Union Dues Quotes

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest euthanasium; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.

The seeking of a mate shall be undertaken with due preparation and care. A life-bond should never be contemplated as a light thing--unlike a legal union or sanctified joining, the sealing of souls CANNOT be severed. When a mate is SOULBOUND to another--LIFEMATED, as some have come to regard it--a mystery is engaged. In one aspect mystical, the lifemating process is the most sublime endeavor that a Refarian may assume. Once formed, the bond must be ever cherished and nurtured by the process of lifelong rigor.

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Injurious Hermia! most ungrateful maid! Have you conspired, have you with the contrived To bait me with this foul derision? Is all the counsel that we two have shared, The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent, When we have chid the hasty-footed time For parting us,-O, and is all forgot? All school=days' friendship, childhood innocence? We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our neelds created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key; As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds, Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition; Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart, Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one, and crowned with one crest, And will you rent our ancient love asunder, To join with men in scorning your poor friend? It is not friendly, 'tis not maidenly: Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it, Though I alone do feel the injury.

Dr. Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler. I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million members of the Soviet Union, and so on. I paid my dues along with everybody else,” he said. It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.” Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.

Turning back to the crowd I say, “I am duty bound to make this plea, but I want to say, with all due respect to the governor here, that I doubt seriously that he will do — cannot do — anything. And for the reason that he is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the capitalists who placed him here in this building.” — Mother Jones

The Ford Motor Company CEO taunts Reuther by asking, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” Reuther comes right back at Ford, asking, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” While

It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone’s malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates everybody, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. (In World War I) We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think taht we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.

In a recent speech Walter Reuther told of a visit to the new automatically operated Ford plant in Cleveland. Pointing to the robots, his host asked him, “How are you going to collect union dues from those guys?” The C.I.O. president … returned an equally pertinent question: “And how are you going to get them to buy cars?

The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians – the Soviet Union – fell because it was broke. Let’s hope that’s not true [laughs] since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false. How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.

They became the directing power in the life insurance companies, and other corporate reservoirs of the people’s savings-the buyers of bonds and stocks. They became the directing power also in banks and trust companies-the depositaries of the quick capital of the country-the life blood of business, with which they and others carried on their operations. Thus four distinct functions, each essential to business, and each exercised, originally, by a distinct set of men, became united in the investment banker. It is to this union of business functions that the existence of the Money Trust is mainly due.[1]

Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Documentary cast; 35 mm.; color; silent w/ heavy use of computerized distortion in facial closeups. Documentary and closed-captioned interviews with participants in the public Steven Pinker-Avril M. Incandenza debate on the political implications of prescriptive grammar during the infamous Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts convention credited with helping incite the M.I.T. language riots of B.S. 1997 UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION

Il principio della letteratura consiste nel controllare la morte e nell'usarla segretamente come forza motrice da utilizzare in false costruzioni, mentre la vita viene sempre tenuta in riserva, immagazzinata, miscelata opportunamente con la morte, irrorata di conservanti e dilapidata nei capolavori letterari che posseggono una lugubre vita eterna. O piuttosto sarebbe preferibile dire che l'arte «marziale» è morire insieme ai fiori, la «letteratura» è coltivare fiori imperituri. E i fiori che non appassiscono mai sono fiori artificiali. Così l' «unione della letteratura e dell'arte marziale» consiste nel riunire fiori che appassiscono a fiori imperituri, nel fare coesistere in se stessi le due esigenze più contrastanti dell'umanità, e quindi i sogni di realizzazione di quei desideri.

King of The Road Trailer for sale or rent Rooms to let, fifty cents No phone, no pool, no pets ain't got no cigarettes Two hours of pushin' broom Buys a eight by twelve four-bit room I'm a man of means, by no means King of the road Third boxcar, midnight train Destination: Bangor, Maine Old worn out suit and shoes I don't pay no union dues I smoke, old stogies I have found Short, but not too big around I'm a man of means, by no means King of the road I know every engineer on every train All of the children and all of their names Every handout in every town Every lock that ain't locked when no one's around They sing, trailers for sale or rent Rooms to let, fifty cents No phone, no pool, no pets I ain't got no cigarettes About two hours of pushin' broom Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room I'm a man of means, by no means King of the road Trailer for sale or rent Rooms to let, fifty cents No phone, no pool, no pets I ain't got no cigarettes About two hours of pushin' broom Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room I'm a man of means, by no means King of the road

quel fallito Club Finanziario che chiamano Unione Europea e che non si capisce a cosa serva fuorché a legittimare l’antiamericanismo quindi a spaccare in due l’Occidente, a imporci una stupidaggine detta Moneta Unica, a pagare eccessivi ed immeritati stipendi (esenti da tasse) ai membri del suo inetto e inutile Parlamento.

The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden (To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State) He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint, For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) And our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured. Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation. And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Too often, we try to extort from chosen others the fierce genetic loyalty we long for from our parents and feel for our kids. The fact is, even though our individual DNAs may conjoin to form a zygote and in due time a unique, freestanding being, we remain literally and existentially separate, our union perfect only apart from ourselves.

When the clowns of British politics - arch-Brexiteer cartoon characters 'Boorish Johnson' and 'JackOff Grease-Smug' advocate ad infinitum that Britain should leave the EU in order to be free to sign her own trade deals; they seem to have overlooked the towering elephant in the room, namely the current occupant of the White House (another clown) - who appears hell-bent on destabilising world trade via crude protectionist policies. Both Tories, despite receiving the best British education money can buy, would do well to revisit their post war history books and be reminded of one of the key objectives of the European Project and in due course the European Union - specifically to promote peace and prosperity amongst previously warring neighbours by forming a unified trading bloc which in time, due to its effective size, also acted as a useful counterweight to US hegemony. Go find another circus for your buffoonery and leave the deadly serious business of politics to principled individuals with the true national interest at heart !

Essex era solo un’ombra nella stanza, l’ombra di una cosa che desideravo, che era a sua volta l’ombra di un desiderio. Ma era incredibilmente dolce riuscire a provare anche solo quello, e terrificante sapere quanto in fretta sarebbe svanito. Un momento inciso sull’ acqua, un ricordo che sarebbe svanito nel grigiore. Non ero altro che un cacciatore di spiriti, che inseguiva lo spettro dell’uomo che ero stato. Un saprofago che si cibava dei suoi stessi resti. Chiusi gli occhi, aggiungendo oscurità a oscurità, e il desiderio si dispiegò come le vele di una nave fantasma. Quello poteva essere il mio universo. Il mondo che non c’era, circoscritto da pelle e fiato, dove nulla aveva importanza a parte due corpi che si muovevano insieme. Il passato e il futuro che perdevano di rilevanza dinanzi alla bellezza del presente, l’unione di due entità che assumevano la forma di un istante. Oh, esisteva forse una definizione più seducente della follia? Da dietro le palpebre, lo vidi danzare in spirali di luce colorata – smeraldo, blu e viola acceso –, che lo avvolgevano come le ali di un angelo elettrico.

Western Union Telegram To: Jehova Yahweh Care: Celestial Hotel (Suite #666) Presidential Tier, Paradise Dear God; This is to inform you that your current position as diety is herewith terminated due to gross incompetence STOP Your check will be mailed STOP Please do not use me for a reference Respectfully, Malaclypse the Younger/Omnibenevolent Polyfather POEE High Priest

Maybe the reading imagination is a fundamentally mystical experience—irreducible by logic. These visions are like revelations. They hail from transcendental sources, and are not of us—they are visited upon us. Perhaps the visions are due to a metaphysical union of reader and author. Perhaps the author taps the universal, and becomes a medium for it. (Perhaps the process is supernatural?)

nationalism and religion still divide our human civilization into different and often hostile camps. This collision between global problems and local identities manifests itself in the crisis that now besets the greatest multicultural experiment in the world—the European Union. Built on the promise of universal liberal values, the EU is teetering on the verge of disintegration due to the difficulties of integration and immigration.

Stai proprio bene, le dice. Lo so. È tipico mio, arrivo all'università e divento carina. Lui ride. Non vorrebbe, ma qualcosa della loro strana dinamica lo fa ridere. «Tipico mio» è proprio una frase da Marianne, vagamente autoderisoria e al tempo stesso allusiva a una qualche intesa tra loro, un'intesa sul fatto che lei è speciale. Il suo vestito ha una profonda scollatura sul davanti e le scopre le pallide clavicole simili a due bianchi trait d'union.

Between 1880 and 1931 the courts issued more than 1,800 injunctions to suppress labor strikes. Labor “combinations” (unions) were declared a violation of due process, a way of coercively extracting wealth from decent defenseless rich employers. Collective bargaining, it was maintained, deprived both owner and worker of “freedom of contract.” By 1920, pro-business federal courts had struck down roughly three hundred labor laws passed by state legislatures to ease inhumane working conditions.

Thomas Jefferson's Letter to John Holmes on the Missouri Statehood Question – April 20, 1820 I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a State. This certainly is the exclusive right of every State, which nothing in the constitution has taken from them and given to the General Government. Could Congress, for example, say, that the non- freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other State? I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect. Th. Jefferson

With a very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces—poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on—had left Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state. What the Tsars had never been able to achieve, namely the complete curbing of minds to the government’s will, was achieved by the Bolsheviks in no time after the main contingent of the intellectuals had escaped abroad or had been destroyed. The lucky group of expatriates could now follow their pursuits with such utter impunity that, in fact, they sometimes asked themselves if the sense of enjoying absolute mental freedom was not due to their working in an absolute void. True, there was among émigrés a sufficient number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris, and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively large scale; but since none of those writings could circulate within the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality.

New Rule: If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man and a madman. Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August--although it weight the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just top giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found our there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is "dominated" by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin...all of them. It's now official Republican dogma, like "Tax cuts pay for themselves" and "Gay men just haven't met the right woman." As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded--but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That's the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib. Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That's the reason health-care reform is so watered down--it's Bob Dole's old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade--it was the first President Bush's plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it's a hoax. But it's not--I know because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: "Oh, look, there's a mountain there." Governments, led my liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I'm for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don't need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it, I can only what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too." No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit at them. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.

