitary conditions and animal cruelty in the corporate farming and food-processing industries would provoke lawmakers to punish the perpetrators and tighten laws protecting the safety of our food supply. But no, in several states they have instead directed their fury against the citizen-activists who exposed the wrongdoing by levying heavy penalties against the surreptitious photographing of inhumane outrages. 6 Republican legislators in North Carolina introduced a bill to make it a felony to disclose the chemicals (some of which are toxic to humans and animals) employed in fracking for natural gas. The bill also authorized drilling companies to oblige emergency responders cleaning up chemical spills to sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to disclose the names of the chemicals in their proprietary stew to the public—or their toxicity.
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Mike Lofgren (The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government)
“
In each of these examples, the determining factor between success and failure is the amount of time that passes between when the problem emerges and when those involved find a way to honestly and respectfully resolve it. What we’re suggesting is that the greatest damage to your relationship with your in-laws is not due to their occasional interference. It’s the toxic emotions and dysfunctional behavior that occurs in the absence of a forthright conversation that causes the greatest damage.
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Kerry Patterson (Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High)
“
Other laws were explicitly created to ensure that Israel remained a sovereign Jewish refuge, chief among them the Law of Return, guaranteeing Jews the automatic right to immigrate and become Israeli citizens, as well as anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent, and their spouses. There was no such law for Palestinians. Yet the more divisive Israeli politics became, and the more Arab politicians became targets of toxic, right-wing discourse, the more Arab voters were shaken out of their apathy.
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Isabel Kershner (The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul)
“
environmental racism. For the purposes here, I define environmental racism using Chavis’s definition: Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policymaking. It is racial discrimination in the enforcement of regulations and laws. It is racial discrimination in the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the siting of polluting industries. It is racial discrimination in the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of positions and pollutants in communities of color. And, it is racial discrimination in the history of excluding people of color from the mainstream environmental groups, decision making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies. (Chavis 1999, 4) Environmental racism can be divided into three categories: procedural, geographic, and social equity/inequity. Procedural equity/inequity refers to policies and procedures, regulations, laws, and enforcement. Geographic equity/inequity includes siting and sanctioning of polluting industries. Social equity/inequity covers the racial, ethnic, and cultural aspects of targeted communities. Separately, these issues can be examined to tell the stories of communities that have been sickened by polluting industries, but when analyzed together, they tell a more nuanced story of the institutionalized behavior that is known as environmental racism.
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Myrriah Gómez (Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos)
“
only is the FDA corrupt from top to bottom, a lot of the consumer chemicals that that you come into contact with everyday fall not under the FDA but the EPA---and have little to no oversight. Since the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) became law in 1976, the number of chemicals in commercial products has increased from 60,000 to 80,000, yet the EPA has required testing on only 200 and restricted
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J. Micha-el Thomas Hays (Rise of the New World Order: The Culling of Man)
“
People do not get to choose their parents or siblings, or even their coworkers, in most cases. But I have no doubt that those very parents, or grandparents, or stepparents, or in-laws who behave in toxic and invalidating ways can put on a hell of a show for other people
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Ramani S. Durvasula ("Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility)
“
You begin to find comfort in simple and essential stuff as your soul expands, but you create apathy for a repetitive career, a toxic relationship, fake human relationships, etc. I don't suggest you give up your simple life in order to awaken your spirit. It's nice to have healthy relationships and love-filled interactions with others, but you may find yourself challenging other issues about your identity, relationships and laws created by society at the beginning of soul awakening. You find yourself in a bond with nature When you felt alive in the vicinity of nature and felt grateful for seeing the landscapes, plants, wildlife, stars, mountains, etc., you may have developed a rare and precious connection with nature. It is no wonder that knowledge has been raised by those who find peace in existence. Such people know their priorities in life and are grateful to God for creating this beautiful world. You may also become more conscious of the rights of climate and animals. You might want to plant trees and live in a place to breathe in the fresh air.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
“
Alienation is inevitable when our inner sense of value becomes status-driven, hinging on externally imposed standards of competitive achievement and acquisition, and a highly conditional acceptance — I should say "acceptability" — in others' eyes. With the erosion of the middle class in recent decades, people who judged themselves in terms of wordly success have sustained a perceived loss of worth.
The promise of the middle-class dream has largely evaporated, to the distress and deep anger of many. But even people perched atop the economic pyramid can experience a devaluation of self, for the simple reason that materialistic values run counter to the need for meaning, for purpose beyond self-serving endeavors.
