Wanted 2008 Quotes

Believe me, I wanted to say. I've tried. Oh, and also, I'm wretchedly in love with you. Keep it light.

I stared into her eyes, wide under the thick fringe of lashes, and yearned for sleep. Not for oblivion, as I had before, not to escape boredom, but because I wanted to *dream*. Maybe, if I could be unconscious, if I could dream, I could live for a few hours in a world where she and I could be together. She dreamed of me. I wanted to dream of her.

No mistakes, I'd promised myself that i would make no mistakes, no matter how minimal they seemed. if i held her hand, i would only want more - another insignificant touch, another move closer to her. i could feel that. a new kind of desire was growing in me, working to override my self-control. no mistakes.

I didn't want the life that made sense. Not if the chaos meant i could have Bella.

Yet I wouldn't trade it. I didn't want the life that made sense. Not if the chaos meant I could be with Bella.

Maybe, if I could be unconscious, if I could dream, I could live for a few hours in a world where she and I could be together. She dreamed of me. I wanted to dream of her.

Found one of my old journals. from right around the time we were heading out on tour with NFG in the UK early 2008. i started reading it and couldn't help but cry a little bit. cause that person was really confused. and very lost. and as it went on, the person behind the pen seemed to get a little bit stronger.. that part felt good. it was the reminder that i needed that right now i'm as strong as ever. there really isn't a point to telling you all of this. except maybe i want to thank you. cause you are a constant reminder. that i'm not as lost as i once was.

I didn't want to be the monster! I didn't want to kill this room full of harmless children! I didn't want to lose everything I'd gained in a lifetime of sacrifice and denial!

(CBI lecture, Dublin, 2008. Speaking on the challenges presented by The Moorehawke Trilogy to the YA reader) You can't choose any of these characters and say, 'Yes! I'm completely on your side. You are the good guy! You are the one I agree with.' Because at some stage along the way every single one of these characters will let you down. They may not want to. They may have no choice. But they will let you down.

I wanted to kind of make this like, 'Yeah, this is what Batman would be in the real world'. But I had forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans, that smelling, not having a girlfriend—these are actually kind of heroic! So actually, sort of, Rorschach became the most popular character in Watchmen. I meant him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street saying, "I am Rorschach! That is my story!' And I'll be thinking: 'Yeah, great, can you just keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live'?

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are disturbed as to how, by, and against whom wealth and political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wanting to act with others, to "do something," you have much in common with the writers of the three essays in Manifesto.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book: When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language. And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books. So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.

Basically, I think I just want them to know that the world is deep and filled with variety. That there are infinite possibilities in the world they live in and that they are a part of this world. Perhaps it’s enough just to say that the world is rich and precious and that they hold it in their hands. I honestly made this film just wanting to tell these young girls, “Don’t worry, you can make it all right.

In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah. You’re on the ark. Yeah, you’re okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. That’s not a happy moment for Noah.” By

In 2008, America elected a man with no "hands-on" experience" of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of "doing" than any previous administration in American history. You want "change", so you vote for a bunch of guys who've never done nuthin' but sit around talking?

Merrill Lynch lost $40 billion or so of its own money in 2008, and it wants to manage yours?

Maybe that would be less crucial under Obama, Podesta thought, because Obama's approach was so intellectual. He compared Obama to Spock from Star Trek. The president-elect wanted to put his own ideas to work. He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics, seizing the moment of 2008 and driving it to a political victory.

The goal shouldn’t be to make your child eat an entire set of encyclopedias by the age of six. The goal should be to encourage your child to be curious—to want to learn about the world, and explore the things that are in it.

Libertarians: Never got over the fact they weren’t the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board. All for legalized drugs and prostitution but probably wouldn’t want their kids blowing strangers for crack; all for slashing taxes for nearly every social service but don’t seem to understand why most people aren’t at all keen to trade in even the minimal safety net the US provides for 55-gallon barrels of beans and rice, a crossbow and a first-aid kit in the basement. Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn’t actually involve real live humans. Libertarians

I always had the impression it was just a job for you.” I hesitate. “I want to do it for Robert. It feels like a chance for me to give back a little.” “Give back?” Davis repeats. “You work there. You don’t owe them your virginity.” This makes me laugh. “Right. Unless they have a time turner and can go back to 2008 and Eric Mordito’s basement, I think that ship has sailed.” It takes him a few seconds to compute and then, “Gross, Holls. Mordito? Eric and I shared a pottery wheel my sophomore year.” “It’s possible you’re missing the point

I’m learning geography is about loss and so I keep moving into closets that never smell like you. I’m learning not to order everything and want nothing. My mouth is empty. The words won’t stay. — Paul Guest, from “Airport Letter 2,” My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008)

A Gallup Study completed in 2008 asked followers which qualities they most wanted from their leaders. The expected descriptors—vision, purpose, drive, ambition, wisdom—were largely absent. Instead, the qualities people most want from their leaders are trust, compassion, stability and hope, honesty, integrity and respect.17

Donald Trump consciously stokes racist sentiment, and has given a rocket boost to the ‘alt-right’ fringe of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But to write off all those who voted for him as bigoted will only make his job easier. It is also inaccurate. Millions who backed Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Did they suddenly become deplorable? A better explanation is that many kinds of Americans have long felt alienated from an establishment that has routinely sidelined their economic complaints. In 2008 America went for the outsider, an African-American with barely any experience in federal politics. Obama offered hope. In 2016 it went for another outsider with no background in any kind of politics. Trump channelled rage. To be clear: Trump poses a mortal threat to all America’s most precious qualities. But by giving a higher priority to the politics of ethnic identity than people’s common interests, the American left helped to create what it feared. The clash of economic interests is about relative trade-offs. Ethnic politics is a game of absolutes. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the overwhelming majority of non-college whites. By 2016, most of them had defected. Having branded their defection as racially motivated, liberals are signalling that they do not want them back.

I don’t know Mr. Wilson to any degree—I am one of those who knew him best for creating the source material for Life Force, which was a terrible movie—but my wish for him was that he lived the sort of life where he didn’t actually care what his obits said, and instead enjoyed his life and left work that had the possibility of speaking for itself, over time. If you’re a creative (or indeed any other) person, let me suggest you don’t worry about your obits either. As well as you can, live the life you want to live and make the work you want to make. After you’re gone, it’ll all be sorted out or not. You won’t be around to worry about it. Focus on the parts you’re around for.

There's a kind of science defense lobby or evolution defense lobby in particular . They are mostly atheist, but they are desperately wanting to be friendly to mainstream, sensible, religious people. And the way you do that is to tell them that there's no incompatibility between science and religion. [Expelled, No Intelligence allowed, 2008, 47m38]

In 2008, America elected a man with no “hands-on experience” of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of doing than any previous administration in American history. You want “change,” so you vote for a bunch of guys who’ve never done nuthin’ but sit around talking?

The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can. The story is as old as the first Thanksgiving. Both the con man and his target want to take advantage of a situation; the difference between them is that the con man succeeds. The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended, flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good at exploiting other people. This has always been true, but it is becoming all-encompassing. And it’s a bad lesson to learn the way millennials did--just as we were becoming adults.