Roosevelt fought hard for the United States to host the opening session [of the United Nations]; it seemed a magnanimous gesture to most of the delegates. But the real reason was to better enable the United States to eavesdrop on its guests. Coded messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco. With wartime censorship laws still in effect, Western Union and the other commercial telegraph companies were required to pass on both coded and uncoded telegrams to U.S. Army codebreakers. Once the signals were captured, a specially designed time-delay device activated to allow recorders to be switched on. Devices were also developed to divert a single signal to several receivers. The intercepts were then forwarded to Arlington Hall, headquarters of the Army codebreakers, over forty-six special secure teletype lines. By the summer of 1945 the average number of daily messages had grown to 289,802, from only 46,865 in February 1943. The same soldiers who only a few weeks earlier had been deciphering German battle plans were now unraveling the codes and ciphers wound tightly around Argentine negotiating points. During the San Francisco Conference, for example, American codebreakers were reading messages sent to and from the French delegation, which was using the Hagelin M-209, a complex six-wheel cipher machine broken by the Army Security Agency during the war. The decrypts revealed how desperate France had become to maintain its image as a major world power after the war. On April 29, for example, Fouques Duparc, the secretary general of the French delegation, complained in an encrypted note to General Charles de Gaulle in Paris that France was not chosen to be one of the "inviting powers" to the conference. "Our inclusion among the sponsoring powers," he wrote, "would have signified, in the eyes of all, our return to our traditional place in the world." In charge of the San Francisco eavesdropping and codebreaking operation was Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett, the protégé of William F. Friedman. Rowlett was relieved when the conference finally ended, and he considered it a great success. "Pressure of work due to the San Francisco Conference has at last abated," he wrote, "and the 24-hour day has been shortened. The feeling in the Branch is that the success of the Conference may owe a great deal to its contribution." The San Francisco Conference served as an important demonstration of the usefulness of peacetime signals intelligence. Impressive was not just the volume of messages intercepted but also the wide range of countries whose secrets could be read. Messages from Colombia provided details on quiet disagreements between Russia and its satellite nations as well as on "Russia's prejudice toward the Latin American countries." Spanish decrypts indicated that their diplomats in San Francisco were warned to oppose a number of Russian moves: "Red maneuver . . . must be stopped at once," said one. A Czechoslovakian message indicated that nation's opposition to the admission of Argentina to the UN. From the very moment of its birth, the United Nations was a microcosm of East-West spying. Just as with the founding conference, the United States pushed hard to locate the organization on American soil, largely to accommodate the eavesdroppers and codebreakers of NSA and its predecessors.

countries under the unyielding rule of Berlin and the discipline of the SS and the Gestapo. It was Churchill in particular who opposed all compromise, who talked to his fellow cabinet members for days on end and finally won over Chamberlain, who, after 1938, was also convinced of Hitler’s evil intentions. ‘Hitler’s terms, if accepted, would put us completely at his mercy,’ Churchill believed. And: ‘Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.’ In May 1940 it would have been blindly optimistic to think that Great Britain could defeat the Germans without massive support from the Soviet Union and the United States. But the British were persuaded that Germany would once again encounter difficulties due to

Self-Love Self-love is the quality that determines how much we can be friends with ourselves and, day to day, remain on our own side. When we meet a stranger who has things we don’t, how quickly do we feel ourselves pitiful, and how long can we remain assured by the decency of what we have and are? When another person frustrates or humiliates us, can we let the insult go, able to perceive the senseless malice beneath the attack, or are we left brooding and devastated, implicitly identifying with the verdict of our enemies? How much can the disapproval or neglect of public opinion be offset by the memory of the steady attention of significant people in the past? In relationships, do we have enough self-love to leave an abusive union? Or are we so down on ourselves that we carry an implicit belief that harm is all we deserve? In a different vein, how good are we at apologizing to a lover for things that may be our fault? How rigidly self-righteous do we need to be? Can we dare to admit mistakes or does an admission of guilt or error bring us too close to our background sense of nullity? In the bedroom, how clean and natural or alternatively disgusting and unacceptable do our desires feel? Might they be a little odd, but not for that matter bad or dark, since they emanate from within us and we are not wretches? At work, do we have a reasonable, well-grounded sense of our worth and so feel able to ask for (and properly expect to get) the rewards we are due? Can we resist the need to please others indiscriminately? Are we sufficiently aware of our genuine contribution to be able to say no when we need to?

If I have discerned rightly, there is a close bond of union between hope and certain affirmation of eternity, that is, of transcendent order. On the other hand - as I say in Remarks on the Irreligion of Today - a world where techniques are paramount is a world given over to desire and fear; because every technique is there to serve some desire or some fear. It is perhaps characteristic of Hope to be unable either to make direct use of any technique or to call it to her aid. Hope is proper to the unarmed; it is the weapon of the unarmed, or (more exactly) it is the very opposite of a weapon and in that, mysteriously enough, its power lies. Present-day scepticism about hope is due to the essential inability to conceive that anything can be efficacious when it is no sort of a power in the ordinary sense of that word.

In 1932 Pravda published a short story by Ilf and Petrov, titled 'How Robinson Was Created,' about a magazine editor who commissions a Soviet Robinson Crusoe from a writer named Moldavantsev. The writer submits a manuscript about a Soviet young man triumphing over nature on a desert island. The editor likes the story, but says that a Soviet Robinson would be unthinkable without a trade union committee consisting of a chairman, two permanent members, and a female activist to collect membership dues. The committee, in its turn, would be unthinkable without a safe deposit box, a chairman's bell, a pitcher of water, and a tablecloth ('red or green, it doesn't matter; I don't want to limit your artistic imagination'), and broad masses of working people. The author objects by saying that so many people could not possible be washed ashore by a single ocean wave: 'Why a wave?' asked the editor, suddenly surprised. 'How else would the masses end up on the island? It is a a desert island, after all!' 'Who said it was a desert island? You're getting me confused. Okay, so there's an island, or, even better, a peninsula. It's safer that way. And that's where a series of amusing, original, and interesting adventures will take place. There'll be some trade union work going on, but not enough. The female activist will expose certain deficiencies - in the area of due collection, for example. She'll be supported by the broad masses. And then there be the repentant chairman. At the end you could have a general meeting. That would be quite effective artistically. I guess that's about it.' 'But - what about Robinson?' stammered Moldavantsev. 'Oh yeah ..., thank for reminding me. I'm not wild about Robinson. Just drop him. He's a silly, whiny, totally unnecessary character.

The communists didn’t release their grip until the late 1980s. Effective organisation kept them in power for eight long decades, and they eventually fell due to defective organisation. On 21 December 1989 Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, the communist dictator of Romania, organised a mass demonstration of support in the centre of Bucharest. Over the previous months the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support from the eastern European communist regimes, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and revolutions had swept Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Ceaus¸escu, who had ruled Romania since 1965, believed he could withstand the tsunami, even though riots against his rule had erupted in the Romanian city of Timis¸oara on 17 December. As one of his counter-measures, Ceaus¸escu arranged a massive rally in Bucharest to prove to Romanians and the rest of the world that the majority of the populace still loved him – or at least feared him. The creaking party apparatus mobilised 80,000 people to fill the city’s central square, and citizens throughout Romania were instructed to stop all their activities and tune in on their radios and televisions. To the cheering of the seemingly enthusiastic crowd, Ceauşescu mounted the balcony overlooking the square, as he had done scores of times in previous decades. Flanked by his wife, Elena, leading party officials and a bevy of bodyguards, Ceaus¸escu began delivering one of his trademark dreary speeches. For eight minutes he praised the glories of Romanian socialism, looking very pleased with himself as the crowd clapped mechanically. And then something went wrong. You can see it for yourself on YouTube. Just search for ‘Ceauşescu’s last speech’, and watch history in action.20 The YouTube clip shows Ceaus¸escu starting another long sentence, saying, ‘I want to thank the initiators and organisers of this great event in Bucharest, considering it as a—’, and then he falls silent, his eyes open wide, and he freezes in disbelief. He never finished the sentence. You can see in that split second how an entire world collapses. Somebody in the audience booed. People

By definition, conspiracy theories imply a coordinated plot by a hostile group. But the most successful conspiracy theories also imply the existence of another group: victims. Theorists become more devout when they identify as part of population under attack, the researchers noted. The more a person identifies with a persecuted "ingroup," the more likely they are to suspect evil deeds by a threatening "outgroup" with which they do not identify. In a 2015 study, for example, Indonesian students were more likely to believe conspiracy theories about Western countries staging terror attacks if researchers first emphasized the students' Muslim faith and described the West as a threat to Muslims. Americans are no more immune than Indonesians. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union's KGB spread rumors throughout the United States that the CIA had engineered the HIV virus to wipe out the country's Black and gay populations. Often, groups that have been dealt a bad hand can be more likely to perceive the world in a conspiratorial light due to past suffering, be it the result of a deliberate conspiracy or passive societal failings. So while the anti-Black HIV rumors were false, the theory took off with some Black Americans who remembered the country's history of documented medical plots against people of color.

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

«Adesso siamo amici, giusto?» «Giusto», dissi raggiante. Il mio primo amico! Certo, era un tecnico dei computer uscito male, con una serie di abitudini sociali deplorevoli, ma pur sempre... amici! Di sicuro mi ci era voluto molto, ma molto tempo per conquistarne uno: ero ben consapevole che di solito le persone della mia età avevano almeno uno o due amici. Non avevo tentato di evitarli, ma nemmeno ero andata a cercarmeli, solo che era sempre stato molto difficile conoscere gente con una mentalità affine alla mia. Dopo l’incendio non ero mai riuscita a trovare nessuno di adatto agli spazi che si erano creati dentro di me. Non posso lamentarmi, era stata interamente colpa mia, in fin dei conti. E comunque, durante la mia infanzia, avevo girato talmente tanto che era difficile restare in contatto con gli altri, anche se avessi voluto. Così tanti collocamenti in affido, tutte quelle nuove scuole... All’università mi ero innamorata dei classici, dedicandomi felicemente al mio lavoro. Perdere qualche serata all’Unione studentesca per ottenere il massimo dei voti ed elogi generosi da parte dei miei docenti mi era sembrato uno scambio equo. E, naturalmente, per qualche anno c’era stato Declan. Non gli piaceva che socializzassi senza di lui. O, se era per quello, con lui. Dopo la laurea avevo cominciato subito a lavorare nell’agenzia di Bob e Dio solo sa che lì dentro non c’era nessuno con la mia stessa mentalità. Una volta che ci si abitua a stare da soli, diventa normale. Certamente lo era diventato per me.

We see the universal harmony in the wondrous sky and on the wondrous earth; how elements essentially opposed to each other are all woven together in an ineffable union to serve one common end, each contributing its particular force to maintain the whole; how the unmingling and mutually repellent do not fly apart from each other by virtue of their peculiarities, any more than they are destroyed, when compounded, by such contrariety; how those elements which are naturally buoyant move downwards, the heat of the sun, for instance, descending in the rays, while the bodies which possess weight are lifted by becoming rarefied in vapour, so that water contrary to its nature ascends, being conveyed through the air to the upper regions; how too that fire of the firmament so penetrates the earth that even its abysses feel the heat; how the moisture of the rain infused into the soil generates, one though it be by nature, myriads of differing germs, and animates in due proportion each subject of its influence; how very swiftly the polar sphere revolves, how the orbits within it move the contrary way, with all the eclipses, and conjunctions, and measured intervals of the planets. We see all this with the piercing eyes of mind, nor can we fail to be taught by means of such a spectacle that a Divine power, working with skill and method, is manifesting itself in this actual world, and, penetrating each portion, combines those portions with the whole and completes the whole by the portions, and encompasses the universe with a single all-controlling force, self-centred and self-contained, never ceasing from its motion, yet never altering the position which it holds.

Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. To make this clear, two points must be observed. First, that man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: secondly, that the perfection of any power is determined by the nature of its object. Now the object of the intellect is "what a thing is," i.e. the essence of a thing, according to De Anima iii, 6. Wherefore the intellect attains perfection, in so far as it knows the essence of a thing. If therefore an intellect knows the essence of some effect, whereby it is not possible to know the essence of the cause, i.e. to know of the cause "what it is"; that intellect cannot be said to reach that cause simply, although it may be able to gather from the effect the knowledge of that the cause is. Consequently, when man knows an effect, and knows that it has a cause, there naturally remains in the man the desire to know about the cause, "what it is." And this desire is one of wonder, and causes inquiry, as is stated in the beginning of the Metaphysics (i, 2). For instance, if a man, knowing the eclipse of the sun, consider that it must be due to some cause, and know not what that cause is, he wonders about it, and from wondering proceeds to inquire. Nor does this inquiry cease until he arrive at a knowledge of the essence of the cause. If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than "that He is"; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists, as stated above (Articles 1 and 7; I-II:2:8).

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.

Frustrato, Doug tentò un’altra strada. “Ascolta, supponiamo che la maggioranza voti per la Brexit e noi...” “Scusami se ti interrompo,” disse Nigel. “Supponiamo che la maggioranza voti per cosa?” “Brexit.” Nigel lo guardò sbalordito. “Come mai salti fuori con questa parola?” “Non è così che la chiamano tutti?” “Credevo che si dicesse Brixit.” “Cosa? Brixit?” “Noi diciamo così.” “Noi... chi?” “Dave e tutto il gruppo.” “Tutti dicono Brexit. Da dove viene Brixit?” “Non lo so. Pensavo che si dicesse così.” Di nuovo prese un appunto sul taccuino. “Brexit? Sei sicuro?” “Sicurissimo. È una parola composta. British exit.” “British exit... Allora dovrebbe essere Brixit?” “Be’, i greci l’hanno chiamata Grexit.” “I greci? Non sono usciti dall’Unione europea.” “No, ma hanno valutato la possibilità di farlo.” “Noi non siamo i greci. Dovremmo avere una parola che sia unicamente nostra?” “Ce l’abbiamo. Brexit.” “Ma noi continuiamo a dire Brixit.” Scuotendo la testa, Nigel continuò a scrivere. “Sarà una notizia bomba nel prossimo consiglio dei ministri. Spero che non tocchi a me comunicarlo.” “A che ti serve avere una definizione se sei sicuro che la cosa non succederà?” gli domandò Doug. Nigel sorrise felice. “Naturale... hai ragione da vendere. Non succederà e quindi non ci serve definirla.” “Ecco, vedi.” “Dopotutto, tra un anno, nessuno si ricorderà più di questa stupida faccenda.” “Esattamente.” “Nessuno si ricorderà che qualcuno voleva la Brixit.” “Proprio così. Però, sai, alcuni di loro...” Si chiese come dovesse metterla. “Sono personaggi da prendere sul serio, no? Boris Johnson, per esempio. Un vero peso massimo.” “Non infierire sul suo aspetto fisico,” disse Nigel. “Anche se Dave è molto arrabbiato con lui.” “Non si aspettava che si pronunciasse a favore dell’uscita?” “No, non se l’aspettava.” “Gira voce che la sera prima che il ‘Telegraph’ andasse in stampa, Boris avesse preparato due articoli – uno in cui sosteneva l’uscita e l’altro in cui si dichiarava favorevole a restare nell’Unione europea.” “Non ci credo per niente,” disse Nigel. “Boris avrebbe preparato tre articoli: uno per uscire, l’altro per restare e il terzo perché non riusciva a decidere. Gli piace essere sempre pronto.”“E poi c’è Michael Gove. Un altro attaccante che si è pronunciato a favore dell’uscita.” “Lo so. Dave è arrabbiatissimo con Michael. Per fortuna rimangono molti conservatori leali e di buon senso che apprezzano i benefici di restare membri della UE. Credo che tu vada a letto con una di loro. Ma prova a immaginare cosa pensa Dave di Michael e di alcuni altri. Insomma, è andato a Bruxelles, è tornato con un accordo assai vantaggioso, e questi non sono ancora contenti.” “Semplice: a molti non va giù la UE,” disse Doug. “Pensano che non sia democratica.” “Sì, ma uscirne sarebbe un male per l’economia.” “Pensano che la Germania comandi a bacchetta su tutti.” “Sì, ma uscirne sarebbe un male per l’economia.” “Pensano che dalla Polonia e dalla Romania siano arrivati troppi immigrati che spingono i salari al ribasso.” “Sì, ma uscirne sarebbe un male per l’economia.” “D’accordo,” disse Doug. “Credo di avere appena capito quali saranno i tre punti strategici della campagna di Dave.” Adesso era il suo turno di prendere appunti. “E come la mettiamo con Jeremy Corbyn?” Nigel inspirò con un lungo sibilo e sobbalzò visibilmente. “Jeremy Corbyn?” “Se il quadro è questo, lui dove si colloca?” “Preferisco non parlarne.” “Perché no?” “Perché no? Perché è un marxista. Marxista, leninista, trotzkista, comunista. Maoista, bolscevico, anarchico, di sinistra. Un socialista fondamentalista, anticapitalista, antimonarchico, pro-terrorismo.” “Ma è anche uno che vuole rimanere nella UE.” “Davvero?” “Così dice.” “Allora, naturalmente, saremo felici di averlo a bordo. Ma non credo che Dave sarebbe pronto a condividere alcunché sul piano politico.” “Non sarà necessario. È Jeremy il primo a respingere un accordo di questo tipo.” “Bene.

Two hours a day for two days per week. Four hours. At $7.25 an hour, that gave him a gross income of $29 a week. He is also now a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers International, the union that represents food workers, retail clerks, and farm workers. His monthly dues for the UFCW are $25, all taken out of his first week’s check. That makes Owen arguably the most selfless labor activist in America, with 86 percent of his pay going to support his union.

Govt to help dropouts study further’ 98 words Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani Saturday said the government will roll out a programme by this year-end wherein school dropouts, who were forced to take up a job or those who opt to exit education due to financial worries, will be facilitated back into studies up to PhD level. “When it comes to specialisation (in education), women, tribal children, children from Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Castes are not economically empowered to possibly study further and many of them drop out because they need to go and get themselves a job...I left education because I didn’t have money,” Irani said.

GIOVANNI - L'opinione comune è una vana stolidità, che spaventa l'inesperta tempra della mente come il regolo del maestro tiene in rispetto un bambino: così fu di me; così io, prima che la mia impareggiabile sorella fosse sposata, pensavo che ogni diletto d'amore dovesse ricevere la morte da quel contratto: ma io non trovo alcun mutamento di voluttà in questa rituale legge di sollazzo. Per me è ancor quella, e ogni bacio non meno dolce e delizioso del primo ch'io colsi, quando il privilegio della giovinezza ancora le dava diritto al nome di vergine. Oh, la fulgida bellezza dell'unione di due cuori come il suo e il mio! Sognino pure di altri mondi gli uomini che vivono sui libri; il mio mondo, e di perfetta felicità, è qui, e non lo cambierei per il migliore dei mondi futuri: una vita di piacere è l'Eliso.

Marriage is a contract between 2 people male and female;doing what it takes to make the union work until death due them apart

Herding children from the choice schools back into government schools would swell the ranks of unionized teachers, whose union dues fund the Democratic Party

An example of the laissez faire adage “let the market decide” can be seen in the way employees at Walmart are treated. Among other things, the anti-union behemoth pays low wages to its employees in the U.S. and supports near slave conditions in Bangladesh garment factories.43 Recently, Walmart had to pay more than $4.8 million in back pay and damages to workers for overtime pay they did not receive. There have been at least three previous settlements with the Department of Labor due to unpaid overtime wages.

By practicing the strictest economy and because of his odd jobs, the Fremonts were able to put aside a dowry for Yvonne, from their dollar a day, minus dues to the union. In 1920 the nest egg amounted to 2,000 francs ($286) and in 1926, to 4,500 francs ($100). Of such mathematics are world disasters made.

At Disney World, membership in a union does not guarantee discernible perks. Employees who don’t pay dues are entitled to the same pay and benefits as those who do, since Florida is a “right-to-work” state—or “right-to-freeload,” as union members charge.

I DESIGNED YOU to live in union with Me. This union does not negate who you are; it actually makes you more fully yourself. When you try to live independently of Me, you experience emptiness and dissatisfaction. You may gain the whole world and yet lose everything that really counts. Find fulfillment through living close to Me, yielding to My purposes for you. Though I may lead you along paths that feel alien to you, trust that I know what I am doing. If you follow Me wholeheartedly, you will discover facets of yourself that were previously hidden. I know you intimately —far better than you know yourself. In union with Me, you are complete. In closeness to Me, you are transformed more and more into the one I designed you to be. “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” MARK 8 : 36 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. PSALM 139 : 13 – 16 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. 2 CORINTHIANS 3 : 17 – 18 September 17 YOU WILL NOT FIND MY PEACE by engaging in excessive planning: attempting to control what will happen to you in the future. That is a commonly practiced form of unbelief. When your mind spins with multiple plans, Peace may sometimes seem to be within your grasp; yet it always eludes you. Just when you think you have prepared for all possibilities, something unexpected pops up and throws things into confusion. I did not design the human mind to figure out the future. That is beyond your capability. I crafted your mind for continual communication with Me. Bring Me all your needs, your hopes and fears. Commit everything into My care. Turn from the path of planning to the path of Peace. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 1 PETER 5 : 6 – 7 In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps. PROVERBS 16 : 9 Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, And He shall bring it to pass. PSALM 37 : 5 (NKJV)

The law isn’t that simple, and the practical damage will be great. State pensions are underfunded by $111 billion—a 500% increase from 1995 and up 75% in the past five years. About one in four state tax dollars already finances pensions, which is more than Illinois spends on education. Yet the court accuses politicians of shortchanging pensions. Politicians are to blame for the state’s fiscal woes, but mainly because they colluded with unions to promise unsustainable benefits in return for political support. Less than 40% of the increase in the state’s unfunded liability since 1995 is due to inadequate payments. The rest is due mainly to benefit growth and faulty actuarial assumptions such as investment rate of return. The 2013 reforms at issue capped salaries of

Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society. The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue. In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it. Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.” It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice. When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”8 Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession. Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.” In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”9 These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

On at least one other occasion, Oswald had told the officers that, if he could not locate Abt, he would consult the American Civil Liberties Union. He had also declared that he was a member of the ACLU. Will Fritz, surprised, asked how much Oswald had paid in dues, and the prisoner told him five dollars.

