Transport Strike Quotes

Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the thousands of years in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance. Thus Europeans enslaved other Europeans, just as Asians enslaved other Asians and Africans enslaved other Africans, while Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave" derived from the word for Slavs, who were enslaved by fellow Europeans for centuries before Africans began to be brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere. Africans were not singled out by a race for ownership by Europeans, they were resorted to after the rise of nation-states with armies and navies in other parts of the world which reduced the number of places that could be raided for slaves without great costs and risks. Slave-raiding continued in Africa, primarily by Africans enslaving other Africans and then, in West Africa, selling some of their slaves to whites to take to the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the growing range of ships and the growing wealth of nations eventually made economically feasible the transportation of vast numbers of slaves from one continent to another, creating racial differences between the enslaved and their owners as a dominant pattern in the Western Hemisphere. Such a pattern was by no means limited to Europeans owning non-Europeans, however. There were many examples of the reverse, quite aside from vast regions of the earth where neither the slaves nor their owners were either black or white.

A few days earlier, Chess and Thomas had driven to Spokane for a cheap hamburger. They walked in downtown Spokane and stumbled onto a drunk couple arguing. "Get the fuck away from me!" the drunk woman yelled at her drunk husband, who squeezed his hand into a fist like he meant to hit her. Thomas and Chess flinched, then froze, transported back to all of those drunken arguments they'd witnessed and survived. The drunk couple in downtown Spokane pulled at each other's clothes and hearts, but they were white people. Chess and Thomas knew that white people hurt each other, too. Chess knew that white people felt pain just like Indians, Nerve endings, messages to the brain, reflexes. The doctor swung hammer against knee, and the world collapsed. "You fucker!" the white woman yelled at her husband, who opened his hands and held them out to his wife. An offering. That hand would not strike her. He pleaded with his wife until she fell back into his arms. That white woman and man held each other while Chess and Thomas watched. A hundred strangers walked by and never noticed any of it. After that, Chess and Thomas had sat in the van in a downtown parking lot. Thomas began to weep, deep ragged tears that rose along his rib cage, filled his mouth and nose, and exploded out.

On vacation you can be anyone you want Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.
In your day-to-day life, maybe you can’t even bob your head to the radio without being embarrassed, but on the right twinkly-light-strung patio, with the right steel drum band, you’ll find yourself whirling and twirling with the best of them. On vacation, your hair changes. The water is different, maybe the shampoo. Maybe you don’t bother to wash your hair at all, or brush it, because the salty ocean water curls it up in a way you love. You think, Maybe I could do this at home too. Maybe I could be this person who doesn’t brush her hair, who doesn’t mind being sweaty or having sand in all her crevices. On vacation, you strike up conversations with strangers, and forget that there are any stakes. If it turns out impossibly awkward, who cares? You’ll never see them again!

It was in that year when the fashion in cruelty demanded not only the crucifixion of peasant children, but a similar fate for their household animals, that I first met Lucifer and was transported into Hell; for the Prince of Darkness wished to strike a bargain with me.

Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

In Florida we got to hang out with some of America’s finest at Eglin Air Force Base. The army Rangers there had been clearing a section of bush for doing operations and had encountered a huge eastern diamondback rattlesnake. Diamondbacks grow to be the largest rattlers anyway, but this one was big for another reason: She was pregnant. Not long after the Rangers’ reptile handlers had transported her back to a holding facility, she gave birth. We watched as the newborn rattlers worked their way out, lay still for a short moment, and then immediately began striking at everything and anything nearby. Although it was a great defense mechanism, in case a predator was about to eat them, it appeared pretty comical. Bite, bite, bite, strike, strike, strike. Then they would curl up and hide for a while. Soon enough it was back on the offensive: bite, strike, bite. They were all fang, and trying to look tough. An interesting way to greet the world. Steve and I scooped up the baby rattlesnakes and held them until they went through their strike phase. We made sure to set them down before they went back to their frenzied biting. “What happens if you’re bitten by a venomous snake while you are breastfeeding?” Steve asked. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I’d probably have to stop breastfeeding, right?” “Just be sure not to get bitten,” Steve said. “Deal,” I said. I scooped up a little wet rattler, talked to the camera, then set the snake back down. Boing, boing, boing went the baby rattler, jumping madly around, trying to bite everything. Even the Rangers laughed. Once the Rangers had completed their training mission, all the dangerous wildlife they collected (including the rattlers) would go right back where they came from. We were very proud to have worked with some of America’s heroes.