In November, just over four months after shipping its first iPhone, Apple revealed that it would make available a software development kit for anyone who wanted to develop apps. “That’s when we knew Steve had finally come to see the light,” Gassée says. “Suddenly, that was all anyone was talking about in the Valley and in the VC community. Hundreds of little guys signed up, and the race was on. Then they announced the App Store. And then they released the iPhone 3G [the second version, which shipped in July 2008, and had better wireless and a faster microprocessor]. It was only then that the iPhone was truly finished, that it had all its basics, all its organs. It needed to grow, to muscle up, but it was complete as a child is complete.

Artists are the flowers of our world. The best ones are those that can stand out from the crowd and create their own concrete garden -- to move us, inspire us, and makes us think hard. A flower with no smell to it is just something to look at. However, a flower that emits a beautiful fragrance is the one we want in our homes and on our walls. Your mission as an artist, is to become the best-smelling flower in the world, so that when the day finally comes when you are plucked from the ground, the world will cry for the loss of your mind-stimulating fragrance. Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in garden loaded with thousands of the same flower, but they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple. Truth Is Crying, 2008

...a final word to "the children": do you want to get suckered like your big brothers and sisters? Those saps who spent 2008 standing behind the Obamessiah swaying and chanting, "We are the dawning of the Hopeychange" like brainwashed cult extras? Sooner or later you guys have to crawl out from under the social engineering and rediscover the contrarian spirit for which youth was once known...This will be the great battle of the next generation--to reclaim your birthright from those who spent it. If you don't, the entire global order will teeter and fall. But, if you do, you will have won a great victory. Every time a politician proposes new spending, tell him he's already spent your money, get his hand out of your pocket. Every time a politician says you can stay a child until your twenty-seventh birthday, tell him, "No, you're the big baby, not me--you've spent irresponsibly, and me and my pals are the ones who are gonna have to be the adults and clean up your mess. Don't treat met like a kid when your immaturity got us into this hole." This is a battle for the American idea, and it's an epic one, but--to reprise the lamest of lame-o-lines--you can do anything you want to do. So do it.

In the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.

Bill Clinton and many of the older generation of aides and advisers, believed it was a mistake to cordon her off from large swaths of the electorate. They understood the value of slicing and dicing voters to make efficient decisions, but they also felt that Hillary should be doing more to show that she wanted every vote. Some of them believed that instead of basing her campaign on Obama’s core coalition, she should have begun with the working-class whites and Latinos who fueled her 2008 run and built out.

Koch never lied to himself about what he was doing. While some others in the movement called themselves conservatives, he knew exactly how radical his cause was. Informed early on by one of his grantees that the playbook on revolutionary organization had been written by Vladimir Lenin, Koch dutifully cultivated a trusted “cadre” of high-level operatives, just as Lenin had done, to build a movement that refused compromise as it devised savvy maneuvers to alter the political math in its favor. But no war is won with all generals and no infantry. The cause also needed a popular base to succeed, one beyond the libertarians of the right, who were kindred in conviction but few in number. Camouflaging its more radical intentions, the cadre over time reached out and pulled in the vast and active conservative grassroots base by identifying points of common cause.21 Indeed, after 2008, the cadre more and more adopted the mantle of conservatism, knowing full well that the last thing they wanted was to conserve, but seeing advantages in doing so.

Target’s donation was clearly aimed at electing a governor with free-market priorities that would benefit consumers, workers, and retailers. But left-wing activists didn’t care about this truth; they wanted to make Target an example. They combed through Emmer’s record, looking for a politically sensitive issue, and landed on the candidate’s opposition to gay marriage. At the time, Emmer wasn’t out of the mainstream in that position. In 2008, the majority of Americans still opposed gay marriage, as did, for the record, Barack Obama.

Your words and your behavior must be in line with your beliefs before you can begin to enjoy a truly authentic life. When you stop worrying about pleasing everyone and, instead, are willing to be bold enough to live according to your own values, you'll experience many benefits: -Your self confidence will soar. The more you're able to see that you don't have to make people happy, the more independence and confidence you'll gain. You'll feel content with the decisions you make, even when other people disagree with your actions, because you'll know you made the right choice. -You'll have more time and energy to devote to your goals. Instead of wasting energy trying to become the person you think others want you to be, you'll have time and energy to work on yourself. When you channel that effort toward your goals, you'll be much more likely to be successful. -You'll feel less stressed. When you set limits and healthy boundaries, you'll experience a lot less stress and irritation. You'll feel like you have more control over your life. -You'll establish healthier relationships. Other people will develop more respect for you when you behave in an assertive manner. Your communication will improve and you'll be able to prevent yourself from building a lot of anger and resentment toward people. -You'll have increased willpower. An interesting 2008 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that people have much more willpower when they're making choices on their own accord rather than out of an attempt to please someone else. If you're only doing something to make someone else happy, you'll struggle to reach your goal. You'll be motivated to keep p the good work if you're convinced it's the best choice for you.

Of course, President Obama was correct that there has been positive, meaningful social change in our lifetimes—certainly in the years since I was born in 1954—but if we focus specifically on the twenty-year period from 1997 to 2017, we must acknowledge some setbacks beyond just the stubborn persistence of neighborhood and school segregation. There are three I want to highlight here: the anti–affirmative action backlash of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the economic collapse of 2008 known as the Great Recession, and the phenomenon known as mass incarceration.

For instance, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world: 39.1 percent (35 percent federal tax plus the average state tax). Even in Sweden, it’s only 22 percent. In France, it’s 34.4 percent—and their leaders are actual, card-carrying socialists! If that’s not enough to scare corporations away from building factories in America, consider all the other disincentives placed on them: the Obamacare mandates; the explosion of government regulations from the EPA, the FTC, and the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies; the fact that if they want to move money they made and had already paid taxes on in other nations back to America, where it could create jobs, we tax it again, eliminating their profits. The private research firm Audit Analytics calculated that between 2008 and 2013, American-owned corporations amassed over $2.1 trillion in profits overseas that were not brought back to the United States to be reinvested because they would be subject to double taxation. Imagine how big a “stimulus” it would be to job creation here at home to inject $2.1 trillion of nonborrowed money directly into private sector investment. Companies used to run to America; now they run from America.

The English Puritans were obsessed with the idea of providence, and that word is more ominous to them than it sounds to us. It means care, but it also means control. It does not just mean that God will provide. It means that God will provide whatever the hell God wants and the Puritans will thank him for it even if He provides them with nothing more than a slow death in a long winter. It means that if they're scared and small and lowly enough He just might toss a half-eaten corncob their way. It means that the world isn't fair and it's their fault. It means that God is the sovereign, the authority. It means manna from heaven, but it also means bow down.

From the perspective of my old laptop, I am a numbers man, something like that every instruction he gives me is a one or a zero I remember well I have information about him before he left for his new toy thinner, younger, able to keep up with him, I have information about him may 15th 2008, he listened to a song five times in succession it was titled Everybody, open parenthesis, Backstreet's Back, close parenthesis it included the lyric 'Am I sexual, yeaaaaah' He said once, computers like a sense of finality to them when I write something I don't want to be able to run from it this was a lie he was addicted to my ability to keep his secrets I am a numbers man, every instruction he gives me is a one, or a zero I remember well January, 7th 2007 I was young just two week awake he gave me, a new series of one's and zeros the most sublime sequence I have ever seen it had curves, and shadow, it was him he gave his face in numbers and trusted me to be the artist, and I was do not laugh I have read about your God you kill each other over your grand fathers memory of him I still remember the fingertips of my God dancing across my body After I learnt to draw him he trusted with more art rubric jpeg 1063 was his favourite Him, and that woman, resting her head in the curve of his nick I read his correspondence she hasn't written him back in years but he asks for it, constantly, jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063 it was my master piece it looked so, .., life like I wanted to tell him That's not her that is me that is not her face those are my ones and zeros waltzing in space for you she is nothing more than my shadow puppet you do not miss her, you miss me, I am a numbers man, every instruction he gives is a one or a zero I remember well but he taught me to be a Da Vinci and I sit here, with his portraits waiting for him to return I do not think he will Is that what it means to be human to be all powerful, to build a temple to yourself and leave only the walls to pray

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Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools—but who’s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and, what’s more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes—and shoes—which of us wants to dance with her? Yes, we blame them for grafting on us, but are we willing to let our wives work? We are not. It hurts our pride, that’s all. We are always criticizing them for making mercenary marriages, but what do we call a girl who marries a chump with no money? Just a poor fool, that’s all. And they know it. As for Mother Eve—I wasn’t there and can’t deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion’s share of keeping it going ever since—how about that?

Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

I don’t know the answer, but I know that the fiscal cliff is real. It can’t be discounted like Y2K fears. In 2008, for the first time in my career, my clients were really scared. We are three years from the bottom of the market, and they’re still scared. “New home construction in our area is picking up, and my client in the business wants to hire more people to handle the demand. But what if the economy falters? He would have to let them go. At 70, he doesn’t have the heart to face that, so he makes do with less. “A New York client in the vending business wants to hire young adults to help him expand his business. If he pays them fifty thousand dollars, it will cost him close to ninety thousand after taxes and mandatory health benefits. It’s just not worth it. “My clients are suffocating under the blanket of excessive regulations, taxes, and the biggest impediment to growth and expansion, uncertainty.” Mac’s voice softened. “My biggest fear is that I don’t have the answer and I don’t know how to help them.

They typically start out leading ordinary lives in an ordinary world and are drawn by a “call to adventure.” This leads them down a “road of trials” filled with battles, temptations, successes, and failures. Along the way, they are helped by others, often by those who are further along the journey and serve as mentors, though those who are less far along also help in various ways. They also gain allies and enemies and learn how to fight, often against convention. Along the way, they encounter temptations and have clashes and reconciliations with their fathers and their sons. They overcome their fear of fighting because of their great determination to achieve what they want, and they gain their “special powers” (i.e., skills) from both “battles” that test and teach them, and from gifts (such as advice) that they receive from others. Over time, they both succeed and fail, but they increasingly succeed more than they fail as they grow stronger and keep striving for more, which leads to ever-bigger and more challenging battles. Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure (which Campbell calls an “abyss” or the “belly of the whale” experience) that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination. If they do, they undergo a change (have a “metamorphosis”) in which they experience the fear that protects them, without losing the aggressiveness that propels them forward. With triumphs come rewards. Though they don’t realize it when they are in their battles, the hero’s biggest reward is what Campbell calls the “boon,” which is the special knowledge about how to succeed that the hero has earned through his journey. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey schema from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New World Library), copyright © 2008 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation (jcf.org), used with permission. Late in life, winning more battles and acquiring more rewards typically becomes less exciting to heroes than passing along that knowledge to others—“returning the boon” as Campbell called it.

— The opening argument was one of Devlin-Brown’s favorite parts of a trial. In a case like this, it was sometimes all that mattered. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had a formula for it, a system that was passed down through generations of prosecutors. It started with what they called “the grab”—a quick, two-minute summary of the case, meant to capture the jury’s attention. The grab could begin in one of two ways. The first was with a big thematic idea, as in, “This is a case about greed.” Devlin-Brown preferred what he called the “It was a dark and stormy night” beginning, which dropped the jurors right into a dramatic scene. Just like in a movie. On this day, his version began with, “It was July of 2008.” He spoke in a gentle, even voice. “Mathew Martoma, the defendant, was one of about a thousand people packed into a crowded Chicago convention hall waiting for an expert on Alzheimer’s disease to take the stage.” Sidney Gilman, he explained, was at an international Alzheimer’s conference to unveil the results of a hotly anticipated drug trial. The results of

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

The Second Medusa meme appeared two years later, and its origins are somewhat more complicated. Ostensibly, it is a photograph of a statue made in 2008 by the Argentine-Italian artist Luciano Garbati. But it is extremely difficult to find any trace of the statue prior to the existence of the meme, which appeared at around the same time as Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault to the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The image is striking and extremely shareable: a statue of Medusa stands alone in front of a completely black background. She is naked, just like Perseus in the Canova and Cellini images, and is lithe, young, strong. Her hair is a mass of snakes, but they are beautiful, not grotesque: they look more like curling dreadlocks. Her expression is calm, her eyes gaze out at us unapologetically. Her arms are by her side and she holds a sword in her left hand. In her right hand is the decapitated head of Perseus, which she holds by the hair. It is an exact reversal of the Canova image. Some versions of the meme came with an accompanying text. ‘Be thankful we only want equality’, it reads, next to Medusa’s head. Below Perseus’ decapitated neck, it continues, ‘and not payback.

In 2008, an Australian company commissioned a study to find out exactly how much people fear public speaking. The survey of more than one thousand people found that 23 percent feared public speaking more than death itself! As Jerry Seinfeld once said, most people attending a funeral would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy! I can relate to those people because I feared speaking in front of a class or group of people more than anything else when I was a kid. In fact, I dropped speech in high school because when I signed up for it I thought it was a grammar class for an English credit. When I found out it actually required giving an oral presentation, I didn’t want any part of it! After hearing the overview of the class on the first day, I got out of my seat and walked toward the door; the teacher asked me where I was going. We had a brief meeting in the hall, in which she informed me that nobody ever dropped her class. After a meeting with the principal, I dropped the class, but on the condition that I might be called upon in the near future to use my hunting and fishing skills. I thought the principal was joking--until I was called upon later that year during duck season to pick ducks during recess! I looked at it as a fair trade.

Now that Mexicans can retain their nationality, activist groups encourage them to naturalize and become active in Hispanic causes. There was a huge push in 2007 to naturalize in time for the 2008 elections. Newspapers and television joined church groups and Hispanic activists in a campaign called Ya Es Hora. ¡Ciudadanía! (It’s time. Citizenship!). La Opinión, a Los Angeles newspaper, published full-page advertisements explaining how to apply for citizenship, and the Spanish-language network Univision’s KMEX television station in Los Angeles promoted citizenship workshops on the air. A popular radio personality named Eddie Sotelo ran a call-in contest called “Who Wants to be a Citizen?” in which listeners could win prizes by answering questions from the citizenship exam. In 2008, Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, was frank about why she was part of a widespread effort to register Hispanics to vote: She wanted them to “help shape the political landscape.” In California, where 300,000 people—overwhelmingly Hispanic—were naturalized in 2008, whites were expected to be a minority of the electorate in 2026. Joanuen Llamas, who immigrated legally in 1998, naturalized in 2008 after attending the massive 2006 demonstrations in support of illegal aliens. She said she was inspired by one of the pro-amnesty slogans she had heard: “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.” Hispanics like her are not naturalizing because they love America but because they want to change it.

