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Histories are like novels in that they set out to provide more or less comprehensive accounts of social systems.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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In Texas, two things are cherished above all else- football and gossip.
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Cora Carmack (All Lined Up (Rusk University, #1))
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There is no such thing as a "general language," a language that is spoken by a general voice, that may be divorced from a specific saying, which is charged with particular overtones. Language, when it means, is somebody talking to somebody else, even when that someone else is one's own inner addressee.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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John Hamm, of Mad Men fame, was suspended from the University of Texas for putting a student's testicles in a claw hammer and leading him around a house while the student was beaten, paddled, and set on fire.
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Jake Jacobs (The Giant Book Of Strange Facts (The Big Book Of Facts 15))
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Dr. Kristin Neff is a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She runs the Self-Compassion Research Lab, where she studies how we develop and practice self-compassion. According to Neff, self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Here are abbreviated definitions for each of these: Self-kindness: Being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. Common humanity: Common humanity recognizes that suffering and feelings of personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience—something we all go through rather than something that happens to “me” alone. Mindfulness: Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. Mindfulness requires that we not “over-identify” with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negativity.
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Brené Brown (The Gifts of Imperfection)
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To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of "languages," styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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James W. Pennebaker and his associates at the University of Texas have conducted extensive research on the benefits of journaling. His findings: if you want relief, write about your most upsetting experiences, write through the pain, and connect painful events with your life story.
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Laurie A. Helgoe (Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength (Reduce Anxiety and Boost Your Confidence and Self-Esteem with this Self-Help Book for Introverted Women and Men))
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The University of Texas stadium was comparable to the Foxhole Court in size. The Longhorns and Foxes shared the same team colors, too, so the packed rafters looked familiar and comforting. Neil just had to ignore the crowd's challenging roar as they noticed the Foxes in their midst.
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Nora Sakavic (The King's Men (All for the Game, #3))
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Being a full prof at the University of Texas at El Paso meant living like a managing director at Barclays. Barry had always wondered why people who were just upper-middle class in New York chose to stay there, given that they could live like minor dictators in the rest of the country. “You’re negative arbing yourself,” he used to say.
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Gary Shteyngart (Lake Success)
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The University of Texas team ate their longhorn mascot, Bevo, in 1920.
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Jake Jacobs (The Giant Book Of Strange Facts (The Big Book Of Facts 15))
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..."extreme capitalism": the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice---and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market. More than that, it is the elimination of these separate concepts from our political discourse, so that we find ourselves looking to the stock market to fund retirement, college education, health care, and having forgotten that in other wealthy and developed societies these are rights, not the contingent outcomes of speculative games.
James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas.
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James K. Galbraith
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More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned “Western Civilization” courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course.
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Rodney Stark (How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity)
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In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run, between Allan Sandage, heir to Hubble at Mount Wilson, and Gérard de Vaucouleurs, a French-born astronomer based at the University of Texas.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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The themes of metamorphosis (transformation-particularly
human transformation-and identity (particularly human identity) are drawn from the treasury of pre-class world folklore. The folkloric image of man is intimately bound up with transformation and identity. This combination may be seen with particular clarity in the popular folktale )skazkaj. The folktale image of man-throughout the extraordinary variety of folkloric narratives-always orders itself around the motifs of transformation and identity (no matter how varied in its turn the concrete expression of these motifs might be).
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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But histories differ from novels in that they insist on a homology between the sequence of their own telling, the form they impose to create a coherent explanation in the form of a narrative on the one hand, and the sequence of what they tell on the other.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.
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Frank Bruni (Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania)
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The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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Where there is no passage of time there is also no moment of time, in the full and most essential meaning of the word. If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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Saul Alinsky, the radical organizer and mentor of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, used to ask his new followers why they wanted to become community organizers. They would respond with idealistic claims that they wanted to help the poor and oppressed. Then Alinsky would scream at them like a Marine Corps drill instructor, “No! You want to organize for power!” That’s the way the SDS radicals at the University of Texas approached the abortion issue—as a means to power, or, in Margaret Sanger’s words, to remake the world. As a writer in the 1960s radical SDS publication New Left Notes put it, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
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David Horowitz (Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America)
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This was something new. Or something old. I didn’t think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won’t be able to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them. Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a “cultist,” or a well-to-do eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that’s worth stealing. And “cultist” is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category, and yet doesn’t quite match Jarret’s version of Christianity. Jarret’s people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.
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Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2))
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Round one: southeast versus southwest." Wymack picked up his clipboard and skimmed the top page. "Odd-ranked teams play on Thursdays this year, so we've got Fridays. January 12th we're away against University of Texas. Good news is that Austin's just outside the thousand-mile range, which means the board's going to let us fly there.
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Nora Sakavic (The King's Men (All for the Game, #3))
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Society itself falls apart into class and intraclass groups; individual life-sequences are directly linked with these and together both individual life and subgroups are opposed to the whole. Thus in the early stages of slaveholding society and in feudal society, individual life-sequences are still rather tightly interwoven with the common life of the most immediate social group. But nevertheless they are separate, even here. The course of individual lives, of groups, and of the sociopolitical whole do not fuse together, they are dispersed, there are gaps; they are measured by different scales of value; each of these series has its own logic of development, its own narratives,
each makes use of and reinterprets the ancient motifs in its own way. Within the boundaries of individual life-series, an interior aspect makes itself apparent. The process of separating out and detaching individual life-sequences from the whole reaches its highest point when financial relations develop in slaveholding society, and under capitalism. Here the individual sequence takes on its specific private character and what is held in common becomes maximally abstract.