In matematica c'è una rappresentazione grafica che si chiama diagramma di Venn. Sono due cerchi, una coppia di anelli che si uniscono e il punto in cui si incontrano si chiama unione. Nell'ultimo anno, Lisa e io abbiamo tracciato dei cerchi, ciascuno seguendo la propria traiettoria intorno a quello che era successo, ciascuno in cerca di un percorso infinito. E soltanto adesso ci siamo incontrati in mezzo, nella quieta sovrapposizione, nello spazio tra i due. (La geometria della disperazione, il diagramma di Venn)

[T]he righteousness wherein we must be found, if we will be justified, is not our own: therefore we cannot be justified by any inherent quality. Christ hath merited righteousness for as many as are found in him. In him God findeth us, if we be faithful, for by faith we are incorporated into him. Then, although in ourselves we be altogether sinful and unrighteous, yet even the man who in himself is impious, full of iniquity, full of sin, him being found in Christ through faith, and having his sin in hatred through repentance, him God beholdeth with a gracious eye, putteth away his sin by not imputing it, taketh quite away the punishment due thereunto, by pardoning it, and accepteth him in Jesus Christ as perfectly righteous, as if he had fulfilled all that is commanded him in the law: shall I say more perfectly righteous than if himself had fulfilled the whole law? I must take heed what I say; but the Apostle saith, "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. [2 Cor 5:21] Such we are in the sight of God the Father as is the very Son of God himself. Let it be counted folly, or phrensy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this: that man hath sinned and God hath suffered; that God hath made himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God. (A Learned Discourse on Justification, p. 6)

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

all national armies by a UN military force, is available online today in “Department of State Publication 7277,” after being “unavailable” for decades due to its sensitive nature. Bowing to Rostow’s suggestion of a unilateral American disarmament, Kennedy in 1961 signed Public Law #87-297, calling for the elimination of US national forces and further declaring that “no one may possess a firearm or lethal weapon except police or military personnel.” During the following administrations, this law has been updated 18 times and is still active and “in transition,” according to ex-President George W. Bush and Admiral William Crowe. Its companion document, Publication 7277, released in 1962, describes a two-phase operation reducing the US armed forces to 2.1 million while those of China and the Soviet Union do the same.

The British bankers at that time also controlled the fledgling American banks which offered to loan Abraham Lincoln money to fight the war. Lincoln wisely refused and created the famous Lincoln greenbacks with which he financed the Civil War.38 Abraham Lincoln, in a famous address, declared: “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.” 39 Lincoln’s refusal to finance the Union through debt to the internationalists demonstrated his keen insight into their strategy for global dominion. Hence, he financed the Civil War by printing the Lincoln greenbacks. In both respects—with regard to the Civil War and the British bankers’ attempt to seize control of the economics of America—once again the aims of the globalists were frustrated. This is what caused Lincoln’s assassination. Nonetheless, America remained in control of her own credit. The result of this victory was low interest loans for entrepreneurs, which led to great business expansion. This great expansion in the post-Civil War era enhanced the fears of those who sought to bring the world into a One World Order. If America was allowed to continue to expand, she would be a major—perhaps insurmountable—obstacle in the way of their goal. For one hundred years, America was able to avoid total control of her capital by the international bankers. Lincoln was most certainly a great irritant and obstacle to the aspirations of the globalists. He was the last president to seek categorically a halting of the globalists’ drive toward a Global One World Government. It cost him his life; he was murdered by John Wilkes Booth, also an agent of the internationalists.40 America’s emergence from the Civil War as a great industrial power was due to the effective centralization of capital and credit within the Federal Government, thanks to Lincoln. It was America’s control over her own capital that was making her prosperous. It was the aim of the international bankers to change all that. Lincoln was the victim of a major conspiracy—a conspiracy so important that even the European bankers were involved. Lincoln had to be eliminated because he dared to oppose their attempt to force a central bank on the United States. He became an example to those who would later oppose such machinations in high places. Could it be that, one hundred years later, John F.

Quando fu il turno di Jack, il cowboy fece appello a ogni briciola di sentimento nel proprio cuore. «Quando abbiamo deciso di rinnovare le promesse, mi ero preparato tutto un discorso, ma oggi mi ritrovo solo con due domande: come spiegare l'amore che provo per mio marito, e com'è cambiata la nostra unione da quando ci siamo scambiati le promesse nuziali? «E ho solo una semplice risposta: quando ci siamo sposati, non ti amavo. Non potevo. Mi dispiace di averti mentito, mamma, ma è la verità. Di te sapevo solo che eri il figlio del nemico giurato della nostra famiglia. Soltanto un nome, ecco cos'eri per me. Per questo oggi me ne sto qui con delle nuove promesse, grazie a tutto ciò che ho imparato da ogni singolo avvenimento degli ultimi mesi. Passando da una crisi all'altra, il mio amore si è evoluto. La mia nuova promessa, che forse non è poi tanto nuova, è che ti amo, che continuerò a tenerti nel cuore, nella mente e ad amarti per tutti gli anni che il buon Dio vorrà concederci. Io, Jackson Robert Campbell-Hayes, prendo te, Riley Nathaniel Campbell-Hayes, come mio sposo. Amo tutto ciò che so di te e confido in ciò che devo ancora scoprire, so che sarà fantastico.» Sogghignò. «Sono così eccitato al pensiero di avere una possibilità di crescere insieme, d'imparare a conoscere l'uomo che diventerai, e ogni giorno che passa m'innamoro sempre di più. Sappi, piccolo etero, che giuro di amarti per l'eternità. Non ho poesie da dedicarti, Riley, ma posso offrirti l'amore della mia famiglia, la mia terra e i miei cavalli, e voglio condividerne ogni aspetto con mio marito. Ti amo, Riley.» Tutto attorno gli argini si ruppero mentre i due si abbracciavano, scacciando con un bacio ogni dubbio che avrebbero mai potuto avere prima di scambiarsi le nuove promesse. La famiglia proruppe in

Several features distinguished the most successful fascisms from previous parties. Unlike the middle-class parties led by “notables” who condescended to contact their publics only at election time, the fascist parties swept their members up into an intense fraternity of emotion and effort. Unlike the class parties—socialist or bourgeois—fascist parties managed to realize their claim to bring together citizens from all social classes. These were attractive features for many. Early fascist parties did not recruit from all classes in the same proportions, however. It was soon noticed that fascist parties were largely middle class, to the point where fascism was perceived as the very embodiment of lower-middle-class resentments. But, after all, all political parties are largely middle class. On closer inspection, fascism turned out to appeal to upper-class members and voters as well. Early fascism also won more working-class followers than used to be thought, though these were always proportionally fewer than their share in the population. The relative scarcity of working-class fascists was not due to some proletarian immunity to appeals of nationalism and ethnic cleansing. It is better explained by “immunization” and “confessionalism”: those already deeply engaged, from generation to generation, in the rich subculture of socialism, with its clubs, newspapers, unions, and rallies, were simply not available for another loyalty

Even with perfect translation devices on both sides, the talks repeatedly broke down due to long silences.

Every man who loves peace, every man who loves his country, every man who loves liberty, ought to have it ever before his eyes, that he may cherish in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America, and be able to set a due value on the means of preserving it.

«E quanto alla Brexit… Alcuni sono convinti che i cambiamenti radicali offrano anche grandi opportunità.» «Quindi, secondo te, noi due staremmo meglio se ci separassimo?» «Oddio, no. Stavo parlando del Paese.» Attraversano la strada. «Allora quali sarebbero le opportunità offerte dai cambiamenti radicali di cui parli?» chiede Louise. «Be’, non saremo più impantanati in tutta quella burocrazia. Potremo fare affari per conto nostro.» «Okay, adesso mi sono completamente persa. Non mi va di continuare a parlare del Paese. Sto cercando di capire perché, secondo te, una Brexit coniugale dovrebbe costituire una grande opportunità.» Tom alza le spalle. Ha lo sguardo sfuggente. «Con chi dovresti fare affari, tu? Per quanto ne so, non stai frequentando donne italiane o tedesche. E non credo che potresti avere più fortuna con delle cinesi o delle americane. Mi pare tutta una stupidaggine.» Sono arrivati alla porta di Canyon. «Voglio dire che non deve per forza essere la catastrofe di cui parla il Guardian.» Louise si ferma e lo guarda. Lui evita il suo sguardo, poi alza la mano per suonare il campanello. «Tu hai votato a favore della stramaledetta Brexit! Non toccare quel campanello! Ecco perché ti sei registrato per il referendum. Nonostante tutte le discussioni che abbiamo avuto sull’argomento.» «E ci sono volute due palle così, credimi. Perché tutti quelli che conosco continuavano a insistere che sarebbe stato un disastro.» «Ed è per questo che l’hai fatto? Perché tutti quelli che conosci la pensavano in maniera diversa?» «Era parte dell’attrattiva, sì. Però anche per alcuni complicati, ma molto difendibili, punti di vista socio-economici.» «Prova a difenderli.» «Non ho intenzione di difenderli fuori della porta di ‘Canyon’ un attimo prima della seduta.» Louise alza gli occhi al cielo, sentendogli sottolineare «Canyon». «Difendine almeno uno. Uno piccolo.» «Be’, nessuno è piccolo. Credimi, vorrei che lo fossero. Ma sono grandi. Grandi punti di vista. Grandi idee. Ma soprattutto volevo fare incazzare i tuoi amici.» «Ah, ci sei riuscito. Non ti rivolgeranno mai più la parola» dice Louise. «Non è un argomento di conversazione con gli amici. Come ti ho detto, si tratta di una faccenda privata.» «Come fai a fare incazzare i miei amici, se io non glielo dico?» «Li ho fatti incazzare in quel momento. Mentre votavo. Non voglio sbatterglielo in faccia. La nazione deve andare avanti. Guarire.» «Okay, ci vai tu a lavorare in un ospizio, con il minimo salariale, per rimpiazzare tutti quelli dell’Europa dell’Est che abbiamo perso.» «Sono pronto a fare la mia parte. Anche se non sono di grande utilità, quando c’è di mezzo la morte. O le malattie. O qualunque altra cosa abbia a che fare con un gabinetto.»