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf of Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in the having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf on Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in that having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

Historian Francis Russell noted that inadequate working conditions and rising prices both frightened and galvanized workers. “Wherever one turned, in industry or transportation or public service, there seemed to be a strike or threatened strike,” he said. “To add to the malaise, prices, instead of falling, continued to rise. The value of the 1914 dollar had dropped to only forty-five cents. Food costs had gone up 84 percent, clothes, 114 percent. For the average American family, the cost of living was double what it had been five years earlier, and income had lagged behind. Professional classes, from clergymen and professors to clerks, state and city employees, firemen and police, found themselves worse off than at any time since the Civil War.

We direct vehicular contempt aimlessly, striking at random, flailing horsepower like peacock's tails and instantly become defensive when this violence is named.

While on Jabba’s barge, the astromech droid had penetrated the Hutt’s data system, and alerted the goons who’d remained in Jabba’s palace that the Imperials were coming for them with death warrants. The Imperial ships could hardly ignore the flotilla of smuggler ships, corsair gunboats, and slave transports that lifted off from the Hutt’s compound en masse; and in the battle that followed, they failed to notice the single X-wing starfighter and Corellian freighter that rose away from Tatooine by a more discreet route.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regularly points to traffic deathse as the number one cause of unintentional injury death for all Americans aged 4 through 34.2 This isn’t new. I found a 2002 paper saying that “in the US, injury, both intentional and unintentional, is the leading cause of death from age 1 to age 45. Because it so disproportionately strikes the young, it is also the leading cause of lost years prior to age 75, more than either cancer or heart disease. Motor vehicle injury is the largest single component of these losses.”3 I also found a 1983 paper lamenting that “automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for all persons between the ages of six months and age 47.”4 And a 1965 paper warned us that “traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among all persons from age 5 to 31!”5 The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that each traffic death equates to an average of 30 lost years of life expectancy.6 With 1.35 million road deaths worldwide each year, more than 2 percent of all deaths from all causes, this adds up to 40 million years of life lost annually on our streets.f WHO also estimates that for every road death, there are at least 10 to 15 people hospitalized due to road crashes.7 This means 13 million to 20 million hospitalizations and millions more that probably should’ve gone to the hospital.

Nevertheless, with respect to cost development, there is a striking similarity between these and other major projects: there is a tendency towards a significant underestimation of costs during project appraisal. This is also the conclusion we draw when we review data from a large number of major transport infrastructure projects, and from other types of project as well.

She prays here, intercedes there, and brings hope, comfort, and a zest for life with her wherever she goes. And when, exhausted, she is all alone again in the evening, the only purpose of her tiny television is to link her up once more with the other children for whom she had no time that day. The clichés that politicians spout remind her how political prisoners are forced to endure the despotism of these men, and how the populace is turned into beasts of burden. Perversely violent movies make her ponder the people upon whom these crimes are inflicted, and in her nightly prayers she has a word or two for God about perversion, violence, and their innumerable victims—prostitutes and delinquents, her other brood, who have been dumped into the street and for whom her heart bleeds in compassion. Even in her delayed and furtive sleep, Auntie Roz is never cut off from her thousands of children: In her dreams she fights the crooked cops who, on every corner and for all to see, rip off her poor little public transportation drivers and street vendors and get away with it! She fights and fights, surrounded by angels with swords of light, striking the evildoers and liberating the virtuous, healing some and feeding others, until she wakes up, always with a start. And once she’s up, the first prayer is a new surge of inspiration to serve her youthful thousands. For them, Auntie Roz imagines a better world made up of small certainties, a world just livable enough for all of them as they wait for the Eden that’s far too long in coming and impossible to foresee honestly, at the center of a world that’s worse than hell and not even truthful enough to call itself by that name. With