The ancient motifs that had passed into the individual life-narratives here undergo a specific kind of degeneration. Food, drink, copulation and so forth lose their ancient "pathos" (their link, their unity with the laboring life of the social whole); they become a petty private matter; they seem to exhaust all their significance within the boundaries of individual life. As a result of this severance from the producing life of the whole and from the collective struggle with nature, their real links with the life of nature are weakened-if not severed altogether.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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Texas…was evidently the only place in the known universe, including Louisiana, that actually got hotter after the sun went down.
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Kathleen Kent (The Dime (Betty Rhyzyk, #1))
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Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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I don’t care what bad songwriters do. I don’t care what lazy songwriters do. Just don’t try to do it with me. Even if I’m not going to be that great I’m damned sure going to try to be.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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In the next six years, I discovered that my principal and my Jungian therapist were both right. There was no reason to limit myself, to let my age restrict my choices. I listened to what my life was asking of me, and in 1974 I earned an MA in educational psychology from the University of Texas–El Paso, and in 1978 a PhD in clinical psychology from Saybrook University.
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Edith Eger (The Choice)
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I never got to take you to the prom. You went with Henry Featherstone. And you wore a peach-colored dress.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Callie asked.
“Because I saw you walk in with him.”
“You didn’t know I was alive in high school,” Callie scoffed.
“You had algebra first period, across the hall from my trig class. You ate a sack lunch with the same three girls every day, Lou Ann, Becky and Robbie Sue. You spent your free period in the library reading Hemingway and Steinbeck. And you went straight home after school without doing any extracurricular activities, except on Thursdays. For some reason, on Thursdays you showed up at football practice. Why was that, Callie?”
Callie was confused. How could Trace possibly know so much about her activities in high school? They hadn’t even met until she showed up at the University of Texas campus. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“You haven’t answered my question. Why did you come to football practice on Thursdays?”
“Because that was the day I did the grocery shopping, and I didn’t have to be home until later.”
“Why were you there, Calllie?”
Callie stared into his eyes, afraid to admit the truth. But what difference could it possibly make now? She swallowed hard and said, “I was there to see you.”
He gave a sigh of satisfaction. “I hoped that was it. But I never knew for sure.”
Callie’s brow furrowed. “You wanted me to notice you?”
“I noticed you. Couldn’t you feel my eyes on you? Didn’t you ever sense the force of my boyish lust? I had it bad for you my senior year. I couldn’t walk past you in the hall without needing to hold my books in my lap when I saw down in the next class.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Trace chuckled. “I wish I were.”
“Then it wasn’t an accident, our meeting like that at UT?”
“That’s the miracle of it,” Trace said. “It was entirely by accident. Fate. Kisma. Karma. Whatever you want to call it.
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Joan Johnston (The Cowboy (Bitter Creek #1))
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early. It was mind-numbing, but at least I got to see Mitch. He didn’t have class for another hour, and I figured we could use that time to get some coffee… or just occupy his office. I could think of a few things that I preferred to working. My feet carried me straight down the hallway of the history building at the University of Texas, Austin. I was anxious for that uninterrupted
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K.A. Linde (The Wright Brother (Wright #1))
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Is there one in particular, Tennyson?” Henry said, ducking out from under her arm. “I could arrange a meeting.”
“Yeah, the one from Texas…what’s his name?”
“That would be Dylan. But he’s a nice guy and you’d break his heart. He dropped out of Texas A&M to come up here and saddle bum around with my horses year-round. Knowing your dad, I think you’d better be looking for a pre-med honors student.”
“Leave my dad out of this.
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Laura Anderson Kurk (Glass Girl (Glass Girl, #1))
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In all of these papers, we find the key words admixture and expansion used over and over again. In other words, no matter how much Homo sapiens explores and moves about, we like to mate with whatever other people we meet up with.
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Ian Tattersall (Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth (Texas A&M University Anthropology Series Book 15))
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yet people and things have gone through something, something that did not, indeed, change them but that did (in a manner of speaking) affirm what they, and precisely they, were as individuals, something that did verify and establish
their identity, their durability and continuity. The hammer of events shatters nothing and forges nothing-it merely tries the durability of an already finished product. And the product passes the test. Thus is constituted the artistic and ideological meaning of the Greek romance.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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A second example of this abandonment of fundamental principles can be found in recent trends in the U.S. Supreme Court. Note what Lino A. Graglia, a professor of law at the University of Texas, has to say about this: 'Purporting merely to enforce the Constitution, the Supreme Court has for some thirty years usurped and exercised legislative powers that its predecessors could not have dreamed of, making itself the most powerful and important institution of government in regard to the nature and quality of life in our society....
'It has literally decided issues of life and death, removing from the states the power to prevent or significantly restrain the practice of abortion, and, after effectively prohibiting capital punishment for two decades, now imposing such costly and time-consuming restrictions on its use as almost to amount to prohibition.
'In the area of morality and religion, the Court has removed from both the federal and state government nearly all power to prohibit the distribution and sale or exhibition of pornographic materials.... It has prohibited the states from providing for prayer or Bible-reading in the public schools.
'The Court has created for criminal defendants rights that do not exist under any other system of law-for example, the possibility of almost endless appeals with all costs paid by the state-and which have made the prosecution so complex and difficult as to make the attempt frequently seem not worthwhile. It has severely restricted the power of the states and cities to limit marches and other public demonstrations and otherwise maintain order in the streets and other public places.
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Ezra Taft Benson (The Constitution: A Heavenly Banner)
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In an interview posted on the University of Texas’s website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experiences into language essentially makes them “graspable.
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Brené Brown (Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.)
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-Don't advertise when you are down. When people believe that you are down, they press down; when they think you are up, they push up.
- Don't worry that people talk about you, just hope that the talk is good. The time to worry is when no one mentions you at all, for it means that you have made no impression.
- Don't tell a lie; you may have to tell a second, even a third, to protect the first one. Real trouble begins when you forget the order in which you told them.
- Don't look back when you have made a decision. You cannot change the past, and looking back only impedes forward movement.