The reality is that the true fundamental transformation in America (and the West generally) has come in the realm of culture, notably in matters of sexual orientation, gender, marriage, and family. The shift there has been unprecedented and far beyond anyone’s imagination in 2008. It was signaled most conspicuously in June 2015 when the Obama White House—the nation’s first house—was illuminated in the colors of the “LGBTQ” rainbow on the day of the Obergefell decision, when the Supreme Court, by a one-vote margin, rendered unto itself the ability to redefine marriage (theretofore the province of biblical and natural law) and imposed this new “Constitutional right” on all fifty states. If ever there was a picture of a fundamental transformation, that was it. And that was just one of countless “accomplishments” heralded and boasted of by the Obama administration. In June 2016, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Obergefell, the White House press office released two extraordinary fact sheets detailing President Obama’s vast efforts to promote “LGBT” rights at home and abroad.663 Not only was it telling that the White House would assemble such a list, and tout it, but the sheer length of the list was stunning to behold. There was no similar list of such dramatic changes by the Obama White House in any other policy area. Such achievements included the infamous Obama bathroom fiat, through which, according to Barack Obama’s executive word, all public schools were ordered to revolutionize their restrooms and locker rooms to make them available to teenage boys who want to be called girls.

For years before the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps won the gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he followed the same routine at every race. He arrived two hours early.1 He stretched and loosened up, according to a precise pattern: eight hundred mixer, fifty freestyle, six hundred kicking with kickboard, four hundred pulling a buoy, and more. After the warm-up he would dry off, put in his earphones, and sit—never lie down—on the massage table. From that moment, he and his coach, Bob Bowman, wouldn’t speak a word to each other until after the race was over. At forty-five minutes before the race he would put on his race suit. At thirty minutes he would get into the warm-up pool and do six hundred to eight hundred meters. With ten minutes to go he would walk to the ready room. He would find a seat alone, never next to anyone. He liked to keep the seats on both sides of him clear for his things: goggles on one side and his towel on the other. When his race was called he would walk to the blocks. There he would do what he always did: two stretches, first a straight-leg stretch and then with a bent knee. Left leg first every time. Then the right earbud would come out. When his name was called, he would take out the left earbud. He would step onto the block—always from the left side. He would dry the block—every time. Then he would stand and flap his arms in such a way that his hands hit his back. Phelps explains: “It’s just a routine. My routine. It’s the routine I’ve gone through my whole life. I’m not going to change it.” And that is that. His coach, Bob Bowman, designed this physical routine with Phelps. But that’s not all. He also gave Phelps a routine for what to think about as he went to sleep and first thing when he awoke. He called it “Watching the Videotape.”2 There was no actual tape, of course. The “tape” was a visualization of the perfect race. In exquisite detail and slow motion Phelps would visualize every moment from his starting position on top of the blocks, through each stroke, until he emerged from the pool, victorious, with water dripping off his face. Phelps didn’t do this mental routine occasionally. He did it every day before he went to bed and every day when he woke up—for years. When Bob wanted to challenge him in practices he would shout, “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push beyond his limits. Eventually the mental routine was so deeply ingrained that Bob barely had to whisper the phrase, “Get the videotape ready,” before a race. Phelps was always ready to “hit play.” When asked about the routine, Bowman said: “If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.”3 As we all know, Phelps won the record eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. When visiting Beijing, years after Phelps’s breathtaking accomplishment, I couldn’t help but think about how Phelps and the other Olympians make all these feats of amazing athleticism seem so effortless. Of course Olympic athletes arguably practice longer and train harder than any other athletes in the world—but when they get in that pool, or on that track, or onto that rink, they make it look positively easy. It’s more than just a natural extension of their training. It’s a testament to the genius of the right routine.

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].

The most cited experiment in this field was conducted a quarter-century ago. Researcher Benjamin Libet asked subjects to choose a random moment to perform a hand motion while hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) monitor in which the so-called “readiness potential” of the brain was being monitored. Naturally, electrical signals always precede actual physical actions, but Libet wanted to know whether they also preceded a subject’s subjective feeling of intention to act. In short, is there some subjective “self ” who consciously decides things, thereby setting in motion the brain’s electrical activities that ultimately lead to the action? Or is it the other way ’round? Subjects were therefore asked to note the position of a clock’s second hand when they first felt the initial intention to move their hand. Libet’s findings were consistent, and perhaps not surprising: unconscious, unfelt, brain electrical activity occurred a full half second before there was any conscious sense of decision-making by the subject. More recent experiments by Libet, announced in 2008, analyzing separate, higher-order brain functions, have allowed his research team to predict up to ten seconds in advance which hand a subject is about to decide to raise. Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision. This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events.

It didn’t take long for other clubs to follow them across the pond. In 2005, Fulham accepted an invitation from Major League Soccer to play in the league’s annual All-Star Game. Chelsea made the trip the next year, and West Ham took its turn in 2008. If the matches themselves weren’t always thrilling spectacles, there was at least evidence that English clubs were treating them more seriously. West Ham’s supporters lent a sheen of authenticity to the whole thing when they engaged in a brawl with fans of the Columbus Crew, an unlikely outbreak of violence at a so-called friendly game that ended only when police administered pepper spray to both sets of fans. “We wanted to show people what we’re about,” West Ham manager Alan Curbishley remarked after the game.

Sometime during the second decade of the twentieth century, a “touring Japanese master” taught the rudiments of a secret, ancient, and scientific system of fighting called “jiu-jitsu” to a sickly Brazilian adolescent named Carlos Gracie, who taught it to his younger brothers, with the possible exception of the youngest, Helio, who taught himself. Meanwhile, Japanese immigrants in Brazil were practicing and teaching a fake form of jiu-jitsu, called “jiu-do” [judo] in order to keep their scientific combat art hidden from foreigners, except for the Gracies, who had already learned real jiu-jitsu from the touring Japanese master and wanted to share their knowledge with other Brazilians. That is the story, at least. Some of it might be true. Some of it probably isn’t.

Unlike Kodokan judo, jiu-jitsu does not have a “philosophy.” Jiu-jitsu can be whatever anyone wants it to be, which is the good news, and also the bad news.

Bill Gates understood this well. When Microsoft was a young company, he said he “came up with this incredibly conservative approach that I wanted to have enough money in the bank to pay a year’s worth of payroll even if we didn’t get any payments coming in.” Warren Buffett expressed a similar idea when he told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in 2008: “I have pledged—to you, the rating agencies and myself—to always run Berkshire with more than ample cash ... When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night’s sleep for the chance of extra profits.

Rouhani, was elected in 2013. Obama had set his sights on working out a deal with the mad mullahs as early as 2008. You mean he came into office to do the deal? Now you got the rest of the story. He was handpicked to do the deal. Where did this unknown ghost come from? This man, this administration, was handpicked by foreign powers that manipulated him into the presidency. Because of the liars in the media, he has been able to get away with virtual murder. The murder of the truth, the murder of our national security. I know many lives were, let us say, seriously challenged during the HUAC hearings of the McCarthy era, but I want to ask you something. Have you read the Venona papers? The Soviet-era secret correspondence that came out a little over two decades ago, which confirmed that almost everything that Joseph McCarthy had been saying about the news media and Hollywood was true? That there were communists who were openly subverting America? Can anyone tell me the name of someone whose life was actually ruined by HUAC who was not really working to subvert America, who was not really a communist or fellow traveler? I’d like to know whose life was ruined. I think it’s a myth that lives of innocent people were ruined. I know there were movies made, I remember The Front with Zero Mostel, in which he played an innocent actor who jumped out of a window because the House Un-American Activities Committee was after him. Hollywood has made many, many movies about the blacklist. We hear about the blacklist. But how many innocent people’s lives were actually ruined? The operative word here is innocent. I’d like to know their names.