It is hardly surprising that the initial stage of most mountain journeys involves laborious uphill hiking. Coming at a time when the typical hiker is out of shape, unacclimated, and transporting the heaviest load of the entire trip, the seemingly endless hillsides can elicit rumblings from even the hardiest backpackers. The first section of the High Route qualifies as a splendid example of such unremitting travel, for the hiker must toil up 6,000 feet to the first major pass, a disheartening prospect. Weathered dead pine at timberline Optimistic hikers who seek the brighter side of unpleasant situations, however, will quickly discover mitigating factors on this interminable slope. The well-manicured trail zigzags up the north wall of Kings Canyon with such a gentle gradient that the traveler can slip into a rhythmic pace where the miles pass far more quickly than would be possible on a steeper, rockier path. Thus freed from scrutinizing the terrain immediately ahead, the hiker can better appreciate the two striking formations on the opposite side of the canyon. Directly across the way towers the enormous facade of Grand Sentinel, rising 3,500 feet above the meadows lining the valley floor. Several miles to the east lies the sculpted oddity known as the Sphinx, a delicate pinnacle capping a sweeping apron of granite. These two landmarks, visible for much of the ascent to the Monarch Divide, offer travelers a convenient means of gauging their progress; for instance, when one is finally level with the top of the Sphinx, the upward journey is two-thirds complete. Hikers able to identify common Sierra trees

As the fierce battle raged on between Prince Assad and the soldiers, the small puddle nestled amidst the underbrush continued to mirror the night sky and the radiant moon. Its surface rippled gently, distorting the celestial reflection and adding an entrancing aura to the scene. Within the puddle's depths, a bright, luminescent orb seemed suspended in the water's embrace, mirroring the moon's radiance. Amidst the enchanting dance of ripples in the puddle, Dilaram, Princess Mehjabeen's loyal companion emerged, took a deep breath, and made a daring decision. She knew the danger that Prince Assad faced in the relentless battle with the soldiers, and her love and loyalty to the princess drove her to act. With her heart pounding, Dilaram raised her delicate hands and began whispering an incantation, her words imbued with ancient magic. Dilaram's incantation, born from the depths of her love and loyalty to Princess Mehjabeen, was a powerful spell that wove together the mystical forces of Tilsim Hoshruba. It was an incantation that had been passed down through generations of enchantresses, carefully guarded and used only in the direst of circumstances. The incantation itself was a blend of ancient words and intricate hand movements, a delicate dance of both spoken and unspoken magic. As Dilaram whispered the words and traced the patterns in the air, the spell took form: "By the moon's radiant light, by the heart's unwavering might, In the name of love, in the name of fate, Create for him an unseen gate." As Dilaram continued her chant, the magic came to life. It created a shimmering tunnel amidst the swampy underbrush. Prince Assad, still embroiled in combat, continued to face the soldiers with unwavering determination. His every strike was a testament to his prowess as a skilled warrior. Dilaram's incantation worked like a silent, invisible wind. It pulled Prince Assad away from the battlefield and into the concealed tunnel she had created. The soldiers, bewildered by his sudden disappearance, exchanged confused glances, their swords raised and ready. Within the concealed tunnel, Prince Assad was transported to safety, away from the immediate danger of the soldiers' blades. As he stepped into this mystical passage, the world around him shifted, and he found himself hidden from view. Dilaram's work was not done yet. Her incantation had created the gate, and now she whispered another set of words: "Through the veil of night, beyond the soldiers' sight, Guide him to where he'll be free, under the moon's decree." This incantation was designed to lead Prince Assad to a safe location, away from the soldiers' pursuit. It was as if the night itself had become his protector, guiding him to a place where he could regroup and remain hidden. With her final words, the portal shimmered and then vanished, leaving no trace of its existence. Dilaram, her heart heavy with concern for Prince Assad, disappeared inside the puddle, from where she had initiated the spell. She knew that the fate of both Prince Assad and Princess Mehjabeen hung in the balance, and the path they would choose was a destiny intertwined with the enigmatic realm of Tilsim Hoshruba.