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Charity Adams Earley (One Woman's Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (Texas A & M University Military History Series, #12))
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As James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, puts it, “75 percent of spontaneous food purchases can be traced to a nagging child. And one out of two mothers will buy a food simply because her child requests it. To trigger desire in a child is to trigger desire in the whole family.
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Martin Lindstrom (Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy)
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There are three major genetic observations that have been made about the diversity of people living on the African continent. First, Africa shows more genetic diversity than the other continents. Second, most of the genetic variation outside of Africa is a subset of the variation found within Africa. Finally, genetic diversity decreases with increasing distance from Africa.
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Ian Tattersall (Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth (Texas A&M University Anthropology Series Book 15))
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If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you’d be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them. If your doctor suggests that you have angioplasty — even though some current research suggests that angioplasty often does little to prevent heart attacks — you aren’t likely to think that the doctor is using his informational advantage to make a few thousand dollars for himself or his buddy. But as David Hillis, an interventional cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, explained to the New York Times, a doctor may have the same economic incentives as a car salesman or a funeral director or a mutual fund manager: “If you’re an invasive cardiologist and Joe Smith, the local internist, is sending you patients, and if you tell them they don’t need the procedure, pretty soon Joe Smith doesn’t send patients anymore.”
Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear. Fear that your children will find you dead on the bathroom floor of a heart attack if you do not have angioplasty surgery. Fear that a cheap casket will expose your grandmother to a terrible underground fate. Fear that a $25,000 car will crumple like a toy in an accident, whereas a $50,000 car will wrap your loved ones in a cocoon of impregnable steel.
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Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
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studies show that having phones even nearby and face down on silent mode is still distracting. The title of one recent paper by researchers at the University of Texas and UC San Diego said it all: “The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” Their study of nearly 800 smartphone users found that those who were told to place their phones in another room performed better on a test of attention than did those allowed to keep the phones by their side. When I spoke with my teenage son about the study mentioned above, he wasn’t surprised by the findings. He said, “Pops, its FOMO” (fear of missing out). Even when not directly holding a phone or gazing at the screen, there is a fear of missing out, so the siren call from the phone still tugs at one’s attention.
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Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
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The accomplishment of the testimony was two-fold: It changed the death of Marshall from suicide to death by gunshot, and it brought into light bespectacled Johnson hit man, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace. At one point, Wallace, a former marine who had been the president of the University of Texas student body, had strong political aspirations. In 1946, Wallace was an organizer for Homer Rainey’s campaign for governor.44 Wallace eventually became indebted to Johnson, and the closest he would ever get to political office would be in administering of carnage for Johnson and his Texas business associates. Wallace was the Mr. X at the gas station asking Nolan Griffin for directions. Described as a “hatchet man”45 for Johnson by Lyndon’s mistress Madeleine Brown, Wallace was an important link in many of the murders connected to Johnson. Estes’s lawyer, Douglas Caddy, revealed Wallace’s and Johnson’s complicity in Texas-style justice in a letter to Stephan S. Trott at the US Department of Justice: My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960’s. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mack Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses: Murders 1. The killing of Henry Marshall 2. The killing of George Krutilek 3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary 4. The killing of Coleman Wade 5. The killing of Josefa Johnson 6. The killing of John Kinser 7. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy46
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Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ)
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I find three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres: (i) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness.
These three characteristics of the novel are all organically interrelated and have all been powerfully affected by a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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Dear Merlin, How empty is empty space? ARTHUR LEVY HOUSTON, TEXAS When a rabbit disappears into “thin air” at a magic show nobody tells you the thin air already contains over 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quintillion) atoms per cubic centimeter. The very best laboratory vacuum chambers have as few as 10,000 atoms per cubic centimeter. Interplanetary space gets down to about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter while interstellar space is as low as 0.5 atoms per cubic centimeter. The award for nothingness, however, must be given to intergalactic space. There it is difficult to find more than 0.0000001 atoms per cubic centimeter. It has been postulated that outside the universe, where there is no space, there is no nothing. We might call this hypothetical region (where we are certain to find multitudes of rabbits) nothing-nothing
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Merlin's Tour of the Universe: A Skywatcher's Guide to Everything from Mars and Quasars to Comets, Planets, Blue Moons, and Werewolves)
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Other genres are constituted by a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre. Language, in other words, is assimilated to form. The novel by contrast seeks to shape its form to languages; it has a completely different relationship to languages from other genres since it constantly experiments with new shapes in order to display the variety and immediacy of speech diversity.
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
“
In a commencement speech at the University of Texas, Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of the US Special Operations Command, said that when he was training to be a Navy SEAL, he was required to make his bed every morning to square-cornered perfection—annoying at the time, but in retrospect one of the most important life lessons he ever learned. “If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day,” he told graduates. “It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another.” Making your bed, McRaven went on, reinforces the fact that the small things in life matter. “If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right. And if, by chance, you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.
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Jancee Dunn (How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids)
“
A second case concerns Charles Whitman, the 1966 “Texas Tower” sniper who, after killing his wife and mother, opened fire atop a tower at the University of Texas in Austin, killing sixteen and wounding thirty-two, one of the first school massacres. Whitman was literally an Eagle Scout and childhood choirboy, a happily married engineering major with an IQ in the 99th percentile. In the prior year he had seen doctors, complaining of severe headaches and violent impulses (e.g., to shoot people from the campus tower). He left notes by the bodies of his wife and his mother, proclaiming love and puzzlement at his actions: “I cannot rationaly [sic] pinpoint any specific reason for [killing her],” and “let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart.” His suicide note requested an autopsy of his brain, and that any money he had be given to a mental health foundation. The autopsy proved his intuition correct—Whitman had a glioblastoma tumor pressing on his amygdala.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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A 20 year old woman in Houston, Texas, was arrested at Lamar University, after posting a tweet. The message on Twitter was bragging about how she still had a warrant in Pearland, Texas, and how the "pigs" would absolutely never be able to catch her. Since her full name (Mahogany Mason-Kelly, hardly a common name) and her school information was easily found on her Twitter account, she was quickly arrested. It was then found that she had originally given the police officers her sister's name during the arrest.