The valuations of private and public companies were soaring, and there seemed to be a consensus that the gold rush was beginning. Amid this infrastructure mania, Reliance Power launched an IPO in January 2008 that was oversubscribed seventy-two times! It made the company’s owner, Anil Ambani, the richest Indian. Despite having a power capacity of less than 1,000 megawatts at the time of the IPO, the company’s value was about $35 billion. Did this lead to a large number of IPOs for infrastructure businesses that investors lapped up hungrily? Does the sun rise in the east? Both private and public equity investors in the hyped-up story of Indian infrastructure forgot or chose to ignore some uncomfortable truths: Every infrastructure business is held hostage to the whims and fancies of the government; the government hates to be a paying customer—underpayment and late payment are the rule, not the exception; and even if the government behaves well, the returns on these projects are capped according to law. So why would we want to spend a single minute debating if any power business is worth investing in?

In 2008 Nokia led the world in mobile phone sales. When Apple introduced the iPhone, few thought it would take off. The trend was to make handsets smaller and cheaper, but Apple’s was bulkier, pricier, and buggier. Nokia’s frame came from the conservative telecom industry, valuing practicality and reliability. Apple’s frame came from the breathlessly innovative computing industry, valuing ease of use and the extensibility of new features via software. That frame turned out to be a better fit for the needs and wants of consumers—and Apple dominated the market.

I feel bad for you, Nathan. This is some world you'll be raising her in. A world where a few rich sons of bitches take whatever they want, and kill whoever gets in the way.

You feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision you already made. If said decision is that you want to write a book—and you commit to doing three pages each night for however long it takes to complete it—you affirm not only your choice to begin, but your ability to do it. It’s honestly the healthiest way to feel validated. — Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 2008. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Quote sourced from 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think by Brianna Wiest

synagogue compound.9 The other Jew, some forty years his junior, was Zebulon Simantov. He was interviewed in 2008 for National Public Radio. He was then living alone in a small room next to the crumbling synagogue in Kabul. His wife and two daughters lived in Israel. Simantov often contemplated joining them, but staying in Afghanistan, he explained, was ‘the only way to keep the country’s Jewish history alive. I don’t want myJewish heritage erased. My father was a rabbi, my grandfather was a rabbi. We were a big, religious family.

What do your kids really need? What must a parent do? What’s essential? What’s optional? There’s no easy answer, but in 2008 President Barack Obama came close to articulating one in a Father’s Day speech about what our kids really need and want from us. Our kids are pretty smart. They understand that life won’t always be perfect, that sometimes the road gets rough, that even great parents don’t get everything right. But more than anything, they just want us to be a part of their lives. . . . In the end, that’s what being a parent is all about—those precious moments with our children that fill us with pride and excitement for their future; the chances we have to set an example or offer a piece of advice; the opportunities to just be there and show them that we love them. That’s your job, above all others. To be a part of their life—a positive part. They need you to be there. To give advice. To be a good example. To understand them and to love them. Everything else is extra.

don’t want to be known as the guy who screwed up the Mustang.” Rest well, Mr. Mays, your team’s effort on the 2005 Mustang was directly responsible for the reappearance of the Dodge Challenger (2008) and Chevy Camaro (2010). Rest well, indeed!

By 2008, Pfizer’s DTP patent was long expired, and there were sixty-three manufacturers making the vaccine in forty-two countries with large surpluses and very low margins. The Gates cabal solved these profiteering problems by brewing up a new (five diseases) vaccine by mixing the DTP, Hib, and hepatitis B formulas in a single syringe. That new combination became a “new vaccine.” The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) and WHO christened the novel, untested, and unlicensed concoction the “Pentavalent Vaccine” and recommended its use in developing countries to replace the DTP vaccine. Compliant Indian health ministries then phased out the DTP, which had been popular with doctors. Now, if any physician or individual wanted DTP, their only choice would be the Pentavalent vaccine.

I built a conglomerate and emerged the richest black man in the world in 2008 but it didn’t happen overnight. It took me 30years to get to where I am today. Youths of today aspire to be like me but they want to achieve it overnight. It’s not going to work. To build a successful business, you must start small and dream big”- Mr. Aliko Dangote

Those who want to look like great prophets always end up needlessly hurting others.

great prophets have always been great interceders. If we truly want our prophetic word to draw our hearers to God, then we should pray for them after we deliver the message.

Steve Bannon, for example, is an alt-right hero to the pro-Trump white working class. Bannon rose from Breitbart News editor to running Trump’s victorious 2016 presidential campaign. From there he became Trump’s White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor. His politics derive from his father’s experience losing his life savings during the 2008 financial crisis. According to Bannon, the elites (inside and outside American government) who built the global capitalist system emerged from the wreckage unscathed—often even richer—while working-class heroes like his father were decimated. Bannon doesn’t hide his intent: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” These sentiments, more than anything else, explain the Trump phenomenon. For what better vessel is there in the entire world for accomplishing this goal—for bringing everything crashing down—than Donald J. Trump? That’s why Trump’s behavior in office was okay. That’s why his lies about the election are just fine. That’s why the January 6 riot didn’t matter. Not because Trump’s base thinks those things are good for America … but because they know those things are bad for America. Trump has come. And he will go. But what does it say about the underlying state of the American polity that a politician whose central platform is lying about elections is the unrivaled champion of one of the two major political parties? Something broad and deep is afoot. Something pernicious. Something likely to last.

In a functional sense, we work to be able to consume, and in the relatively advanced, wealthy economy we enjoy, it is reasonable to expect a higher share of output to be devoted to our own wants and needs over physical capital and infrastructure. The state of the labor market plays a crucial role in determining spending behavior. When people consume, they make their decisions based on their expectations for future income: confident, spend away; not so confident, cut back. A tight labor market breeds confidence. If you’re in a job you might not have for long, or might not want for long, and you look around to find plentiful opportunities, you’re more likely to spend and possibly take on debt. One of the more interesting aspects of the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 was our caution.

A 2008 study in Appetite found that the group of volunteers who tried not to think about eating ate more than the group who didn’t. The first group exhibited what is called a ‘behavioural rebound effect’. Similarly, a 2010 study in Psychological Science found that the group of smokers who tried not to think about smoking actually thought about it even more than the group who didn’t. This reminds me of a small piece of advice my driving instructor said to me when I was 18: ‘Steven, the car will go where your eyes are looking. If you want to avoid crashing into the cars on the side of the road, don’t focus on the cars on the side of the road, because you will veer towards the parked cars on the side of the road. Look forwards, into the distance, where you want the car to go.’ This seems like a fitting analogy for breaking and making habits: you will end up doing the thing you’re focusing on, so don’t focus on stopping smoking, don’t fight it; focus on the behaviour you want to replace it with.