It’s Thanksgiving, and you’ve eaten with porcine abandon. Your bloodstream is teeming with amino acids, fatty acids, glucose. It’s far more than you need to power you over to the couch in a postprandial daze. What does your body do with the excess? This is crucial to understand because, basically, the process gets reversed when you’re later sprinting for your life. To answer this question, it’s time we talked finances, the works—savings accounts, change for a dollar, stocks and bonds, negative amortization of interest rates, shaking coins out of piggy banks—because the process of transporting energy through the body bears some striking similarities to the movement of money. It is rare today for the grotesquely wealthy to walk around with their fortunes in their pockets, or to hoard their wealth as cash stuffed inside mattresses. Instead, surplus wealth is stored elsewhere, in forms more complex than cash: mutual funds, tax-free government bonds, Swiss bank accounts. In the same way, surplus energy is not kept in the body’s form of cash—circulating amino acids, glucose, and fatty acids—but stored in more complex forms. Enzymes in fat cells can combine fatty acids and glycerol to form triglycerides (table). Accumulate enough of these in the fat cells and you grow plump. Meanwhile, your cells can stick series of glucose molecules together. These long chains, sometimes thousands of glucose molecules long, are called glycogen. Most glycogen formation occurs in your muscles and liver. Similarly, enzymes in cells throughout the body can combine long strings of amino acids, forming them into proteins. The hormone that stimulates the transport and storage of these building blocks into target cells is insulin. Insulin is this optimistic hormone that plans for your metabolic future. Eat

Cholesterol is the body’s equivalent of duct tape. It’s one of the most versatile nutrients our cells have and they use it for solving all sorts of problems. And it’s more than just a problem-solver; it’s also a building block: • It enables cell division. The rapidly dividing cells in our intestinal tract, skin, and bone marrow need it more than most other kinds of cells in our bodies. • It enables cell transport and communication. Cells need cholesterol to create structures called “lipid rafts” that are essential to responding to hormones and to moving large molecules into the cell, out of the cell, and from place to place within the cell. • It’s the precursor for vitamin D, which forms when ultraviolet light rays strike cholesterol in the skin. Vitamin D helps our bodies absorb calcium. • It provides waterproofing for our skin and other boundary layers within our bodies. • It helps our brains and nerve cells conduct electricity. The brain is 15 percent cholesterol by dry weight, a higher proportion than any other organ in our bodies. • It’s the precursor to numerous hormones, called steroid hormones. These include the well-known sex hormones testosterone, estrogen, and cortisol—which give us energy. And there are dozens more, including the supplements many people buy for health and performance enhancement, such as DHEA and adrenal extracts. Doctors know all this, but the

Jesus had set out with the Twelve, but they were gradually joined by an ever-increasing crowd of pilgrims. Matthew and Mark tell us that as he was leaving Jericho there was already “a great multitude” following Jesus (Mt 20:29; Mk 10:46). An incident occurring on this final stretch of the journey increases the expectation of the one who is to come and focuses the wayfarers’ attention upon Jesus in an altogether new way. Along the path sits a blind beggar, Bartimaeus. Having discovered that Jesus is among the pilgrims, he cries out incessantly: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Mk 10:47). People try to calm him down, but it is useless, and finally Jesus calls him over. To his plea, “Master, let me receive my sight”, Jesus replies, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” Bartimaeus could see again, “and he followed [Jesus] on the way” (Mk 10:48-52). Now that he could see, he became a fellow pilgrim on the way to Jerusalem. The Davidic theme and the accompanying Messianic hope now spread to the crowd: Was it possible that this Jesus, with whom they were walking, might actually be the new David for whom they were waiting? As he made his entrance into the Holy City, had the hour come when he would reestablish the Davidic kingdom? The preparations that Jesus makes with his disciples reinforce this hope. Jesus comes from Bethphage and Bethany to the Mount of Olives, the place from which the Messiah was expected to enter. He sends two disciples ahead of him, telling them that they will find a tethered donkey, a young animal on which no one has yet sat. They are to untie it and bring it to him. Should anyone ask by what authority they do so, they are to say: “The Lord has need of it” (Mk 11:3; Lk 19:31). The disciples find the donkey. As anticipated, they are asked by what right they act; they give the response they were told to give—and they are allowed to carry out their mission. So Jesus rides on a borrowed donkey into the city and, soon afterward, has the animal returned to its owner. To today’s reader, this may all seem fairly harmless, but for the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus it is full of mysterious allusions. The theme of the kingdom and its promises is ever-present. Jesus claims the right of kings, known throughout antiquity, to requisition modes of transport (cf. Pesch, Markusevangelium II, p. 180). The use of an animal on which no one had yet sat is a further pointer to the right of kings. Most striking, though, are the Old Testament allusions that give a deeper meaning to the whole episode.