There are no moral fingers to wag here. Objectively, it is the case that centering on the self's evanescent desires to the exclusion of communal needs results in a diminished connection to our deepest selves, which is to say the parts of us that generate and sustain true well-being. Whatever "wins" our personality can rack up, whatever momentary sense of security we gain through our various identities, however much we burnish our image or self-image with material gains — these are a flimsy replacement for the rewards (and challenges) of being alive to one's humanity.
An investor dabbling daily in millions told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg, "I feel like I'm wasting my life. When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point on my return? My work feels totally meaningless." That loss of meaning, Duhigg says, afflicts "even professionals given to lofty self-images, like those in medicine and law." Why would this be? the author wondered. The answer: "Oppresive hours, political infighting, increased competition sparked by globalization, an 'always-on culture' bred by the internet — but also something that's hard for these professionals to put their finger on, an underlying sense that their work isn't worth the grueling effort they're putting into it."
It's simple economics, really: artificial inflation (of self-concept, of identity, of material ambition) is bound to lead to a downturn or even a crash when the bubble inevitable burts.
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Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
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You have the legal right to a safe workplace.
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Steven Magee (Toxic Altitude)
“
Combat in a war zone is always a toxic environment. Bourke writes that the main characteristic of war is not dying but killing other people lawfully. (From Nailed!, p. 16)
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J Bourke
“
Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community.
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J.C. Herz (Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness)
“
Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community. At the end of his two-month woodland retreat, Amundson realized two things. The first was that it doesn’t matter how much of a firebreather you are if you can’t cut any slack to the important people in your life. The second was that all his macho law-and-order jobs had defined him, and if he wanted to stop being That Guy, he couldn’t work that kind of job.
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J.C. Herz (Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness)
“
My research into various frauds also revealed the toxicity of the police and their deceitful internal affairs system.
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Steven Magee
“
I’ve heard people with homeland defense say, ‘Oh, we keep a good control on whatever genes are synthesized commercially, blah blah blah.’ ” Pincus takes no comfort there. He related another story. “For therapeutic reasons, we wanted to synthesize a gene that encoded the toxic part of ricin, that would be expressed—i.e., produced—in human cells. This should have set off a lot of red flags if anyone was looking for that kind of thing. But, man, we ordered it, and we had the gene two weeks later. So if you think the Select Agent list protects us from sophisticated terrorists …” I’ll finish the sentence for him. It’s a load of horse spleen.
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Mary Roach (Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law)
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Power companies are just toxic! The government backs them up with the numerous laws they break. Nothing has changed since the 1970's, the same corrupt government system is in place.
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Steven Magee
“
The formula was simple. It was based on one that a judge named Learned Hand—his actual given name—had written in a legal opinion, probably unaware what the implications were. The food industry had run with it. Defects in food—bacterial infections, rot, mold, cross-contamination with allergens, exposure to toxic substances, and everything else that could go wrong—were discovered by manufacturers long before the general public knew. The manufacturer then had a decision to make: do we recall the food or not? Actuaries worked out death tables that predicted how many people would die or become ill because of the defect. They could determine how much money the average person who bought the product earned per year: that person’s earning capacity. Adding up the earning capacity of everyone who could potentially die or get sick because of the defect gave them an estimate of how much settlements would cost. Under the law, a consumer’s value equaled the amount of money that person could have earned in a lifetime, had he or she lived. If the calculation of damages in all the wrongful death lawsuits was greater than the cost of a recall, the manufacturer would recall the product. If the settlements would cost the company less than the recall, then they just ignored the defect. Damages > Profit = Recall
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Victor Methos (An Invisible Client)
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I research the toxicity of many things and the police are one of the biggest toxins I have identified.
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Steven Magee
“
Mr Toxic Police Officer, please excuse me while I make a 911 call for a police supervisor to attend.
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Steven Magee
“
I love it when toxic police officers inadvertently harass a police corruption researcher!
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Steven Magee
“
Discovery for police corruption researchers happens when they inadvertently encounter toxic police officers.
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Steven Magee
“
Police internal affairs is nothing more than a bunch of jerks covering up for toxic police officers.
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Steven Magee
“
I have had a toxic encounter with a police officer that I later discovered had killed a person.
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Steven Magee
“
I have had a toxic encounter with police officers and later discovered that a person with a similar experience showed up dead!
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Steven Magee
“
Through toxic experiences, I developed an extreme dislike of police officers.