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Jeffrey Fisher (Stupid Criminals: Funny and True Crime Stories)
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Historically, chromosomes were not at all easy to study. They spend most of their existence balled up in an indistinguishable mass in the cell nucleus. The only way to count them was to get fresh samples from living cells at the moment of cell division, and that was a tall order. Cell biologists, according to one report, “literally waited at the foot of the gallows in order to fix the testis of an executed criminal immediately after death before the chromosomes could clump.” Even then the chromosomes tended to overlap and blur, making anything but a rough count difficult. But in 1921, a cytologist at the University of Texas named Theophilus Painter announced that he had secured good images and declared with reassuring confidence that he had counted twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. That number stuck, universally unquestioned, for thirty-five years until a closer examination in 1956 showed that in fact we have just twenty-three pairs—a fact that had been clearly evident in photographs for years (including in at least one popular textbook illustration) had anyone taken the trouble to count.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres
suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the "novelistic" layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the most important thing-the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series Book 1))
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James Pennebaker, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Writing to Heal, has done some of the most important and fascinating research I’ve seen on the power of expressive writing in the healing process. In an interview posted on the University of Texas’s website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experiences into language essentially makes them “graspable.” What’s important to note about Pennebaker’s research is the fact that he advocates limited writing, or short spurts. He’s found that writing about emotional upheavals for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day on four consecutive days can decrease anxiety, rumination, and depressive symptoms and boost our immune systems.
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Brené Brown (Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.)
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Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave.47 When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity (Figure 26.7). Fig. 26.6. Our bet about naked singularities. Fig. 26.7. Left: Matthew Choptuik. Middle: An imploding gravitational wave. Right: The boiling produced by the wave, and the naked singularity at the center of the magnifying glass. Now, such a singularity can never occur in nature. The required tuning is not a natural thing. But an exceedingly advanced civilization could produce such a singularity artificially by precisely tuning a wave’s implosion, and then could try to extract the laws of quantum gravity from the singularity’s behavior.
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Kip S. Thorne (The Science of Interstellar)
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Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was born in New York City on October 6, 1924. He died of cancer on January 2, 1999. Dr. West served in the U.S. Army during World War II and received his M.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1948, prior to Air Force LSD and MKULTRA contracts carried out there. He did his psychiatry residency from 1949 to 1952 at Cornell (an MKULTRA Institution and site of the MKULTRA cutout The Human Ecology Foundation). From 1948 to 1956 he was Chief, Psychiatry Service, 3700th USAF Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas Psychiatrist-in-Chief, University of Oklahoma Consultant in Psychiatry, Oklahoma City Veterans Administration Hospital Consultant in Psychiatry. [...]
Dr. West was co-editor of a book entitled Hallucinations, Behavior, Experience, and Theory[285]. One of the contributors to this book, Theodore Sarbin, Ph.D., is a member of the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). Other members of the FMSF Board include Dr. Martin Orne, Dr. Margaret Singer, Dr. Richard Ofshe, Dr. Paul McHugh, Dr. David Dinges, Dr. Harold Lief, Emily Carota Orne, and Dr. Michael Persinger. The connections of these individuals to the mind control network are analyzed in this and the next two chapters. Dr. Sarbin[272] (see Ross, 1997) believes that multiple personality disorder is almost always a therapist-created artifact and does not exist as a naturally-occurring disorder, a view adhered to by Dr. McHugh[188], [189], Dr. Ofshe[213] and other members of the FMSF Board[191], [243].
Dr. Ofshe is a colleague and co-author of Dr. Singer[214], who is in turn a colleague and co author of Dr. West[329]. Denial of the reality of multiple personality by these doctors in the mind control network, who are also on the FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board, could be disinformation. The disinformation could be amplified by attacks on specialists in multiple personality as CIA conspiracy lunatics[3], [79], [191], [213].
The FMSF is the only organization in the world that has attacked the reality of multiple personality in an organized, systematic fashion.
FMSF Professional and Advisory Board Members publish most of the articles and letters to editors of psychiatry journals hostile to multiple personality disorder.
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Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
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at the moment—and looking for other boats. Kelly advanced the port throttle a notch farther as he turned the wheel, allowing Springer to pivot all the more quickly in the narrow channel, and then he was pointed straight out. He advanced the starboard throttle next, bringing his cruiser to a mannerly five knots as he headed past the ranks of motor and sail yachts. Pam was looking around at the boats, too, mainly aft, and her eyes fixed on the parking lot for a long couple of seconds before she looked forward again, her body relaxing more as she did so. “You know anything about boats?” Kelly asked. “Not much,” she admitted, and for the first time he noticed her accent. “Where you from?” “Texas. How about you?” “Indianapolis, originally, but it’s been a while.” “What’s this?” she asked. Her hands reached out to touch the tattoo on his forearm. “It’s from one of the places I’ve been,” he said. “Not a very nice place.” “Oh, over there.” She understood. “That’s the place.” Kelly nodded matter-of-factly. They were out of the yacht basin now, and he advanced the throttles yet again. “What did you do there?” “Nothing to talk to a lady about,” Kelly replied, looking around from a half-standing position. “What makes you think I’m a lady?” she asked. It caught him short, but he was getting used to it by now. He’d also found that talking to a girl, no matter what the subject, was something that he needed to do. For the first time he answered her smile with one of his own. “Well, it wouldn’t be very nice of me if I assumed that you weren’t.” “I wondered how long it would be before you smiled.” You have a very nice smile, her tone told him. How’s six months grab you? he almost said. Instead he laughed, mainly at himself. That was something else he needed to do. “I’m sorry. Guess I haven’t been very good company.” He turned to look at her again and saw understanding in her eyes. Just a quiet look, very human and feminine, but it shook Kelly. He could feel it happen, and ignored the part of his consciousness that told him that it was something he’d needed badly for months. That was something he didn’t need to hear, especially from himself. Loneliness was bad enough without reflection on its misery. Her hand reached out yet again, ostensibly to stroke the tattoo, but that wasn’t what it was all about. It was amazing how warm her touch was, even under a hot afternoon sun. Perhaps it was a measure of just how cold his life had become. But he had a boat to navigate. There was
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Tom Clancy (Without Remorse (John Clark, #1; Jack Ryan Universe, #1))
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While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world.
Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies.
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Kevin D. Mitnick (The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers)
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The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism.
It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement.
The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions.
By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity.
I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it.
Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege.
But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum.
While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers.
These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant.
So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change.
If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.
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Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
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As implied in Levy’s quote, the process of freely choosing what sort of person you become, despite whatever bad constitutive luck you’ve had, is usually framed as a gradual, usually maturational process. In a debate with Dennett, incompatibilist Gregg Caruso outlined chapter 3’s essence—we have no control over either the biology or the environment thrown at us. Dennett’s response was “So what? The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc.” This is a logical outcome of Dennett’s claim that bad and good luck average out over time: Come on, get your act together. You’ve had enough time to take responsibility, to choose to catch up to everyone else in the marathon.[2] A similar view comes from the distinguished philosopher Robert Kane, of the University of Texas: “Free will in my view involves more than merely free of action. It concerns self-formation. The relevant question for free will is this: How did you get to be the kind of person you now are?” Roskies and Shadlen write, “It is plausible to think that agents might be held morally responsible even for decisions that are not conscious, if those decisions are due to policy settings which are expressions of the agent [in other words, acts of free will in the past].”[3] Not all versions of this idea require gradual acquisition of past-tense free will. Kane believes that “choose what sort of person you’re going to be” happens at moments of crisis, at major forks in the road, at moments of what he calls “Self-Forming Actions” (and he proposes a mechanism by which this supposedly occurs, which we’ll touch on briefly in chapter 10). In contrast, psychiatrist Sean Spence, of the University of Sheffield, believes that those I-had-free-will-back-then moments happen when life is at its optimal, rather than in crisis.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will)
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Anti-voting lawmakers perhaps weren’t intending to make it harder for married white women to vote, but that’s exactly what they did by requiring an exact name match across all forms of identification in many states in recent years. Birth certificates list people’s original surnames, but if they change their names upon marriage, their more recent forms of ID usually show their married names. Sandra Watts is a married white judge in the state of Texas who was forced to use a provisional ballot in 2013 under the state’s voter ID law. She was outraged at the imposition: “Why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last forty-nine years?” Like many women, she included her maiden name as her middle name when she took her husband’s last name—and that’s what her driver’s license showed. But on the voter rolls, her middle name was the one her parents gave her at birth, which she no longer used. And like that, she lost her vote—all because of a law intended to suppress people like Judge Watts’s fellow Texan Anthony Settles, a Black septuagenarian and retired engineer. Anthony Settles was in possession of his Social Security card, an expired Texas identification card, and his old University of Houston student ID, but he couldn’t get a new photo ID to vote in 2016 because his mother had changed his name when she remarried in 1964. Several lawyers tried to help him track down the name-change certificate in courthouses, to no avail; his only recourse was to go to court for a new one, at a cost of $250. Elderly, rural, and low-income voters are more likely not to have birth certificates or to have documents containing clerical errors. Hargie Randell, a legally blind Black Texan who couldn’t drive but who had a current voter registration card used before the new Texas law, had to arrange for people to drive him to the Department of Public Safety office three times, and once to the county clerk’s office an hour away, only to end up with a birth certificate that spelled his name wrong by one letter.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
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The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest. The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition, Ramenofsky and Galloway argued, extended across the whole Southeast. The societies of the Caddo, on the Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa, in western Georgia, both disintegrated soon after. The Caddo had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain’s ability to control our many degrees of freedom. This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers. It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are.
The reality of this kind of free will is underlined by the fact that it cannot be taken for granted. Brain injuries, or unlucky draws from the lotteries of our genes and our environments, can undermine our ability to exercise voluntary behaviour. People with anarchic hand syndrome make voluntary actions which they do not experience as being theirs, while those with akinetic mutism are unable to make any voluntary actions at all. An awkwardly located brain tumour can transform an engineering student into a mass school shooter, as happened in the case of Charles Whitman, the ‘Texas Tower Sniper’, or engender in a previously blameless teacher a rampant paedophilia – a tendency which disappeared when the tumour was removed, and returned when it grew back.
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Anil Seth (Being You: A New Science of Consciousness)
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Every time the cataclysmic concept has come to life, the 'beast' has been stoned, burned at the stake, beaten to a pulp, and buried with a vengeance; but the corpse simply won't stay dead. Each time, it raises the lid of its coffin and says in sepulchral tones: 'You will die before I.'
The latest of the challengers is Prof. Frank C. Hibben, who in his book, 'The Lost Americans,' said:
'This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive. [...] What caused the death of forty million animals. [...] The 'corpus delicti' in this mystery may be found almost anywhere. [...] Their bones lie bleaching in the sands of Florida and in the gravels of New Jersey. They weather out of the dry terraces of Texas and protrude from the sticky ooze of the tar pits off Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. [...] The bodies of the victims are everywhere. [...] We find literally thousands together [...] young and old, foal with dam, calf with cow. [...] The muck pits of Alaska are filled with evidence of universal death [...] a picture of quick extinction. [...] Any argument as to the cause [...] must apply to North America, Siberia, and Europe as well.'