When condominiums don’t meet government-backed lenders’ standards they become non-warrantable. This means that buyers cannot get standard loans for these properties. They will have to pay cash or pay exorbitant rates through private lenders. When a building is full of non-warrantable condos, the pool of buyers shrinks and lowers the condo’s value. One might think that newer projects would have lower maintenance costs than older projects. But this isn’t always true. Some builders set monthly fees low while they advertise the project. This attracts bargain buyers, but owners soon discover they have inadequate reserves. The monthly fees then skyrocket. Even if the homeowners successfully sue the builder, it is hard to sell any properties while litigation is pending, and values drop. Most states have specific forms for condominium transactions in which the association discloses finances and reserves. Buyers must sign and verify they have examined the financial condition of the project. Pay attention to past history. How old is the roof? When were improvements last made? How often do association dues increase? Even though many people don’t investigate these issues, a home’s value depends on them. CHAPTER 7 BANK FINANCING Banks have a new image. Now you have ‘a friend,’ your friendly banker. If the banks are so friendly, how come they chain down the pens? — Alan King Bank lending standards and terms change daily. This chapter provides general principles that should prove useful over the long term. We will examine how to borrow from banks to acquire or refinance a home. Please note the term “banks” as used here includes credit unions and other major financial institutions. There’s another chapter on non-bank lending to help those who don’t meet the criteria set by major lending institutions.

prostrate to the father guru. I, the yogi Milarepa, From within the abiding nature will sing you a song. I’ll do a dance in the space free of true existence. Listen, assembly of mamos and dakinis. This reliance on confidence in cause and effect Is faith with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. Staying alone in solitary places Is samadhi with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. This resting evenly, free of perceiver and perceived, Is view with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. This postmeditation that’s free of forgetting Is meditation with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. This mindfulness without perceiver or perceived*3 Is conduct with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. This union of compassion and emptiness Is fruition with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. This clothing that’s free of any feeling of cold*4 Has softness and excellence with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. This samadhi that’s without any hunger Is meat and beer with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. This drinking from the river of enlightenment Is drinking with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. Giving rise to contentment from within Is food and wealth with which ordinary ones’ cannot compare. Marpa Lotsawa, the translator, Is a siddha with whom ordinary ones cannot compare. The view of one’s mind as the face of the deity Is the yidam with which ordinary ones cannot compare. I, the yogi Milarepa, Am a meditator with which ordinary ones cannot compare. This body that’s without any sickness Is a doctor with which ordinary ones cannot compare. Now listen once more, assembly of dakinis: Where nothing is clear, it is clear for me.57 This very luminosity is clear. Where there is no heat, I feel warm. This very single cloth is warm. When there’s nothing comfortable, I feel good, This very illusory body feels good. Where there is no joy, I feel quite joyful, This very dream is so joyful. This yogi here feels better and better. Is Drakya Vajra high, or not? If Drakya Vajra isn’t high, Then how could vultures soar below? If the icy new year’s wind isn’t great, Then how could water in the mountain and valley freeze? If the garment of chandali isn’t warm, How could I feel warm with a single cotton cloth? If I don’t eat samadhi for my food, How could I survive being hungry with an empty belly? If the river of enlightenment isn’t drunk, Then how could I survive being thirsty without water? If the guru’s instructions are not profound, Then how is it obstructions and maras don’t come? If this yogi does not have realization, How could I wander in mountain retreats with no people? This is all due to the kindness of the wise guru. Put efforts in practicing just like this.

Note for a Textbook The question is never answered, never resolved, The circle of love and anger never squared, The stubborn instinct not translated yet In decimals, accurate and predictable In union dues or payroll cuts or blood... Always a symbol lost in the lovely theorem, A fraction that will not fit in the sum of the system, A jutting thrust in the graph of the commissar's forecast, A troublesome blank in gauleiter's careful accounting, An awkward hitch in the plans of the second vice-president. The answers worked on the slate are never the same, And the answers proved in the back of the book are wrong.

Taoists merely know that there was one Kalpa of Emptiness before the formation of this present universe, and point out the Emptiness, the Chaos, the primordial Gas, and the rest, naming them as the first or the beginningless. But they do not know that the universe had already gone through myriads of cycles of Kalpas of formation, existence, destruction, and emptiness. Thus even the most superficial of the Hinayana doctrines far excels the most profound of the outside doctrines.' All this is due to Ignorance which does not understand that no bodily existence, by its very nature, can be Atman. The reason why it is not Atman is this, that its formation is, after all, due to the union of matter and mind. Now (let us) examine and analyze (mind and body). Matter consists of the four elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, while mind consists of the four aggregates of perception,[FN#345] consciousness,[FN#346] conception,[FN#347] and knowledge.[FN#348]

As the story is told, determined to inspire his men to take the offensive, Jackson suddenly rode into the battlefield and attempted to brandish his sword, but the man who had once warned his VMI cadets to be ready to throw the scabbards of their swords away found that due to the infrequency with which he had drawn it, it had rusted in its scabbard.  Undaunted, he unbuckled the sword from his belt--scabbard and all--and waved it over his head.   Then he grabbed a battle flag from a retreating standard bearer and called for his men to rally around him.  Heartened by their commander’s zeal, the Stonewall Brigade set fiercely into the Union troops, quickly driving them back.  And although Union forces were subsequently able to regroup and attack, the Stonewall Brigade had given the Confederate front line time to reform and A. P Hill's troops time to come up and fill in the gaps. Almost

From the Bridge” Celebrating “La Navidad Cubana” Before the fall of Batista, Cuba was considered to be a staunch Catholic Nation. As in other Christian countries, Christmas was considered a religious holiday. In 1962, a few years after the revolution, Cuba became an atheist country by government decree. Then In 1969, Fidel Castro thinking that Christmas was interfering with the production of sugar cane, totally removed the holiday from the official calendar. Of course Christmas was still celebrated by Cubans in exile, many of whom live in South Florida and Union City, NJ. However it was still was celebrated clandestinely in a subdued way on the island. It was said, if it is to believed, that part of the reason for this was due to the fact that Christmas trees do not grow in Cuba. Now that Christianity and Christmas have both been reestablished by the government, primarily due to the Pope’s visits to Cuba, Christmas as a holiday has been reinstated. Many Christmas traditions have been lost over the past five decades and are still not observed in Cuba, although the Cuban Christmas feast is highlighted by a festive “Pig Roast,” called the “Cena de Navidad” or Christmas dinner. Where possible, the dinner includes Roast Pork done on a spit, beans, plantains, rice and “mojo” which is a type of marinade with onions, garlic, and sour orange. Being a special event, some Cubans delight in serving the roasted pork, in fancier ways than others. Desserts like sweet potatos, “turrones” or nougats, “buñuelos” or fritters, as well as readily available tropical fruits and nuts hazelnuts, guava and coconuts, are very common at most Christmas dinners. Beverages such as the “Mojito” a drink made of rum, sugar cane juice, lime, carbonated water and mint, is the main alcoholic drink for the evening, although traditionally the Christmas dinner should be concluded by drinking wine. This grand Christmas dinner is considered a special annual occasion, for families and friends to join together. Following this glorious meal, many Cubans will attend Misa de Gallo or mass of the rooster, which is held in most Catholic churches at midnight. The real reason for Christmas in Cuba, as elsewhere, is to celebrate the birth of Christ. Churches and some Cuban families once again, display manger scenes. Traditionally, children receive presents from the Three Wise Men and not from Santa Claus or the parents. Epiphany or “Three King’s Day,” falls on January 6th. Christmas in Cuba has become more festive but is not yet the same as it used to be. Although Christmas day is again considered a legal holiday in Cuba, children still have to attend school on this holiday and stores, restaurants and markets stay open for regular business. Christmas trees and decorations are usually only displayed at upscale hotels and resorts.

Among those liberties which we in this UNION claim for the child, due to him as a person, is freedom of thought, the function of right thinking,—the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. This is an article in his Bill of Rights which we should be most careful to safeguard and to establish for the child. All those who teach know how difficult it is not to violate this right. It is so easy to impose opinion, and so to create prejudice unless a careful watch be kept.

«Avrai sempre le mani legate con questa ragazza, – disse. – Non sarai mai tu ad avere il coltello per il manico. Qui c’è qualcosa – mi disse – che ti fa perdere la testa, e te la farà perdere sempre. Se non tagli definitivamente questo legame, alla fine quel qualcosa ti distruggerà. Non stai più semplicemente soddisfando un bisogno naturale, con lei. Questa è patologia nella sua forma più pura. Senti, – mi disse, – guardala come un critico, da un punto di vista professionale. Hai violato la legge della distanza estetica. Con questa ragazza hai sentimentalizzato l’esperienza estetica: l’hai personalizzata, l’hai trasportata nella sfera dei sentimenti, e hai perduto il senso della separazione indispensabile per il tuo godimento. Sai quando è successo? La sera che si è tolta l’assorbente. La necessaria separazione estetica è venuta meno non mentre tu la guardavi sanguinare – questo andava bene, non era questo il problema – ma quando non sei riuscito a trattenerti e ti sei inginocchiato. Ma cosa diavolo te l’ha fatto fare? Cosa c’è sotto la commedia di questa ragazza cubana che manda al tappeto uno come te, il professore di desiderio? Bere il suo sangue? Io direi che questo ha rappresentato l’abbandono di una posizione critica indipendente, Dave. Adorami, lei dice, venera il mistero della dea sanguinante, e tu lo fai. Non ti fermi davanti a nulla. Lo lecchi. Lo consumi. Lo digerisci. E’ lei che penetra te. Che altro la prossima volta, David? Un bicchiere della sua urina? Tra quanto la implorerai di darti le sue feci? Io non sono contrario perché è poco igienico. Non sono contrario perché è disgustoso. Sono contrario perché questo vuol dire innamorarsi. L’unica ossessione che vogliono tutti: l’“amore”. Cosa crede, la gente, che basti innamorarsi per sentirsi completi? La platonica unione delle anime? Io la penso diversamente. Io credo che tu sia completo prima di cominciare. E l’amore ti spezza. Tu sei intero, e poi ti apri in due. Quella ragazza era un corpo estraneo introdotto nella tua interezza. E per un anno e mezzo tu hai lottato per incorporarlo. Ma non sarai mai intero finché non l’avrai espulso. O te ne sbarazzi o lo incorpori con un’autodistorsione. Ed è questo che hai fatto, e che ti ha ridotto alla disperazione». (…) «L’attaccamento è rovinoso, ed è il tuo nemico. Joseph Conrad: chi si forma un legame è perduto. E’ assurdo che tu stia lì seduto con quella faccia. L’hai assaggiato. Non ti basta? Di cosa riesci mai ad avere più di un assaggio? E’ tutto quello che ci è dato nella vita, è tutto quello che ci è dato della vita. Un assaggio. Non c’è altro». (…)