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Steven Magee
“
For the twenty-first-century economic story, the state’s role must be rethought. Put it this way: in the film of the play, the state should be aiming all-out to win Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars—starring as the economic partner that supports the household, the commons and the market alike. First, by providing public goods—ranging from public education and healthcare to roads and street lighting—that deliver for all, not just for those who can pay, so enabling a society and its economy to thrive. Second, by supporting the core caring role of the household, such as with maternal and paternal leave policies that empower both parents, investment in early-years education and care support for seniors. Third, by unleashing the dynamism of the commons, with laws and institutions that enable their collaborative potential and protect them from encroachment. Fourth, by harnessing the power of the market by embedding it in institutions and regulations that promote the common good—from banning toxic pollutants and insider trading to protecting biodiversity and workers’ rights.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
“
It has been my experience that there are some really toxic police officers.
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Steven Magee
“
Most of my interactions with law enforcement have been toxic.
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Steven Magee
“
In high altitude astronomy, it is time for the old guard to be replaced with new blood that fully understands the law, health and safety, and the full range of toxicity that astronomical observatories present to their workers.
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Steven Magee
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I hope that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have communicated to Hawaii law enforcement the wide range of health and safety issues that will arise by stationing sea level adapted law enforcement officers at the 13,796 feet high biologically toxic summit of Mauna Kea.
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Steven Magee
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Now that the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) have shut down, the law states they should stay closed to prevent astronomers from willfully damaging their summit workers health.
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Steven Magee
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Parents are responsible for the development of our personal value. Peck shares a basic law of child development: “Wherever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to the deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image.”7 If we start life with a deep sense of self-doubt due to poor parenting, we either become underachievers or overachievers. If we are the overachiever, which I am, we achieve in some way under the guise that, if I achieve enough, then maybe I will become important to my parents; maybe they will see me and validate my worth. I can say in my case, not my brother’s, that the more I have succeeded, the more my parents have loathed me. Yet, I have heard both of my parents say, “I must have done something right because you and your brother are both successful.” It’s surreal to me that instead of seeing our accomplishments for what they are—ways to secure their love or establish our independence from them—they take personal parenting credit for our accomplishments.
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Sherrie Campbell (But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath)
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When managing toxic or narcissistic in-laws, the usual toxic-relationship rules apply. However, you may need to manage these more delicately, in a way that is simultaneously self-preserving and does not step on the toes of the relationship your in-law has with his or her child or your own child.
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Ramani S. Durvasula ("Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility)
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Toxic people get their power when there are no other witnesses to acknowledge your experience—if you draw together with a partner or other family members, the damage wrought by toxic in-laws can be managed.
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Ramani S. Durvasula ("Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility)
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I make this promise to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project atop Mauna Kea: I will do everything within the law to shut your toxic enterprise down.
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Steven Magee
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Good. So go and make your dal, sabzi, roti fresh and use a small utensil. That way you will save your fuel and LPG cost. Okay? Also, understand the reason why you’ve got dimples (cellulite) in the wrong places. You didn’t just get fat over the last few years because of excessive calories or limited exercise. It’s about fuel efficiency. You’ve consumed too many calories and received very little nutrients in return, forcing such a deprived state in your body that the body fat is also turning toxic, and instead of evenly spreading out under your skin, it has developed stretch marks, cellulite and khaddas. It’s like using a ten-person ka capacity wala kadai and making only one person’s sabzi in it. Waste hua na? So much time and fuel to heat the kadai aur mila kya? Sabzi (and that too overcooked) only for one person. Getting it?’ ‘Kind of.’ ‘So that’s why I’m telling you to eat a wholesome meal — roti, sabzi, dal — by 6-6.30 p.m., when all you eat is junk. Every calorie you eat will be worth the nutrients.’ ‘This variety is all junk or what? Even if I make it at home?’ ‘You really need me to answer that? Yes, Hinaben, make it more than once, max twice a week, and it’s junk. Too little nutrients too many calories. One person’s sabzi in a ten-people ka kadai.’ ‘Okay, can I eat moong dhokli? I’ll eat it with sabzi separate. It’s like dal dhokli. So the roti I will mix in moong ka dal. My mother-in-law loves it and so does my son. So
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Rujuta Diwekar (Women and the weight loss tamasha)
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The last thing you want when you are willfully damaging your workers health is for your biologically toxic workplace to fill up with law enforcement officers!
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Steven Magee
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I am looking forward to seeing a large number of sea level adapted law enforcement officers atop the 13,796 feet high summit of Mauna Kea, as they will discover how biologically toxic it really is!
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Steven Magee
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When interacting with a police officer, I am aware that I am in the presence of a radiation exposed person that may be showing the long term adverse effects of those toxic exposures.
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Steven Magee
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I am wondering why the known biologically toxic 1.4 billion dollar Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea has not been shut down by OSHA, as it is legally required under USA law to prevent the willful damage of workers health.
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Steven Magee