'[...] Mamooth and bison were torn and twisted as though by a cosmic hand in a godly rage.'
'[...] In many places the Alaskan muck blanket is packed with animal bones and debris in trainload lots [...] mammoth, mastodon [...] bison, horses, wolves, bears, and lions. [...] A faunal population [...] in the middle of some cataclysmic catastrophe [...] was suddenly frozen [...] in a grim charade.'
Fantastic winds; volcanic burning; inundation and burial in muck; preservation by deep-freeze. 'Any good solution to a consuming mystery must answer all of the facts,' challenges Hibben.
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Chan Thomas (The Adam & Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms)
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Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare.
Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest.
Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine.
In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
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Hank Bracker
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Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small.
He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking
could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain
possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers.
Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea.
"Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more
powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he
started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small
church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime
preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the
Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over
the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens
of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began
converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand.
L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the
creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed
Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that
they use his name. It's a postrational religion.
"He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the
cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult
prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major
functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and
vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let
religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of
drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood
serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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- I’m a normal kid, I was raised by television.
The secret to great barbeque: only Oscar knows it. Life should be so simple as enjoying ribs, farting, crapping, pissing, fucking and drinking, and maybe smoking too, but anything other than that is too complicated, life should be simple. It is not.
- Work? You would go to work even if there’s a chance your job’s imaginary?
Imaginary or not, the questions Max poses remain as relevant for Frank, Sam, and Oscar as they are for us.
A slight hangover won’t be best friends with any kind of daylight and while this one wasn’t particularly hazardous, they wouldn’t be having any of it.
"...the lunatic is on the grass."
Surely if you see a bunch of people having a picnic in a park that would turn your head wouldn’t it? How normal a picnic really is? When was the last time you saw one happening? Not in a movie, in real life.
If a man’s hat falls to the ground, said man is expected to pick it up. That’s the premise.
I’m not some pissy little kid who stopped believing in God because some priests rape kids. I don’t believe in God because I can’t be sure of its
existence.
I’m not some pissy little kid who stopped believing in God because the church raped kids. I don’t believe in God because I can’t be sure of its existence.
Nothing is wrong.
You don’t take another man’s hat, another man’s ride, or another man’s woman. Those are universal laws.
- You do not take another man’s hat, another man’s ride, or another man's woman. Universal laws, Rosa.
- Jesus, no. That won’t be necessary Mr. Coyote. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through the course of my life is this: loaded guns make pretty compelling arguments, and it’s not like I was the star in the debate team in high school.
A lot of dinners are joined by assholes, people that don’t matter, and good friends too, but breakfast are kind of elite. You have breakfast with fewer people in your life and most of the time those people you have breakfast with are the good ones.
- That’s the thing: I don’t know. I’m aware of the fact that guns might not be the ultimate protection when what we’re facing is the truth, we’re coming to terms with our reality, but we don’t know what we might find out there and if by god there’s an imaginary monster or something waiting there for us, I’d rather have ammo than luck
No gun will ever protect a man as he prepares to meet his maker.
Personally, I think half a burger is something you can have regardless of how hungry you are.
Air conditioning is a marvel of modern science, how could we have lived without it?
In the end, there was no greener grass than Texas.
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Santiago Rodriguez (An Imaginary Dog Needs to Find Out Whether Or Not His Master's Real)
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Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D
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Anonymous
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The Lance deHaven-Smith book Conspiracy Theory in America (published by the University of Texas) reveals that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was invented by the CIA to discredit doubters of the Warren Commission, which claims that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was carried out alone by a single “lone gunman.” Distraught by the murder of President Kennedy, a Beverly Hills housewife named Mae Brussell took it upon herself to buy all 26 printed volumes issued by the Warren Commission report, and attempt to make sense of the thing by cross-indexing the entire work. Mae was disturbed by the contradictory information and unreported realities she discovered in those volumes. As a result, she started subscribing to many major newspapers and magazines, whose stories she filed and organized, uncovering disquieting connections and patterns behind government and corporate malfeasance.
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Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
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Ross himself had gained the expertise to build his government-eluding site after attending one of the best-funded public high schools in Texas and two public universities.
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Nathaniel Popper (Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money)
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As Rebecca Bigler of the University of Texas points out, “Going to integrated schools gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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In college in Austin, I clocked the auburn-haired Asian kids who smoked Marlboro Light 100s and drove Mitsubishi 3000 GTs and Toyota Celicas with swooping, pearlized spoilers. They talked about AKs, were seemingly very good at pool, hailed mostly from Houston, and were decidedly cooler than church nerds or extracurricular-scholastic-group nerds. We didn’t interact much beyond the shade they’d throw as I walked by with my white boyfriend. “He’s half Mexican!” I wanted to tell them, but of course, that proved nothing. The other Asian crews were part of the Greek system, and I was leery of them as well. I knew them only because the housing administration of the University of Texas at Austin automatically roomed you with an Asian kid in a larger suite of Asian kids, and my Chinese suitemates rushed for Asian Panhellenic sororities. My roommate was a gorgeous socialite from Taiwan who spoke little English and dated guys who bought her clothes. She wore only Armani. We all kept a healthy distance.
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Mary H.K. Choi (Oh, Never Mind)
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And who's to say she wasn't right? After all, love is the most powerful thing in the universe; the determining factor in one's dealings on earth. Though challenged, it has never been conquered; though questioned, it has never been quieted; and though tested, it has never been stilled. Love can build up or it can tear down; make life totally fulfilling, or destroy it completely. It can alter the past, enrich the present, and change the future. With it one can face anything. Without it a person will turn his back on everything. In the presence of love all sins fade; while in its absence they magnify, stark and vivid, in all their ugliness. Yes, love can hurt, scar, and wound; but it can also heal, repair, and bind. It can open one's eyes to reality, or it can blind them completely. True love has no illusions. It sees things in a clear light and accepts them anyway. In the end, it all comes down to choice. And the only pain is when it is not returned. And the only crime is when one is blind to its offering.