Know the bondage and attachments from inside and from root to be free. Don't waste time on leaves of life, Awake and cut the root of all web of illusions. Awake and the karma breaks. Awake and the illusion breaks. Awake and the fate breaks. Knowledge is fake and worthless if it can not erase and wipe away false knowledge and free you from illusion of knowledge. Awake and librate from Web of illusions don't catch one after another. Don't control things in you. Know them and let be, witness each of them. The only sin in this world is, Not sowing Seed of Awakening. Rest are just your actions and perceptions in sleep and illusion. Only your own attainment of knowledge and truth can give you liberation not of somebody elses. Knowledge of somebody else will only give illusion of knowledge. If you are believing in mine or anyone's beliefs and thoughts then you are imprisoned by illusions of freedom, thought and Bondages. You are only free when you believe by your own experiences. Know ego, Let your body fall. Let your mind fall, know soul. Know spirit, let your soul fall. Let illusion fall, know consciousness. Know consciousness & let your spirit fall. Egoless, greedless & desireless state of consciousness can liberate soul. Love and Meditation are two Main gates of Awakening and Liberation. Witness everything and awake from the sleep of illusions of world and liberate. Wars in the world will never come to an end until the war inside the mind is perished. Transformation of soul and consciousness will start with the Awakening fire inside, and burn the negativity and remove the darkness. illusion of knowledge, play of words, blind faith, and superstitious beliefs, kill your journey of self discovery of self transformation of Awakening. The whole world has been slaved into union on basis of thoughts, beliefs, Faith, religions, caste, creed, regions and other worthless words. One will achieve freedom only when, one gave up the illusion of words created by mind, people, and World, else one will be always bound to words and it's prison. Let go words and knowledge, Know the silence, be the silence, and you will free from illusion of words and knowledge. Enslavement of words and illusion of words will be one day responsible for the destruction of the world. All prisons are in mind and due to mind. If mind is enslaved one cannot be free. Freedom is a inner state of mind and consciousness into silence and bliss. Where Perception of Death is Lost and Life is Known As It is, Salvation is Achieved. Faith is backbone of all religions. Let the faith fall and start the process transformation of the Awakening. Truth can be only Know by rejecting the Blind faith and beliefs. Only then can be the path of Truth can be achieved. Truth is pathless, because it is right here. Path is a outward thing, inner process of knowing oneself is a different thing. Religion can only take place in an Awakened consciousness. Service to needy must be done intentionlessly else it is worthless. Every act done unconsciously is act of sleep. Awake and be Aware. Transforming broken situations of life in act of facing, withstanding and winning is guide by master. If you let love kill you inside you have not known love as it is.

Do you think the United States is currently a united or a divided country? If you are like most people, you would say the United States is divided these days due to the high level of political polarization. You might even say the country is about as divided as it has ever been. America, after all, is now color-coded: red states are Republican; blue states are Democratic. But, in Uncharted, Aiden and Michel note one fascinating data point that reveals just how much more divided the United States once was. The data point is the language people use to talk about the country. Note the words I used in the previous paragraph when I discussed how divided the country is. I wrote, “The United States is divided.” I referred to the United States as a singular noun. This is natural; it is proper grammar and standard usage. I am sure you didn’t even notice. However, Americans didn’t always speak this way. In the early days of the country, Americans referred to the United States using the plural form. For example, John Adams, in his 1799 State of the Union address, referred to “the United States in their treaties with his Britanic Majesty.” If my book were written in 1800, I would have said, “The United States are divided.” This little usage difference has long been a fascination for historians, since it suggests there was a point when America stopped thinking of itself as a collection of states and started thinking of itself as one nation.

At one point when I was in the middle of the first season, I asked myself why I would want to watch a conservative Democrat destroy teachers’ unions and have joyless sex with a woman who looks like a very young teenager. I still had not answered the question when Claire pushed things to the next level in a scene so intensely creepy that it might count as the most revolting thing I have ever witnessed on television. A longtime member of the couple’s Secret Service security detail is dying of cancer, and Claire goes to visit him alone. On his deathbed, he reveals that he was always secretly in love with her and thought that Frank wasn’t good enough for her. Her response is almost incomprehensible in its cruelty—she mocks and taunts him for thinking he could ever attain a woman like her, and then puts her hand down his pants and begins to give him a handjob, all the while saying, in true perverse style, “This is what you wanted, right?” Surely Claire doesn’t have to emotionally destroy a man who is dying of cancer—and yet perhaps in a way she does, because she uses it as a way of convincing herself that Frank really is the right man for her. Not only could an average, hardworking, sentimental man never satisfy her, but she would destroy him. By contrast, Frank not only can take her abuse, but actively thrives on it, as she does on his. Few images of marriage as a true partnership of equals are as convincing as this constant power struggle between two perverse creeps. Claire is not the first wife in the “high-quality TV drama” genre to administer a humiliating handjob. In fact, she is not even the first wife to administer a humiliating handjob to a man who is dying of cancer. That distinction belongs to Skyler White of Breaking Bad, who does the honors in the show’s pilot. It is intended as a birthday treat for her husband Walt, who is presumably sexually deprived due to his wife’s advanced pregnancy, and so in contrast to Claire’s, it would count as a generous gesture if not for the fact that Skyler continues to work on her laptop the entire time, barely even acknowledging Walt’s presence in the room. In her own way, Skyler is performing her dominance just as much as Claire was with her cancer patient, but Skyler’s detachment from the act makes it somehow even creepier than Claire’s.

off from the same line, they were scattered peacefully across the globe for centuries, each mostly disregarding the others. But in the Middle Ages, the witches, who by nature did the most interacting with normal humans, began to be discovered. And then persecuted, and tortured, and murdered. Their leaders went to the vampires and the wolves and begged for help, but both groups turned away, the vampires from apathy and the wolves from fear of meeting the same fate. Wolves are pack animals, and look after their pack before anything else. So the witches did the only thing they could: they looked to strengthen their magic. They didn’t know about evolution and magical lines back then, but during their research, the witches managed to stumble upon a group of plants that magic had bonded itself to, just like the human conduits. They were known as nightshades: belladonna, mandragora, Lycium barbarum (which also became known as wolfberry), tomatillo, cape gooseberry flower, capsicum, and solanum. The entire subspecies was rife with magic. The latter four plants could be used in hundreds of charms and potions, many of which helped the witches to deter the human persecutors. But the former three plants were unique; they interacted with the remaining magical beings in mystifying ways. Belladonna was poisonous to vampires—it took unbelievable amounts to actually kill them, but even a sprinkle of the plant would work as a paralytic. Proximity to wolfberry caused the shifters to lose control, painfully unable to stop from changing, again and again, which was very dangerous to anyone nearby. And mandragora, also called mandrake, was the key ingredient in a spell that could grant a very powerful witch the ability to communicate between living and dead. Which is how I ended up disposing of that naked guy’s body in Culver City, all those years ago. This discovery was your classic Pandora’s box scenario. A small group of witches, furious that the vampires and the wolves had abandoned them during their darkest time, began to use wolfberry and belladonna against them—sometimes without much provocation. The balance of power shifted once again, and while the witches’ discovery didn’t cause a full-out war, it did spawn thousands of skirmishes, minor battles breaking out between the three major factions. Eventually, the use of those herbs was “outlawed” in the Old World, but it was done the way that marijuana has been outlawed in the US—basically, don’t get caught. The witches are always arguing about this among themselves; some of them think it should be open season, and others think the ban should be more strictly enforced. But while they may not be able to pull together a majority vote, in Los Angeles Kirsten has organized the witches into sort of an informal union. I know it sounds crazy, but if actors and directors can have unions in this town, why not witches? As I understand it, the real benefit to joining the union is access: to chat rooms, newsletters, support groups, spell sessions—and me. The witches’ dues pay Kirsten a small salary, and she uses the rest to organize the network and pay me. There are plenty of “non-union” witches in LA, too, ones who either haven’t

The Crusade against “Liberals” Promotion of Hinduism went hand in hand with an incessant fight against “liberals,” a highly derogatory term in the mouths of Hindu nationalists, which they use to refer to academics, NGOs, and journalists that do not adhere to their ideology. Bringing Universities to Heel—the Case of Jawaharlal Nehru University Universities with a “progressive” reputation have long been a Hindu nationalist target, but tensions further intensified after 2014. They have been subjected to two types of interference. First, the government appointed men from the Sangh Parivar or fellow travelers to head them with the task of reforming them. Second, the RSS student wing, the ABVP, could finally try to call the shots on university campuses with the government’s blessing. This dual strategy is most clearly apparent in the treatment inflicted on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This institution, known for the excellence of its teachers—especially in the social sciences—had drawn bitter Hindu nationalist criticism as soon as it was founded in the 1960s due to the leftist leanings of many teachers and some of its main student organizations.97 In 2016, the Modi government appointed Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar vice-chancellor of JNU. This electrical engineering professor had been teaching at the nearby Indian Institute of Technology until then, and he had allegedly played an active role in Vijana Bharati, an organization under the Sangh Parivar umbrella that aims to promote indigenous Indian science.98 He brought about drastic budget cuts—academic spending was almost halved over three years99—and a decline in student recruitment, while systematically hampering the activities of student unions and faculty opposed to the RSS. The political disciplining of the campus took various routes, such as the harassment of professors who were openly hostile to the Sangh Parivar.

In the long term,” wrote the English economist John Maynard Keynes, “we are all dead.” The Scottish Enlightenment learned a different lesson from the changes brought by union with England. Its greatest thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, understood that change constantly involves trade-offs, and that short-term costs are often compensated by long-term benefits. “Over time,” “on balance,” “on the whole”—these are favorite sentiments, if not expressions, of the eighteenth-century enlightened Scot. More than any other, they capture the complex nature of modern society. And the proof came with the Act of Union. Here was a treaty, a legislative act inspired not by some great political vision or careful calculation of the needs of the future, or even by patriotism. Most if not all of those who signed it were thinking about urgent and immediate circumstances; they were in fact thinking largely about themselves, often in the most venal terms. Yet this act—which in the short term destroyed an independent kingdom, created huge political uncertainties both north and south, and sent Scotland’s economy into a tailspin—turned out, in the long term, to be the making of modern Scotland Nor did Scots have to wait that long. Already by the 1720s, as the smoke and tumult of the Fifteen was clearing, there were signs of momentous changes in the economy. Grain exports more than doubled, as Scottish agriculture recovered from the horrors of the Lean Years and learned to become more commercial in its outlook. Lowland farmers would be faced now not with starvation, but with falling prices due to grain surpluses. Glasgow merchants entered the Atlantic trade with English colonies in America, which had always been closed to them before. By 1725 they were taking more than 15 percent of the tobacco trade. Inside of two decades, they would be running it. A wide range of goods, not just tobacco but also molasses, sugar, cotton, and tea, flooded into Scotland. Finished goods, particularly linen textiles and cotton products, began to flood out, despite the excise tax. William Mackintosh of Borlum saw even in 1729 that Scotland’s landed gentry were living better than they ever had, “more handsomely now in dress, table, and house furniture.” Glasgow, the first hub of Scotland’s transatlantic trade, would soon be joined by Ayr, Greenock, Paisley, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. By the 1730s the Scottish economy had turned the corner. By 1755 the value of Scottish exports had more than doubled. And it was due almost entirely to the effect of overseas trade, “the golden ball” as Andrew Fletcher had contemptuously called it, which the Union of 1707 had opened.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads—their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype.

When this cell-salt is deficient in the blood, physical and mental disease (not-at-ease) is the result. Elastic fiber is formed by the union of the fluoride of lime with albuminoids, whether in the rubber tree or the human body. All relaxed conditions of tissue (varicose veins and kindred ailments) are due to a lack of sufficient amount of elastic fiber to “rubber” the tissue and hold it in place.