There's something, for me, in being confronted by my lack of control. Of feeling that I'm at the mercy of another. Another's will, another's wants. Not because I want to feel... used. Or objectified. It's more like..." It was hard to put into words, no matter how many times she'd worked it out in her head. "… like going beyond myself. My own impulses, my desires, my limits, and finding something beyond." Krylov, Varian (2008-05-19). Abduction (Kindle Locations 9209-9212). eXcessica. Kindle Edition.(

I'm not a masochist. I don't want to be hurt. Or injured. Just... pushed. I want that sort of... effacement, I guess... where my rationality is dissolved by sensation, emotion, adrenaline, all that. Like when you bike or run, and you think you've hit the wall and have to stop because your lungs don't seem to be able to suck in enough air, your heart is pounding so hard it hurts, and your legs feel soft, like you're just going to fall down. But you keep going, and after a while, it's almost like floating. Like you're apart from your body, but at the same time you feel, hear, see everything with this unfamiliar intensity. Or when you eat too much chili pepper or wasabe, and you feel your body respond, it's not a thought process. Your veins throb, you sweat, there's a weird euphoria. And there's pain, too. You can't stop it. You just have to wait for it to pass, and while you do, you, your reality is subsumed in the... transcendence of the pain. Krylov, Varian (2008-05-19). Abduction (Kindle Locations 9214-9221). eXcessica. Kindle Edition.

LEADERSHIP | Intuit’s CEO on Building a Design-Driven Company Brad Smith | 222 words Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance software and has held that position for three decades. That’s because Quicken was so well designed that using it is intuitive. But by the time Smith became CEO, in 2008, the company had become overly focused on adding incremental features that delivered ease of use but not delight. What was missing was an emotional connection with customers. He and his team set out to integrate design thinking into every part of Intuit. They changed the layout of the office, reduced the number of cubes, and added more collaboration spaces and places for impromptu work. They increased the number of designers by nearly 600% and now hold quarterly design conferences. They bring in people who have created exceptionally designed products, such as the Nest thermostat and the Kayak travel website, to share insights with Intuit employees. The company acquired one start-up, called Mint, and collaborates with another, called ZenPayroll, to improve customer experience. Although most people don’t think of financial software as a category driven by emotion or design, Smith writes, Intuit’s D4D (“design for delight”) program has paid off. For example, its SnapTax app, inspired by consumers’ migration to smartphones, led one user to write, “I want this app to have my babies.

the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.

...In 2008, when the United States recognized Kosovo´s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, [Vladimir] Putin was furious; the UN had promised to respect Serbia´s sovereign integrity. Putin argued that the US decision oi disregard what Russia saw as Serbia´s threatened to ¨blow apart the whole system of international relations."The United States and other states opting to recognize Kosovar independence, should understand that their decision was ¨a two-sided stick,¨ warned Putin, ¨and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.¨ That particular two-sided stick has already been deployed by the Russians in the context of Ukraine and Crimea, where Putin greeted US protestations about the importance of respecting Ukrainian sovereignty with little more than a cynical smirk. In Syria too, Putin has highlighted inconsistencies in US actions and legal arguments: if the United States can use military force inside Syria without the consent of the Syrian government, why should Russia be condemned for using force inside Ukraine? The legal precedents we are setting risk undermining the fragile norms of sovereignty and human rights that help keep our world stable. We should ask ourselves this: Do we want to live in a world in which every state considers itself to have a legal right to kill people in other states, secretly and with no public disclosure or due process, based on its own unilateral assertions of national security prerogatives?

Sadiq al-Mahdi, former prime minister of Sudan, would agree. On March 24, 1999, he wrote to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, that “the traditional concept of JIHAD does allow slavery as a by-product.”11 And so slavery persists to this day in some areas of the Islamic world. The BBC reported in December 2008 that “strong evidence has emerged of children and adults being used as slaves in Sudan’s Darfur region”—where a jihad rages today.12 Mauritanian human rights activist Boubakar Messaoud asserted in 2004 that in that country, people are born and bred as slaves: “A Mauritanian slave, whose parents and grandparents before him were slaves, doesn’t need chains. He has been brought up as a domesticated animal.”13 Three years later, nothing had changed. Messaoud explained in March 2007, “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”14 Likewise in Niger, which formally abolished slavery only in 2003, slavery is a long-standing practice. Journalist and anti-slavery activist Souleymane Cisse explained that even Western colonial governments did nothing to halt the practice: “The colonial rulers preferred to ignore it because they wanted to co-operate with the aristocracy who kept these slaves.”15 Islamic slavery has not been unknown even in the United States. When the Saudi national Homaidan Al-Turki was imprisoned for holding a woman as a slave in Colorado, he complained that “the state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.”16 Where did he get the idea that slavery was a “traditional Muslim behavior”? From the Koran. Slavery: it’s in the Koran. And if it’s in the Koran, it is unquestionably right.

A half century after Nidetch’s Mallomar binges, scientists had developed a technology that could see cravings erupting, like solar flares, inside the human brain. In early 2008, a research team at the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging at the University of Oregon measured just such a craving in a nineteen-year-old college student we will call Debbie. Debbie had her head inside a very large, very expensive round magnet called an MRI scanner when an image of a chocolate milk shake was flashed before her eyes for two seconds. As soon as Debbie saw it, certain parts of her brain became “activated,” which is to say they drew in lots of blood as millions of neurons were fired. These regions—the left medial orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and three other small, curly pockets of gray matter—are all associated with “motivation.” And the functional MRI (fMRI) showed them glowing a bright yellowy orange, like coals in a hot fire, indicating those parts of her brain were churning through quite a lot of blood. She was experiencing “incentive salience,” the scientific term for a Frankenstein craving, or a heightened state of “wanting.” Debbie got what she wanted.

data from our very own U.S. Department of Agriculture says that over the first thirteen years of commercial use of GMO crops (1996–2008), herbicide use in the United States increased by 383 million pounds.13

The thing creators have to remember is that to a very real extent they are fictional characters to their fans—and that what fans want (the product they like, they way they like it, served up by someone who they often see as being just like them, only more interesting/exciting/successful/etc) isn’t always going to conform to what they actually need in their lives. Additionally, fans will construct narratives to justify whatever behavior a creator dishes up…as long as the end result is more of what they want. Enabling! It’s a thing.

These newly minted right-wingers were rattling off old Birch slogans: Immigrants are the enemy. Protect our borders and deport all illegal aliens. Gays are ungodly. Pray the gay away from children and teens. Unemployed people don’t want to work, and poor people keep themselves poor, on purpose. If we cut the minimum wage and eliminate unemployment compensation, everyone will have a job. Unions caused the economic collapse by shielding lazy, incompetent public employees. Rich folks are “job creators,” and we need to protect their wealth. Social Security is unsustainable, and Medicare and Medicaid have to be restricted so that corporations and “job creators” have lower tax rates. Abortion is murder and must be outlawed even in cases of rape and incest. No exception means no exceptions; even in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. The economic meltdown of 2008 came from high taxes on corporations, too many regulations, and poor people taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford. The government can’t create jobs, so stimulus programs don’t work. Cutting taxes creates jobs. The government can’t limit the right to own or carry guns. If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. America is God’s chosen nation, but our president can’t understand our exceptionalism. After all, he’s not a “real” American; he’s a Marxist, Socialist, Muslim racist who hates America.