Only what did he know? He was, after all, just a cat.
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James Hold (Out of Texas 4: Josie and the Alley Cat)
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Ray was downtown on Lower Broad and saw some guy with that sign: ‘Friend for Life, 25 cents.’ It seems to be a simple song, but it’s great,” Guy says. “I glanced over it in my mind for several years, and, after dissecting it, it’s strong as mare’s breath. It’s really wild.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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Well, it’s all right. I’m going through the treatments and stuff like that.’ I said ‘I’m really sorry. I understand those treatments are really rough.’ Guy says, ‘Oh, hell. I’ve had hangovers worse than this.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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After she was bedridden for several years, she seemed kind of hollow. I started avoiding her because I was so uncomfortable on the phone with her and seeing her like that. Once in a while there’d be a little glimmer of the old Susanna, but mostly just this hollow face. It’s really sad.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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Guy declined a drink. He told me the chemotherapy had made him lose his taste for alcohol, and he was still pissed off about it.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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He’s respected for that. He hasn’t given in to radio or to anything. He writes from his heart. He’s nice. He’s kind, and he’s lived his life exactly how he’s wanted to.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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Discreetly, I found the waiter and paid the $15 check for our migas. When Guy found out I paid the check, he was miffed.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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Guy is the one who said ‘You have to throw out the best line of your song if it doesn’t serve the rest of the song.
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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Guy brought in his studio band for the final show on September 27. Shawn Camp played fiddle and mandolin, Bryn Davies
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Tamara Saviano (Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University))
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Parents always have the best of intentions when they wish not to impose too much on their children, but in the absence of a normative standard, something else always fills the vacuum. Today, for instance, we flatter ourselves that we are morally neutral, that we can’t comment on a girl’s behavior for fear of crushing her “sexuality,” and yet we are constantly negatively judging a girl’s body rather than praising her internal qualities. The reality is that we haven’t moved away from judgment at all; it’s just that we judge girls now for their superficial “deficiencies.” Think of the alarming increase in the number of parents who buy their thirteen-to-eighteen-year-old daughters breast implants despite the high risk of surgical complications, or consider eleven-year-old Lilly Grasso, an athletic girl of normal weight who came home from school toting a so-called “fat letter” warning her mother that her BMI put her at risk. (Twenty-one out of fifty states now mandate BMI testing in schools, with dubious results.) Then there is the large number of boys who report that they are “revolted” by girls whose privates do not resemble those of the porn stars they view online, and in 2013, a student body president at the University of Texas–Austin even felt free to share his views about how to judge a woman’s private parts, and whether they will prove to be “gross,” based on her general appearance. Is encountering such negative judgments directed against a young woman’s body and most private areas empowering? Is such an attitude enlightened for either party? Or is it more empowering to praise a young woman for her internal qualities of character? I personally feel that it is the latter.
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Wendy Shalit (A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue)
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In a commencement speech at the University of Texas in 2014, William H. McRaven explained this concept in a simple message he gave to those seeking success: “Make your bed in the morning.” McRaven argues this seemingly insignificant detail starts your day off with accomplishment. You start by fighting the resistance we’re all going to experience. By simply committing to action and rising up to the challenge of making our bed, we create a domino effect that leads to us challenging our bodies, minds, and spirits. This concept is simple: Your life will show proof of your principles and your deeply rooted integrity. If you can’t build the muscle of persistence during low-stakes situations, it’ll become incredibly difficult to show up when the stakes are high.
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Tommy Baker (The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love with the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams)
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When I was interviewed to be president of Texas A&M, I told the search committee that if they were looking for someone to maintain the status quo, they had the wrong guy. “I don’t do maintenance,” I told them. My interest, I continued, was taking on the challenge of making a good institution better. I would be “an agent of change” while preserving the core values and traditions of the university. This was, I had discovered, my “core competency.” I loved all three institutions I led, but part of that love was the conviction that each could be better.
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Robert M. Gates (A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service)
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but because in the universe in which Larry Roberts was educated and now lived, it just wasn’t right for a guy with an MIT PhD in engineering to report to a guy with a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Texas.
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Leslie Berlin (Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age)
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All known cases of women in the ranks involved volunteers who, unlike regulars, often did not have to undergo physical examination upon enlistment. One Alabama Volunteer passed off a female companion as his frail younger brother until the ruse was discovered. Caroline Newcome took the name "Bill" and served as a private in the Missouri volunteers until pregnancy betrayed her. A similar case occurred in the Mississippi volunteers.
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Richard Bruce Winders (Mr. Polk's Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series Book 51))
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Avowed Marxist and tenured professor at the University of Texas, David Michael Smith, called capitalism “a system based on exploitation and oppression and domination and racism and war—and lots of other things.”20 Right. And socialism is a system based on pretty butterflies and flowers and tolerance of all living creatures.
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Ben Shapiro (Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth)
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Forty percent of the new dental school graduates were women, although as late as 1970 the dean of the University of Texas dental school had insisted on admitting no more than two women in every class of a hundred because “girls aren’t strong enough to pull teeth.
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Gail Collins (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present)
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I grew up in a bookless town, in a bookless part of the state—when I stepped into a university library, at age eighteen, the whole of
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Larry McMurtry (In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas)
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the Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute does not actually exist. It has no website, no phone number and no buildings. It does have a post office box in Henan province’s capital city, Zhengzhou, but that’s about it. The name is in fact a cover for the university that trains China’s military hackers and signals intelligence officers, the People’s Liberation Army Information Engineering University, which is based in Zhengzhou.109 Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Clemson University in South Carolina, Louisiana State University, and City University of New York have all collaborated with individuals who disguise their affiliation with this PLA university, which is in effect its cyberwarfare training school.