But what was always striking in her, like something unexpected, was the look in her eyes - meek, calm and truthful - and especially her smile which always transported Levin into a magic world where he felt softened and moved to tenderness, as he could remember himself being on rare days in his early childhood.

Most people associate the Nazis with book burning. Everyone has seen on television or the Internet the Dantesque images of students throwing hundreds of books into the fire in the streets and squares of German cities in the 1930s. True funeral pyres of Western civilization, they were a barbaric prelude to the burning of human beings, exactly as the German poet Heinrich Heine described in a visionary way. Much less well-known is the meticulous looting carried out by the Nazis in libraries throughout Europe. Prior to my conversation with Albert, I had heard something about it, but was unaware of both the reasons why this massive theft had taken place or of its size. While the theft of a work of art is usually done out of artistic passion or simple greed, what could have driven the Nazis to transport tons of books in train wagons across Europe? And it was not a selective exercise, no—the books were taken in bulk without any sorting. That is, they were removed without prior knowledge of their value. One particularly striking fact explains the Nazi regime’s interest in Jewish books. According to one of its most influential ideologues, Alfred Rosenberg, it was important for future generations to know the enemy after their final defeat. That is why public and private Jewish libraries were ransacked throughout Europe to fill the shelves of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. In the eyes and most delirious dreams of the Nazis, it was a research institute dedicated to studying a people that was doomed to extinction.

And yet there were men—and she knew it—who were able to obtain transportation whenever they wished, as by a mystic secret, as by the grace of some power which one was not to question or explain. They were the men whose dealings with Cuffy Meigs were regarded by people as that unknowable of mystic creeds which smites the observer for the sin of looking, so people kept their eyes closed, dreading, not ignorance, but knowledge. She knew that deals were made whereby those men sold a commodity known as “transportation pull”—a term which all understood, but none would dare define. She knew that these were the men of the emergency specials, the men who could cancel her scheduled trains and send them to any random spot of the continent which they chose to strike with their voodoo stamp, the stamp superseding contract, property, justice, reason and lives, the stamp stating that “the public welfare” required the immediate salvation of that spot. These were the men who sent trains to the relief of the Smather Brothers and their grapefruit in Arizona—to the relief of a factory in Florida engaged in the production of pin-ball machines—to the relief of a horse farm in Kentucky—to the relief of Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel.

She laughed, swinging her dark curtain of hair over a shoulder. “The Cauldron is not for transporting grunt armies. It is for remaking worlds. It is for bringing down this hideous wall and reclaiming what we were.” I merely crossed my legs. “I’d think that with an army of ten thousand you wouldn’t need any magical objects to do your dirty work.” “Our army is ten times that, girl,” Brannagh sneered. “And twice that number if you count our allies in Vallahan, Montesere, and Rask.” Two hundred thousand. Mother save us. “You’ve certainly been busy all these years.” I surveyed them, utterly nonplussed. “Why not strike when Amarantha had the island?” “The king had not yet found the Cauldron, despite years of searching. It served his purposes to let her be an experiment for how we might break these people. And served as good motivation for our allies on the continent to join us, knowing what would await them.” I finished off my apple and chucked the core into the woods.

Israel was ahead of the curve, seemingly able to bring the disease under control while others could not. It was then that I made a cardinal mistake. Responding to public pressure, the government lifted restrictions on public gatherings, restaurants, bars, eateries, large parks, swimming pools, and public transportation too quickly. To make matters worse, I gave a press conference in which I thanked Israel’s citizens for their cooperation and then added, “We want to help the economy and ease your lives, to make it possible for you to get out, return to normalcy. Go get a cup of coffee, a glass of beer, have fun.”3 The public did just that and the infection rate soon began to rise again. “Prime Minister, are we out of it?” I was asked by my staff. “Of course not,” I answered. “As long as there’s even one infected person around, the disease will reappear and again spread exponentially.” “So what should we do?” “You ever play an accordion?” I asked. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll open up and close down the country, depending on the infection rate and our hospitals’ ability to handle the severely ill, until we can get this damn thing under control.” The “accordion policy” was an attempt to strike a balance between keeping the hospitals from crashing and keeping businesses from collapsing. We shelled out billions of shekels to help small businesses, employers, and laid-off workers. This largesse was frowned upon by those who had previously supported my tight fiscal policies. Two prominent officials in the Finance Ministry unabashedly briefed reporters against the government’s economic aid policy. “Prime Minister Netanyahu is working against Finance Minister Netanyahu,” carped my critics. Not quite. Unlike in previous economic crises, the world was awash with cheap credit. The cost of an economic collapse from a general health breakdown would be far greater than the interest payments we would have to make to keep business alive.