1) “How did I end up down this rabbit hole of being obsessed with men on the DL (down-low)? Why did I prefer playing more in the straight arena with the closet cases (as they were called in my day) and the bisexual men over the gay ones?” 2) “We didn’t identify in my day; you were either gay, bisexual, or straight. People will always label others or pigeonhole them without even knowing for sure who they really are. They presumably stereotype and judge just by your outward appearance.” 3) “It wasn't until the seventh grade that Sister Gloria would be my social studies teacher, and I began leaning more towards being an extrovert than the anxious introvert that I was. All the accolades go to her. She lit the flame under my ass that would be the catalyst for my advocacy. Her podium, located front and center of the classroom, became ground zero for me and where I found my voice.” 4) “Their taunting was my kryptonite. My peers hated me for no other reason than the fact that they thought I was gay. I was only thirteen and often wondered how they knew who I was before I did.” 5) “Evangelical Christian Anita Bryant (First Lady of Religious Bigotry), along with her minions, led a crusade against the LGBTQ community back in 1977 and said we were trying to recruit children and that ‘Homosexuals are human garbage.’ My first thoughts were, how unchristian and deplorable of her to even say something like that, not to mention, to make it her life’s mission promoting hate.” 6) “Are there any more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of Christians in this country today? Dr. King knew about his friend’s homosexuality and arrest. Being a religious man and a pastor, Dr. King could have cast judgment and shunned Bayard Rustin like so many other religious leaders did at the time. But he didn’t. That, to me, is the true meaning of being a Christian. He loved Bayard unconditionally and was unbiased towards his sexual orientation. Dr. King was not a counterfeit Christian and practiced what he preached—and that, along with remembering what Jesus had said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ is the bottom line to Christianity and all faiths.” 7) “We are all God’s children! That is what I was taught in Catholic school. God doesn’t make mistakes—it’s as simple as that. Love is love—period! I don’t need anyone’s validation or approval, I define myself.” 8) “You will bake our cakes, you will provide us our due healthcare, you will do our joint tax returns, and yes, you will bless our unions, too. Otherwise, you cannot call yourselves Christians or even Americans, for that matter.” 9) “The torch has been passed. But we must never forget the LGBT pioneers that have come before and how they fought in the streets for our lives. Never forget the Stonewall riots of 1969 nor the social stigma put upon us during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from its onset in the early 1980s. Remember how many died alone because nobody cared. Finally, keep in mind how we were all pathologized and labeled in the medical books until 1973.

Have we not a right to appeal to you, as brethren bound by the compact of our fathers, that you should, with due regard to your own rights and interests and constitutional obligations, do all that is necessary to preserve our peace and promote our prosperity? If, sir, the seeds of disunion have been sown broadcast over this land, I ask by whose hand they have been scattered? If, sir, we are now reduced to a condition when the powers of this Government are held subservient to faction; if we can not and dare not legislate for the organization of territorial governments—I ask, sir, who is responsible for it? And I can with proud reliance say, it is not the South—it is not the South! Sir, every charge of disunion which is made on that part of the South which I in part represent, and whose sentiments I well understand, I here pronounce to be grossly calumnious. The conduct of the State of Mississippi in calling a convention has already been introduced before the Senate; and on that occasion I stated, and now repeat, that it was the result of patriotism, and a high resolve to preserve, if possible, our constitutional Union; that all its proceedings were conducted with deliberation, and it was composed of the first men of the State.

Another objection made to the right of secession is based upon obscure, indefinite, and inconsistent ideas with regard to allegiance. It assumes various shapes, and is therefore somewhat difficult to meet, but, as most frequently presented, may be stated thus: that the citizen owes a double allegiance, or a divided allegiance—partly to his State, partly to the United States: that it is not possible for either of these powers to release him from the allegiance due to the other: that the State can no more release him from his obligations to the Union than the United States can absolve him from his duties to his State. This is the most moderate way in which the objection is put. The extreme centralizers go further, and claim that allegiance to the Union, or, as they generally express it, to the Government—meaning thereby the Federal Government—is paramount, and the obligation to the State only subsidiary—if, indeed, it exists at all.

Lee’s reference to Missouri as a “country” hints at another widely shared conception of his time. The United States was not yet a solidified nation. It lacked a truly national identity. Other than through its post offices, the federal government had little presence in the lives of most Americans. Rather, the state evoked a person’s primary loyalty. One was a Virginian or a Georgian or a Minnesotan before one was an American. Indeed, a common name for the country was plural—these United States—rather than singular—the United States. It took a civil war to forge the thirty-two states into one nation. As a former Union general reminisced, “We must emphasize this one statement which was ever on the lips of many good men in 1860 and ’61, to wit: ‘My first allegiance is due to my State!’” Only after the country added the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did the Constitution affirm the preeminence of national over state citizenship.27

Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country’s collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose

condemning a war that, due to college draft deferments, was being fought largely by soldiers drawn from the working class, with blacks a proportionately high percentage.

One of the reasons our educational system is slow to change is largely due to the power of the teachers union. They know the power of a network.

Il matrimonio è l'unione di due creature che si tollerano, e si amano qualche volta di amicizia, mai l'unione di due anime che si amano perennemente di amore. Questa eternità dell'amore è un'aspirazione degli uomini che si sono quasi illusi di conseguirla imponendosene le apparenze. Se l'amore fosse durevole, la felicità sarebbe ricondotta in un mondo da cui forse su bandita per sempre.

All'inizio degli anni sessanta Brodskij scrive delle poesie e ne traduce senza essere iscritto all'unione degli scrittori, la cosa viene denunciata e lui viene processato per parassitismo. Al giudice che gli chiede "Ma lei, che non è iscritto all'unione degli scrittori, come fa ad essere un poeta? Chi glielo dice che lei è un poeta?" Brodskij risponde "Forse è un dono divino". Che nell'Unione Sovietica atea è una bella risposta, ma non è una risposta che gli vale un'assoluzione, lo condannano a cinque anni di lavori forzati al nord, nel distretto di Konosa, nel villaggio di Norinskaja. Dopo meno di due anni piò tornare a Leningrado. Nel 1972 lo costringono a lasciare l'Unione Sovietica. Lui si trasferisce in America dove comincia a insegnare. Nel 1987, come si sa, vince il premio Nobel per la letteratura, segno che i campi di rieducazione sovietici funzionavano, prima non era neanche iscritto all'unione degli scrittori, poi ha vinto il premio Nobel per la letteratura.

Not only must the Federal judges be good citizens, and men of that information and integrity which are indispensable to all magistrates, but they must be statesmen, wise to discern the signs of the times, not afraid to brave the obstacles that can be subdued, nor slow to turn away from the current when it threatens to sweep them off, and the supremacy of the Union and the obedience due to the laws along with them. The President, who exercises a limited power, may err without causing great mischief in the state. Congress may decide amiss without destroying the Union, because the electoral body in which the Congress originates may cause it to retract its decision by changing its members. But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war.

One must give the CIA (and the assassination sponsors that were even further in the shadows) their due for having devised and executed a brilliant setup. They had played out a scenario to Kennedy’s death in Dallas that pressured other government authorities to choose among three major options: a war of vengeance against Cuba and the Soviet Union based on the CIA’s false Mexico City documentation of a Communist assassination plot; a domestic political war based on the same documents seen truly, but a war the CIA would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or a complete cover-up of any conspiracy evidence and a silent coup d’état that would reverse Kennedy’s efforts to end the Cold War.

On its face, who says no? Companies want to give money and benefits to workers who otherwise wouldn’t have them—especially in a field like housekeeping that has always operated in the gray economy. It should be Elizabeth Warren’s Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa wrapped into one, right? Of course not. Because if you can have both the total flexibility of being an independent contractor and setting your own schedule and still get benefits, why join a union and pay dues? So we were faced with an oxymoronic dynamic: private companies wanting to give benefits to workers but unable to because unions wouldn’t allow it.

The Battle of Prokhorovka on July 12, 1943, was the largest tank battle in history, involving over one thousand tanks. The armored battle was considered a tactical success for Germany due to the high number of Soviet tanks destroyed, but a strategic victory for the Soviet Union because it prevented a German breakthrough.

41 percent of all Americans believe the Second Coming “probably” or “definitely” will happen by the year 2050. Images of the rapture that believers have posted on the Internet suggest a growing gulf between those who rise to Heaven and those who stay on earth. In one image, svelte, well-dressed adults rise to a blue sky. Perhaps the rapture speaks to shared and understandable anxieties about an earthly economy, it occurs to me. For many congregants, well-paid, union-protected jobs through which a man could support a stay-at-home wife are gone for all but a small elite. Given automation and corporate offshoring, real wages of high school–educated American men have fallen 40 percent since 1970. For the whole bottom 90 percent of workers, average wages have flattened since 1980. Many older white men are in despair. Indeed, such men suffer a higher than average death rate due to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. Although life expectancy for nearly every other group is rising, between 1990 and 2008 the life expectancy of older white men without high school diplomas has been shortened by three years—and truly, it seems, by despair. In their tough secular lives, life may well feel like “end times.

All the ancient dissimilarities, conflicts and antagonisms were solely due to the fragmentary fashion in which people had been content, until then, to study the universe. When all these divergent rays of thought had found their common focal point in the four-dimensional synthesis, natural variations were no longer anything but harmonic manifestations of a single common thought. And from matter, formerly judged inert, to the noblest speculations of the human mind, the world was now no more than a single soul, living the same life, an emanation of a single diverse thought that was named, in memory of the naïve beliefs of old, the Golden Eagle. This union of minds, of the same time and all times, by the direct path of the fourth dimension—by the subconscious, as one would once have put it—had nothing blissful or passive about it, though, although no one had believed otherwise in the times when humankind still dreamed of naïve celestial sentimentality and eternal paradisal adoration. More than ever, contradiction engendered an intense intellectual life in which opposition alone, as in all the mind’s operations, was able to motivate thought. What ensured that all effort became useful and positive, however, was that each individual action of intelligence concurred with the same continuous whole—just as, in a statue, all the lines, because they are opposed, unite to perfect a single masterpiece—and that love had replaced hatred since the language of the four-dimensional soul had been substituted for the fragmentary hypocrisies of three-dimensional modes of expression: hypocrisies contained in the concrete words of language as in the relative formulas of science. After overturning all human traditions and mores, sincerity, imposed by the direct reading of thoughts, had engendered love and created, in the spiritual domain, a sort of state of nature, this time transcendental, that marked the definitive liberation of the human mind. Every man understood, in the Age of the Golden Eagle, that he was but one fragment of a single statue—whether an eye, nose or finger did not matter—that he was only one act of the same intelligence, and that he desired the beauty of the whole with all his heart, his duty was to devote all his strength to make the part that was confided to him as beautiful as possible. That detail of the whole, his personality, immortal as the whole outside time, was the art-work signed with his name for all eternity within the universal art-work; it was the “I” marking his place in the universal continuum. It was not important whether the act was one of intelligence, faith, revolt or kindness, provided it was worthy of the whole; on the contrary, woe betide the man if his “I” was nothing but a defect, a lack or a fault, forever.