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Clive Hamilton (Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World)
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Sharon Fowler, from the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, in the 2008 San Antonio Heart Study8 prospectively studied 5158 adults over eight years. She found that instead of reducing the obesity, diet beverages substantially increased the risk of it by a mind-bending 47 percent. She writes, “These findings raise the question whether [artificial sweetener] use might be fueling—rather than fighting—our escalating obesity epidemic.
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Jason Fung (The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss (Why Intermittent Fasting Is the Key to Controlling Your Weight))
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100%原版制作學历證书【+V信1954 292 140】《德州理工大学學位證》Texas Tech University
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《德州理工大学學位證》
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In 2008, a study from the University of North Texas found that students who identified themselves as morning people earned significantly higher grades. In fact, the early risers had a full grade point higher than the night owls in the study with a 3.5 to 2.5 GPA respectively.
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Shawn Stevenson (Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success)
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As mentioned earlier, the 27th Amendment was one of 2 unratified amendments written by Madison that Congress sent to the states with the Bill of Rights. But here’s the story of how it was ratified. Unlike modern amendments, the proposed amendments in the Bill of Rights didn’t have expiration dates. So in 1982, 191 years after it failed, a sophomore political science student at the University of Texas–Austin named Gregory Watson noticed that some states had ratified it, but that it hadn’t expired. So he wrote a paper about the failed amendment and got a C from his TA. He appealed the grade, but his professor upheld the C. Pissed off, Watson started writing letters to various state legislatures. They noticed and began ratifying the amendment. Ten years after his C, Alabama became the 38th state to ratify it, giving it the ¾ (38) needed to add it to the U.S. Constitution.
In 2016, Watson’s paper was resubmitted for a grade change, with a request of an A+ for having caused an actual constitutional amendment. The University of Texas–Austin honored the change, but only gave the paper an A.
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Ben Sheehan (OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say?: A Non-Boring Guide to How Our Democracy is Supposed to Work)
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Douglas Bell is a debut African American writer with a BS in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a MA in business from Texas A&M University at College Station. Bell currently works as an engineer and once made his living as a magician. The heart of being a magician is about using magic to tell a story.
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Douglas Bell (CAKEWALK)
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As a Christian university administrator, it has been my life’s work to integrate faith and learning to equip students to be Christian servant leaders in their respective callings. In this book a dear friend of mine, Tony Carvalho, does not just integrate faith and learning, but rather he aids Christians in going beyond that into our central calling of integrating faith and living. Beyond Sunday Morning is a wonderful guide from a gifted business
leader who has implemented these practices into his own life and work.
This book is insightful, challenging, and inspiring.
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Dr. Gary Cook: Chancellor of Dallas Baptist University, Dallas, Texas
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Lonnie Wayne Olson is an administrator and adjunct Lecturer at Texas State University. Holding a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, Lonnie dedicates himself to inspiring his students with profound philosophical insights.
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Lonnie Wayne Olson
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. . . the Native American relationship with the land is very important . . . One could not any more own the land than one could own the air above the land or the rain that fell on it or the animals that lived on it. Land is so important and place is so important to tribal people that history for them is more a function of place than of time. People are associated with a particular region, the region is the centre of their world . . . consequently, that land is so intricately bound into the very soul of most tribal people that it's not something that you trade back and forth. And when they were forced to trade lands in the early part of the nineteenth century, and to give up land, in order to survive, it was a very traumatic experience for them. Another thing to remember is that most of the religious beliefs of tribal people are site-specific, and by that I mean that their cosmology, the powers in their universe, are also tied to the particular area in which they live. - David Edmunds, Professor of American History at the University of Texas
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Neil MacGregor (A History of the World in 100 Objects)
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HISTORY OF NIGERIA Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and the world’s eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption, and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria’s recent troubles, through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism, and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria’s history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential. TOYIN FALOLA is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Power of African Cultures (2003), Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (2004), and A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir (2004). MATTHEW M. HEATON is a Patrice Lumumba Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He has co-edited multiple volumes on health and illness in Africa with Toyin Falola, including HIV/AIDS, Illness and African Well-Being (2007) and Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (2007). A HISTORY OF NIGERIA
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Toyin Falola (A History of Nigeria)
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When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25
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Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
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For many years, Darrel Royal was the football coach for the University of Texas at Austin. They always had great teams and winning records. Sometimes, however, when they won a close game, a sportswriter would suggest that while the Longhorns were skilled, they had been lucky on that day. Hearing it one time too often, Coach Royal finally said, “Luck is partly the residue of design, the simple act of being prepared for luck when it arrives.” And there is something else to luck, Royal said—luck follows speed. Move, and luck finds you. Move quickly, and it finds you more often.
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Mac Anderson (You Can't Send a Duck to Eagle School: And Other Simple Truths of Leadership)
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Forgot to mention,” Serge called after them. “You’re on an advanced strain of St. Augustine called Floratam. Fun fact: got its name when cross-bred in 1972 by a joint research project from the University of Florida and Texas A&M. Get it? Flora-tam. Genetically engineered it to be extra chinch-bug resistant, in case you’re planning on sodding anytime soon.
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Tim Dorsey (Nuclear Jellyfish (Serge Storms, #11))
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We don’t have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don’t have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football.
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H.G. Bissinger (Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream)
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In fact, Wilson and King showed that the difference in the average protein-coding gene sequences of chimps and modern humans was about 1 percent. In other words, the proteins that we use in our day-to-day biology are nearly identical to those that chimpanzees and bonobos use.
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Ian Tattersall (Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth (Texas A&M University Anthropology Series Book 15))
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There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.
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Antonin Scalia
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Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)