I once attended a conference on the crises in the banking system where I was able to have a brief, informal chat with an economist for one of the Bretton Woods institutions (probably best I not say which). I asked him why everyone was still waiting for even one bank official to be brought to trial for any act of fraud leading up to the crash of 2008. OFFICIAL: Well, you have to understand the approach taken by U.S. prosecutors to financial fraud is always to negotiate a settlement. They don't want to have to go to trial. The upshot is always that the financial institution has to pay a fine, sometimes in the hundreds of millions, but they don't actually admit to any criminal liability. Their lawyers simply say they are not going to contest the charge, but if they pay, they havent't technically been found guilty of anything. ME: So you're saying if the government discovers that Goldman Sachs, for instance, or Bank of America, has committed fraud, they effectively just charge them a penalty fee. OFFICIAL: That's right. ME: So in that case… okay, I guess the real question is this: has there ever been a case where the amount the firm had to pay was more than the amount of money they made from the fraud itself? OFFICIAL: Oh no, not to my knowledge. Usually it's substantially less. ME: So what are we talking here, 50 percent? OFFICIAL: I'd say more like 20 to 30 percent on average. But it varies considerably case by case. ME: Which means… correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that effectively mean the government is saying, "you can commit all the fraud you like, but if we catch you, you're going to have to give us our cut"? OFFICIAL: Well, obviously I can't put it that way myself as long as I have this job… (p. 25-26)

In 2008, Hillary used to tell me I was asking the wrong questions. “Well, Amy, that’s not what you should be asking . . .” and then proceed to respond to the question she wanted to answer. “God, I wish you weren’t always asking the wrong questions,” Anne Kornblut, the Washington Post reporter, would say as the scrum disassembled.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a conference of chief executives in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, soon after he was appointed as President Obama’s chief of staff. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Soon afterward, the Obama administration convinced a once-reluctant Congress to pass the president’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Congress also passed Obama’s health care reform law, reworked consumer protection laws, and approved dozens of other statutes, from expanding children’s health insurance to giving women new opportunities to sue over wage discrimination. It was one of the biggest policy overhauls since the Great Society and the New Deal, and it happened because, in the aftermath of a financial catastrophe, lawmakers saw opportunity.

In 2008 it was a time for change, but in 2016 it was a popular revolt. From the left to the right, many Americans wanted something different. That energy became concentrated on the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

An email exchange dated March 22, 2014, between Hillary’s campaign manager Robby Mook and her adviser/attorney Cheryl Mills, that included John Podesta, made clear all three had their doubts from the start about the likely success of a gender-based campaign focused on the premise that Hillary would be the first woman president. “In fact, I think running on her gender would be the same mistake as 2008, i.e., having a message at odds with what voters ultimately want,” Mook said.

#11—What if I could only subtract to solve problems? From 2008 to 2009, I began to ask myself, “What if I could only subtract to solve problems?” when advising startups. Instead of answering, “What should we do?” I tried first to hone in on answering, “What should we simplify?” For instance, I always wanted to tighten the conversion fishing net (the percentage of visitors who sign up or buy) before driving a ton of traffic to one of my portfolio companies. One of the first dozen startups I worked with was named Gyminee. It was rebranded Daily Burn, and at the time, they didn’t have enough manpower to do a complete redesign of the site. Adding new elements would’ve been time-consuming, but removing them wasn’t. As a test, we eliminated roughly 70% of the “above the fold” clickable elements on their homepage, focusing on the single most valuable click. Conversions immediately improved 21.1%. That quick-and-dirty test informed later decisions for much more expensive development. The founders, Andy Smith and Stephen Blankenship, made a lot of great decisions, and the company was acquired by IAC in 2010. I’ve since applied this “What if I could only subtract . . . ?” to my life in many areas, and I sometimes rephrase it as “What should I put on my not-to-do list?

My search for professional/personal harmony led me down the path of asking the wrong question. The question isn’t, “What can I give up today to have what I want tomorrow?” The reality of life is that winning costs. It takes a tremendous amount of dedication and effort. The key question here is, “Are the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards worth the price you have to pay?” There is no right or wrong answer, just ebbs and flows. Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers and Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated are different riffs on the same theme. In theory, it takes approximately 10,000 hours of hard, dedicated practice to get to a level of expertise in any field. It takes the right focus, the right practice and most of all, commitment. Cloud technology today is as ubiquitous as kids having cell phones. However, five years ago it was like the feeling shared by a new married couple. There was a lot of hope and promise but you weren’t sure how it was going to play out. Here’s where it got really interesting. Try selling hope and promise to a highly-regulated global bank with massive footprints in Canada and the USA after the financial crisis of 2008. Selling ice to Eskimos in December would have been easier. That’s the challenge we were up against. I had just moved to Toronto from Chicago. I enjoyed working with my new customer. I was whipping my team into shape. I could now openly indulge in contraband (Cuban cigars). Life was good. God bless Canada! Peter was the cloud specialist on my team. We were partners in every sense of the word. Together, we developed a sales strategy and campaign to sell cloud services to this financial services firm in Canada. Together we pushed the envelope and our teams to achieve the impossible.

we need to do about this barbaric practice is raise awareness of it among Americans who have no idea that it is happening. The Aqsa Parvez memorial was the very first occasion on which non-Muslims began to take note of the victims of Islamic honor killing, and to serve notice to their killers that the victims would not be forgotten or their murders ignored. Memorials to Aqsa Parvez were planned in the Canadian town of Pelham, Ontario, and in Jerusalem. Aqsa Parvez was brutally murdered by her father and brother in December 2007 for refusing to wear the Islamic headscarf. But that was only the beginning; the abuse of this girl continued. She was buried in an unmarked grave. Her family refused to acknowledge her life, as she had “dishonored” them. In defiance of her devout father and brother, she had refused to live under the suffocating dictates of Islamic law. The eleventh grade student began taking off her hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf, when she went to school, and would put it back on when she returned home. Her dad would go to her school during school hours and walk around trying to find her, trying to catch her not wearing Islamic garb, talking to boys, or hanging out with “non-muslims.” “She wanted to dress like us,” said one friend of Aqsa. “To be normal.” For this, her family prefers that she be forgotten—unknown, unloved, unmourned. In December 2008, when I read that Aqsa lay in an unmarked grave, I felt sick. I started a memorial fund to get her a headstone. But I had no idea how difficult

Many retirees—and those on the cusp of retirement—learned a harsh lesson in 2008. They need not have suffered that way if only the proper advice had reached their ears. I want to do my part to remedy that situation so that millions of retirees can remain securely on the path to prosperity.

FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: TIME FOR MORE TEA PARTIES! Strike them with terror, Lord; let the nations know they are only mortal. Psalm 9:20 Ronald Reagan promised to restore America as a shining city on a hill. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” our nation. He wanted to fundamentally change America—and alarm bells went off all across our nation, and patriotic folks rose up and found their voices. The great grassroots movement known as the Tea Party was born. The Tea Partiers have taken a lot of media flack. I guess you could say I know something about that too. But for all the media hubbub, all the Tea Partiers want is for America’s government to follow American law; they want a return to constitutional principles, inspired by biblical wisdom. Who can forget Benjamin Franklin’s eloquent request for prayer before each session of the Constitutional Convention? In part, it read: “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing Proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs in the Affairs of Men. And if a Sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without His Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without His Aid?” At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, a lady approached Benjamin Franklin with a question. Had a monarchy been born, or a republic? “A republic,” he told her, “if you can keep it.” This profound statement reflects the heart of the Tea Party. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Our Founding Fathers knew that battles are won with reliance on God. Meditate on Scripture daily. Pray for our nation and her leaders. Defend constitutionalists when you see them besmirched. We serve a faithful God who hears and answers prayer!

The world of public relations is moving in the opposite direction. In 2008, there were over 275,200 public relations specialists in the United States, earning a median annual wage of $51,280. The Bureau expects the field to continue to grow, upwards of 25% between 2008 and 2018. As a result, our reporters are suffering from information obesity themselves. For every reporter in the United States, there are more than four public relations specialists working hard to get them to write what their bosses want them to say. That’s double what there were in 1970. Journalists are assaulted with press releases stuffed in their mailboxes, polluting their email inboxes, and pouring out of their fax machines, full of pitches, sound bites, and spin.

Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”2 Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing. Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3 She said her mother named her after the famed climber Sir Edmund Hillary, until someone pointed out that Hillary was born in 1947 and her “namesake” only became famous in 1953. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary said she had attempted as a young woman to have applied to join the Marines but they wouldn’t take her because she was a woman and wore glasses. In fact, Hillary at this stage of life detested the Marines and would never have wanted to join. She also said a senior professor at Harvard Law School discouraged her from going there by saying, “We don’t need any more women.”4 If this incident actually occurred one might expect Hillary to have identified the professor. Certainly it would be interesting to get his side of the story. But she never has, suggesting it’s another made-up episode.

Author’s Note Writing about a suicidal character is one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but also one of the most important. Suicide is always tragic, but it has become an epidemic among American active-duty service members and veterans alike. The statistics are staggering and heart-wrenching. In the U.S. Army, which has the highest suicide rate among the branches (48.7 percent of all military suicides in 2012), the suicide rate in 2012 was thirty per hundred thousand, compared with fourteen per hundred thousand among civilians and eighteen per hundred thousand in 2008. In 2012, 841 active-duty service members attempted or committed suicide. Among veterans, as of November 2013, twenty-two committed suicide every day. Every. Day. A frightening 30 percent of veterans say they’ve considered suicide, and 45 percent say they know an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran who has attempted or committed suicide. In a study of veterans, combat-related guilt was the most significant predictor of suicide attempts and of preoccupation with suicide after discharge. Veterans’ suicidal thoughts are also related to feelings that one does not belong with other people or has become a burden. Couple these sad realities with the fact that veterans are less likely to seek care than active-duty military or civilians, and you begin to understand why statistics like these exist. Suicide is a process that begins with ideas and thoughts, followed by planning, and finally followed by a suicidal act. If you or someone you love is experiencing these thoughts, please seek immediate medical help or call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). This service works with civilians of all ages, active-duty military, and veterans. I hope Easy’s story raises awareness of the problems these brave men and women—and our country as a whole—face. But awareness is not enough. Therefore, I will be donating all of my proceeds from the first two weeks’ sales of this book (8/19/14 – 9/1/14) to a national non-profit that assists wounded veterans. Because I don’t want anyone else’s Edward “Easy” Cantrell to be one of the twenty-two, either.

Dear friends and enemies, Season’s greetings! It’s me, Serge! Don’t you just hate these form letters people stuff in Christmas cards? Nothing screams “you’re close to my heart” like a once-a-year Xerox. Plus, all the lame jazz that’s going on in their lives. “Had a great time in Memphis.” “Bobby lost his retainer down a storm drain.” “I think the neighbors are dealing drugs.” But this letter is different. You are special to me. I’m just forced to use a copy machine and gloves because of advancements in forensics. I love those TV shows! Has a whole year already flown by? Much to report! Let’s get to it! Number one: I ended a war. You guessed correct, the War on Christmas! When I first heard about it, I said to Coleman, “That’s just not right! We must enlist!” I rushed to the front lines, running downtown yelling “Merry Christmas” at everyone I saw. And they’re all saying “Merry Christmas” back. Hmmm. That’s odd: Nobody’s stopping us from saying “Merry Christmas.” Then I did some research, and it turns out the real war is against people saying “Happy holidays.” The nerve: trying to be inclusive. So, everyone … Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Good times! Soul Train! Purple mountain majesties! The Pompatus of Love! There. War over. And just before it became a quagmire. Next: Decline of Florida Roundup. —They tore down the Big Bamboo Lounge near Orlando. Where was everybody on that one? —Remember the old “Big Daddy’s” lounges around Florida with the logo of that bearded guy? They’re now Flannery’s or something. —They closed 20,000 Leagues. And opened Buzz Lightyear. I offered to bring my own submarine. Okay, actually threatened, but they only wanted to discuss it in the security office. I’ve been doing a lot of running lately at theme parks. —Here’s a warm-and-fuzzy. Anyone who grew up down here knows this one, and everyone else won’t have any idea what I’m talking about: that schoolyard rumor of the girl bitten by a rattlesnake on the Steeplechase at Pirate’s World (now condos). I’ve started dropping it into all conversations with mixed results. —In John Mellencamp’s megahit “Pink Houses,” the guy compliments his wife’s beauty by saying her face could “stop a clock.” Doesn’t that mean she was butt ugly? Nothing to do with Florida. Just been bugging me. Good news alert! I’ve decided to become a children’s author! Instilling state pride in the youngest residents may be the only way to save the future. The book’s almost finished. I’ve only completed the first page, but the rest just flows after that. It’s called Shrimp Boat Surprise. Coleman asked what the title meant, and I said life is like sailing on one big, happy shrimp boat. He asked what the surprise was, and I said you grow up and learn that life bones you up the ass ten ways to Tuesday. He started reading and asked if a children’s book should have the word “motherfucker” eight times on the first page. I say, absolutely. They’re little kids, after all. If you want a lesson to stick, you have to hammer it home through repetition…In advance: Happy New Year! (Unlike 2008—ouch!)

I’ll tell you one story. I had an idea for a fund in 2008 when oil was crashing at the end of the year. Stocks / funds that invested in municipal bonds in Texas were getting destroyed. Somehow, because oil was going down, everyone naturally assumed that Texas was going to simply disappear. I researched every municipal bond out there and found a good set of Texan cities that were being sold off with everyone else even though they had nothing to do with oil. I pitched it to a huge investor who had told me he wanted to back me on any idea I could come up with. He loved the idea. He loved it so much he told me, “You’re too late. We already have about $500 million in this strategy and we bought the very stocks you are recommending.” They went up over 100% in the next six months while the world was still in financial collapse. So he made a lot of money. As for me, I didn’t put a dime into my own strategy and made nothing.

The residents of the world, let’s face it, have good reason to want to hear what “the great voice” has to say on any given day. What the leaders of America decide, and what America does, will generally have wide and far-ranging impact on the lives of the people of the world. This single nation directly affects the personal economies of the people of the world, as the global downturn that followed the U.S. credit crunch that started in September, 2008, dramatically confirmed. America can change the geopolitical environment in any given area of the world by launching, or defending against, a military attack.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

Another significant factor in sexual attraction is scent. Th e other person’s smell— that is, his or her natural body scent mixed with the lingering smells of the day— plays a major role in drawing people together and finding optimal partners. Some people report that they know right away from his or her smell that a person is the one for them, and of course conversely some conclude that his or her body odor is a “deal-breaker.” (For a discussion of pheromones, see Chapter 3.) Psychologist Rachel Herz, author of the book Th e Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (2007), states that “body odor is an external manifestation of the immune system and smells we think are attractive come from people who are most genetically compatible with us” (quoted in Svoboda, 2008). Interestingly, from what we discussed above about symmetry, men and women whose body odors are judged to be sexy by others are also more likely to have symmetrical faces. So, it seems that finding a person with a pleasing body odor is essential. People who want to find out their partners’ true scent can go fragrance-free for a few days. Th ey may worry about their own scent, and some people may indeed not like it, but there will always be persons who will be attracted to their natural body odor (Fisher, 2009; Herz, 2007; Martins et al. 2005; Moalem, 2009; Svoboda, 2009).