Wikipedia: Party System There have been at least six different party systems throughout the history of the United States: First Party System: This system can be considered to have developed as a result of the factions in the George Washington administration. The two factions were Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists and Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party. The Federalists argued for a strong national government with a national bank and a strong economic and industry system. The Democratic-Republicans argued for a limited government, with a greater emphasis on farmers and states' rights. After the 1800 presidential election, the Democratic-Republicans gained major dominance for the next twenty years, and the Federalists slowly died off. Second Party System: This system developed as a result of the one party rule of the Democratic-Republicans not being able to contain some of the most pressing issues of the time, namely slavery. Out of this system came the Whig Party and Henry Clay's American System. Wealthier people tended to support the Whigs, and the poorer tended to support the Democrats. During the Jacksonian era, his Democratic Party evolved from Democratic-Republicans. The Whig party began to break apart into factions, mainly over the issue of slavery. This period lasted until 1860. Third Party System: Beginning around the time of the start of the Civil War, this system was defined by bitter conflict and striking party differences and coalitions. These coalitions were most evidently defined by geography. The South was dominated by the Democrats who opposed the ending of slavery, and the North, with the exception of some major political machines, was dominated by the Republicans, who supported ending slavery. This era was a time of extreme industrial and economic expansion. The Third Party System lasted until 1896. Fourth Party System: This era was defined by Progressivism and immigration, as well as the political aftermath of the American Civil War. Northeastern business supported the Republicans while the South and West supported the Democrats. Immigrant groups were courted by both parties. The Fourth Party System came to an end around 1932. Fifth Party System: This system was defined by the creation of the New Deal Coalition by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. This coalition supporting new social welfare programs brought together many under-privileged, working class, and minority groups including unions, Catholics, and Jews. It also attracted African-Americans, who had previously largely supported the Republican Party due to Lincoln's freeing of the slaves. This era lasted approximately until early-mid 1970s. Sixth Party System: The transition to this system appears to have begun with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the Democrats subsequently losing their long dominance of the South in the late 1960s, with the GOP adopting the southern strategy leading to Republican dominance as evidenced by election results.

A few months later, Everett followed up with another missive repeating the argument that while this war may not be an abolitionist one on the Union’s part due to constitutional restraints, it was a proslavery one on the Confederacy’s part.

The urban capitalists and the bourgeoisie differ in linguistic habits and dress from the workers. They don't live together in one integrated society, but as two separate societies that speak different languages both literally and metaphorically. The urban capitalists do not know the life led by workers. Workers experience hardships that are unheard of amongst villagers and these evoke malice in the urban workers, easily stirred by union leaders who use them to ride to power. Villagers are different. Teaching the villagers cannot easily change what they have inherited from the environment and the past they have known and in which they have grown up. The village entrepreneur wore only a sarong in the past. Some of them wore a sarong and slung another over a shoulder. The poor villager's dress is also a sarong. The village entrepreneur speaks Sinhalese, which is the language of the poor villager too. On the day of the traditional New Year, the children of both the rich and the poor in the village eat together and play together in the homes of the villager elite. All this subdues feelings of resentment against the wealthy villagers. It's true that villagers suffer a great deal on account of their poverty. But unlike the urban poor, poverty amongst the villagers does not incite malice toward the wealthy, due to the rural way of life.

Divorzio e referendum sul divorzio. La norma religiosa nello spazio pubblico Il secondo punto che avrei voluto discutere con Giussani riguarda un episodio raccontato nel libro, che merita a mio avviso una riflessione più profonda, più dettagliata, perché ha un significato più che storico. Riguarda, infatti, la posizione della religione nello spazio pubblico, allora e oggi. Si tratta del coinvolgimento di CL nel referendum Fanfani del 1974, che cercava di abrogare la legge che permetteva il divorzio. CL, guidata da Giussani, sosteneva il «Sì» seguendo fedelmente le indicazioni della CEI. C’era qualche voce dentro il movimento (vedi a pagina 458) che consigliava diversamente, e non per ragioni di principio ma di opportunità politica. Come sappiamo, la proposta abrogativa fu sconfitta clamorosamente. All’indomani del voto Giussani ha reagito in modo assai militante, quasi amaro. Ma in dieci anni il suo pensiero è diventato più sottile. Cito da pagina 459: il referendum «portò alla ribalta una situazione fino ad allora non da tutti chiaramente percepita; e soprattutto poco percepita all’interno della Chiesa istituzionale, dove spesso si continuava malgrado tutto a credere che l’Italia fosse un paese ancora incontestabilmente e largamente cattolico. […] Valutando la questione a posteriori penso di poter concludere che una presa di coscienza della situazione così chiara ed inequivocabile, anche se brutale, fu meglio per la Chiesa di quel che altrimenti sarebbe potuto accadere: che cioè il declino della presenza cattolica nella società italiana continuasse in modo strisciante, ed inavvertito da molta parte della Chiesa istituzionale». Se avessi avuto la possibilità di discutere con Giussani, gli avrei domandato: «Secondo lei, se la situazione sociale in Italia fosse stata diversa, cioè se il Paese fosse stato ancora incontestabilmente e largamente cattolico, sarebbe stata una giustificazione per votare “SÌ” all’abrogazione?». A mio umile avviso, anche in queste condizioni sarebbe stato un errore votare «SÌ», perché in questo modo si nega la volontà di Dio e, se ho capito bene, anche l’insegnamento del Concilio Vaticano II sul rapporto fra la religione e il potere coercitivo dello Stato. Come ha spiegato con chiarezza e coraggio Benedetto XVI davanti al Bundestag, esistono norme religiose che, pur essendo religiose, sono spiegabili nei termini della semplice ragione di cui Dio ha dotato tutti gli esseri umani. Il monito: «Non uccidere» si trova nei Dieci Comandamenti, parole rivelate direttamente di Dio. Ma anche senza questa rivelazione sarebbe giustificabile davanti ai credenti e ai non credenti. La sua coincidenza con la rivelazione può aggiungere un’ulteriore motivazione per il credente, per il quale uccidere non sarà solo un reato contro la legge e contro le norme morali e l’etica generale, ma anche un peccato davanti a Dio. E il credente, senza alcuna esitazione, può mobilitarsi perché diventi legge generale applicata e tutelata dallo Stato con tutto il suo potere coercitivo. Ma l’indissolubilità del matrimonio cattolico è una questione diversa. È, infatti, espressione del concetto di matrimonio «sacramentale» (la parola non ha alcun significato nel vocabolario dello Stato non confessionale), che distingue lo sposo cattolico non soltanto dai suoi concittadini non credenti, ma anche dai credenti di altre religioni (come Protestanti, Ebrei e Musulmani che, pur avendo il matrimonio sacramentale, prevedono la possibilità del divorzio). C’è un elemento molto particolare nel matrimonio cattolico (che secondo tanti è un elemento molto nobile), perché esso è concepito come un’unione che coinvolge tre parti, i due sposi e Dio, che assegna a tale unione un valore addirittura sacramentale, che assegna una certa santità (un’altra parola che non esiste nel vocabolario dello Stato non confessionale) al matrimonio e che ne spiega e giustifica l’indissolubilità in termini religiosi. Il matrimonio civile, però, è del tutto diverso. Per la mia

After January 1, 1959, the Castro Revolution changed the way business was done in Cuba. Abruptly, supplies for Cubana were no longer available, most routes were altered or suspended, and many of the pilots deserted their jobs or were exiled. In May of 1960, the new Castro administration merged all of the existing Cuban airlines and nationalized them under a drastically restructured Cubana management. At the time, many of Cubana’s experienced personnel took advantage of their foreign connections, and left for employment with other airlines. During the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April of 1961, two of the remaining Cubana DC-3’s were destroyed in the selective bombing of Cuba’s airports. Actually the only civil aviation airport that was proven to be bombed was the Antonio Maceo Airport in Santiago de Cuba. During the following years, the number of hijackings increased and some aircraft were abandoned at American airports, as the flight crews sought asylum in the United States. This corporate instability, as well as political unrest, resulted in a drastic reduction of passengers willing to fly with Cubana. Of course, this resulted in a severe reduction in revenue, making the airline less competitive. The Castro régime reacted by blaming the CIA for many of Cubana’s problems. However, slowly, except to the United States, most of the scheduled flights were restored. Not being able to replace their aging fleet with American manufactured aircraft, they turned to the Soviet Union. Currently Cubana’s fleet includes Ukrainian designed and built Antonov An-148’s and An-158’s. The Cubana fleet also has Soviet designed and built Illyushin II-96’s and Tupolev TU-204’s built in Kazan, Russia. Despite daunting difficulties, primarily due to the United States’ imposed embargo and the lack of sufficient assistance from Canada, efforts to expand and improve operations during the 1990’s proved successful. “AeroCaribbean” originally named “Empresa Aero” was established in 1982 to serve as Cuba’s domestic airline. It also supported Cubana’s operations and undertook its maintenance. Today Cubana’s scheduled service includes many Caribbean, European, South and Central American destinations. In North America, the airline flies to Mexico and Canada. With Cuban tourism increasing, Cubana has positioned itself to be relatively competitive. However much depends on Cuba’s future relations with the United States. The embargo imposed in February of 1962 continues and is the longest on record. However, Cubana has continued to expand, helping to make Cuba one of the most important tourist destinations in Latin America. A little known fact is that although Cubana, as expected, is wholly owned by the Cuban government, the other Cuban airlines are technically not. Instead, they are held, operated and maintained by the Cuban military, having been created by Raúl Castro during his tenure as the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

After the war, in 1924 Gerardo Machado was elected to the Presidency. As a General during the Cuban War of Independence, he had a great deal of popular support. He was best known for rustling cattle from the Spanish Imperial Army to feed the poor. As the President of Cuba, he undertook many public projects, including the 777-mile construction of a highway, going almost the entire 782-mile length of Cuba. He developed the Capital in Havana and intended to modernize and industrialize the nation. His ambitions and admiration of fascist Benito Mussolini in Italy, caused him to overreach when he convened the legislature to extend his term in office for 6 years, without the benefit of an election. Not only had he overspent, but now he also alienated the Cuban public who denounced him as an authoritarian nationalist. Students, labor unions and intellectualists denounced him as a dictator. Due to a new worldview of Marxist thinking brought on by the Russian revolution, communism was becoming popular and gained a reasonably strong foothold in Cuba. Machado, intent on holding on to power, became more despotic. He created a secret police and resorted to torture and even assassination to control the Cuban people. What started as a great idea ended in disaster for the Cuban people! World history shows this to be a common event. First someone like Machado or Hitler gets elected and in the end as the elected leader becomes a “despot” and takes over the country!