Horizontal expertise paints on a far-reaching canvas. Say that you are an expert known worldwide for helping CEOs manage change in disruptive environments. Your expertise doesn’t come from understanding a vertical industry, like mining or media or consumer electronics or transportation. You just need to be sufficiently sharp to learn enough about a given industry to know how to apply your expertise in a given setting. In effect, you can work with any viable CEO candidate who wants to learn — regardless of the industry — as long as the primary challenges are defined horizontally, such as navigating deep change in the middle of disruption. Today you’re working with C-level executives at Samsung after their phones are banned on all airline flights, but next month you might be working with an executive in the hospitality industry facing a hotel worker strike. Or health insurance executives navigating an uncertain landscape that can never really see farther than two years. Each of these engagements is interesting because you have to apply your expertise to a new setting. But as much as you are learning, you’re taking two steps back for every three steps forward because much of what you learn with each new engagement is just the bare necessity in order to even be relevant. It’s interesting but challenging. Thrilling but exhausting. Engaging but distracting. There are cases, of course, where new clients regard your broad expertise as a significant selling point. They like that you can apply consumer insights to a professional B2B setting, or that you can help apply change management to consumer engagement. The first advantage of horizontal expertise, then, is how the application of expertise to many verticals always keeps the expert engaged and learning.

Loss of Proteostasis: Inside a cell, proteins run the show. They transport materials, send signals, switch processes on and off, and provide structural support. But proteins become less effective over time, so the body recycles them. Unfortunately, as we age, we can lose this ability. The trash collector goes on strike and we suffer a toxic buildup of proteins that can, for example, lead to diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Von Thünen’s abstract principles had strikingly concrete geographical consequences. A series of concentric agricultural zones would form around the town, each of which would support radically different farming activities. Nearest the town would be a zone producing crops so heavy, bulky, or perishable that no farmer living farther away could afford to ship them to market. Orchards, vegetable gardens, and dairies would dominate this first zone and raise the price of land—its “rent”—so high that less valuable crops would not be profitable there. Farther out, landowners in the second zone would devote themselves to intensive forestry, supplying the town with lumber and fuel. Beyond the forest, farmers would practice ever more extensive forms of agriculture, raising grain crops on lands where rents fell—along with labor and capital investment—the farther out from town one went. This was the zone of wheat farming. Finally, distance from the city would raise transport costs so high that no grain crop could pay for its movement to market. Beyond that point, landowners would use their property for raising cattle and other livestock, thereby creating a zone of even more extensive land use, with still lower inputs of labor and capital. Land rents would steadily fall as one moved out from the urban market until they theoretically reached zero, where no one would buy land for any price, because nothing it might produce could pay the prohibitive cost of getting to market.

She felt as though she'd suddenly been transported from the distant past into a brash and indifferent present.

The Nazis received less direct financial help from business than many have assumed. Before the final deal that put Hitler in power, German big business greatly preferred a solid reassuring conservative like von Papen to the unknown Hitler with his crackpot economic advisors. In the final tense months, when Hitler was refusing all lesser offers in an all-or-nothing gamble on becoming chancellor, and when party radicalism resurfaced in the Berlin transport strike, money grew scarcer. The NSDAP was virtually broke after the disappointing election of November 1932. A relatively minor Cologne banker, Kurt von Schröder, served as go-between in negotiations between Hitler and von Papen, but business contributions did not become a major resource for Hitler until after he attained power. Then, of course, the game changed. Businessmen contributed hugely to the new Nazi authorities and set about accommodating themselves to a regime that would reward many of them richly with armaments contracts, and all of them by breaking the back of organized labor in Germany