Worst Section Quotes

The worst type of crying wasn't the kind everyone could see--the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.

Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainly that class's own worst enemy.

You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

at any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists—because these professions are more immune to randomness.

A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons—if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order. It’s something similar here—despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor. This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.41 The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant.*

The problem for US officials is the same problem that filters through all the other sections of our societies. It goes something like this. Since we know – thanks to Salman Rushdie, who was forced into hiding for his life because of his novel about Islam, The Satanic Verses, Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker who was murdered after making a critical film about Islam, and others – that there is a potentially high price to pay for criticising Islam, what reaction are we able to make in response to the religion? If we cannot criticise it at all, ever, for fear of being ‘phobic’ at best and beheaded at worst, we have to find some other attitude towards it.

The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see—the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived.

Over the last decades, the travel industry and media have unwittingly teamed up to create the gap this book aspires to fill. I read a lot of travel sections, travel sites, and travel magazines, and I realized one day I was getting punch-drunk on how fantastic everything was. There s just so much Escape, Undiscovered, Quaint, Top 10 Most Amazing . . . , Secret Beaches, Incredible Islands, Savvy, Frugal, Best Ever. These adjectives just don t connect with most of my experiences on the road life, misadventure, and a dose of Murphy s Law often get in the way.

If Readers have prejudices, that's the writing world we live in. We must decide how to navigate it. We can't please all the Readers all the time and we shouldn't try. but we don't get to create our Readers in our own image, either. We don't get to tell them what to value or enjoy. We can write in a way true to our own voice and our own ideas of beauty and substance, and we can hope that some readers appreciate it. But, even when we aim to serve the narrowest cross section of Readers, we're still working for the Readers we have. We should be grateful that we have them.

He was beautiful when he sat alone, he was like me, he had wide lapels, he was holding the mug in the hardest possible way so that his fingers were all twisted but still long and beautiful, he didn’t like to sit alone all the time, but this time, I swear, he didn’t care on way or the other. I’ll tell you why I like to sit alone, because I’m a sadist, that’s why we like to sit alone, because we’re the sadists who like to sit alone. He sat alone because he was beautifully dressed for the occasion and because he was not a civilian. We are the sadists you don’t have to worry about, you think, and we have no opinion on the matter of whether you have to worry about us, and we don’t even like to think about the matter because it baffles us. Maybe he doesn’t mean a thing to me any more but I think he was like me. You didn’t expect to fall in love, I said to myself and at the same time I answered gently, Do you think so? I heard you humming beautifully, your hum said that I can’t ignore you, that I’d finally come around for a number of delicious reasons that only you knew about, and here I am, Miss Blood. And you won’t come back, you won’t come back to where you left me, and that’s why you keep my number, so you don’t dial it by mistake when you’re fooling with the dial not even dialing numbers. You begin to bore us with your pain and we have decided to change your pain. You said you were happiest when you danced, you said you were happiest when you danced with me, now which do you mean? And so we changed his pain, we threw the idea of a body at him and we told him a joke, and then he thought a great deal about laughing and about the code. And he thought that she thought that he thought that she thought the worst thing a woman could do was to take a man away from his work because that made her what, ugly or beautiful? And now you’ve entered the mathematical section of your soul which you claimed you never had. I suppose that this, plus the broken heart, makes you believe that now you have a perfect right to go out and tame the sadists. He had the last line of each verse of the song but he didn’t have any of the other lines, the last line was always the same, Don’t call yourself a secret unless you mean to keep it. He thought he knew, or he actually did know too much about singing to be a singer; and if there is actually such a condition, is anybody in it, and are sadists born there? It is not a question mark, it is not an exclamation point, it is a full stop by the man who wrote Parasites of Heaven. Even if we stated our case very clearly and all those who held as we do came to our side, all of them, we would still be very few.

Young white men in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old range are often coming to grips with the fact that life isn't as easy as they were promised. I've been there myself. When you realize that life isn't going to hand you the job you want or the woman you want to fuck, you look around for someone to blame, and feminism becomes an easy target. If only women were subservient objects who stayed at home, there would be more jobs open to young white men and more women with no other option but to have sex with them for sustenance. I realize that white-man utopia sounds really pleasing to these guys, but it's basically everyone else's worst nightmare It's not so great for them either, but they won't get that for a long time, if ever. Suffice to say you won't convince them of this in an online comments section, either.

Looking back on the Dixiecrat challenge, Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

It’s the worst thing that could ever happen to a woman, and they know that. It’s why it’s their best weapon. But after months of healing physically, I’m going to accept that I’ll never be the same. That’s all right. I’m still strong. I’m just different. And to change is to live. To survive.

Each half of the arch is made from several sections. Enormous jacks, whose only prior job was raising the sunken Kursk submarine in 2001, were used to lift each stage higher and higher until it reached its full height of 110 meters. Inside are remotely-operated heavy-duty overhead cranes, to be used for moving people and equipment.

Her shoulders never shook. No tears streamed down her face. The worst type of crying wasn't the kind everyone could see - the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived.

This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.41 The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant.*

You were burning in the middle of the worst solar storm our records can remember. (...) Everyone else fled. All your companions and crew left you alone to wrestle with the storm. “You did not blame them. In a moment of crystal insight, you realized that they were cowards beyond mere cowardice: their dependence on their immortality circuits had made it so that they could not even imagine risking their lives. They were all alike in this respect. They did not know they were not brave; they could not even think of dying as possible; how could they think of facing it, unflinching? “You did not flinch. You knew you were going to die; you knew it when the Sophotechs, who are immune to pain and fear, all screamed and failed and vanished. “And you knew, in that moment of approaching death, with all your life laid out like a single image for you to examine in a frozen moment of time, that no one was immortal, not ultimately, not really. The day may be far away, it may be further away than the dying of the sun, or the extinction of the stars, but the day will come when all our noumenal systems fail, our brilliant machines all pass away, and our records of ourselves and memories shall be lost. “If all life is finite, only the grace and virtue with which it is lived matters, not the length. So you decided to stay another moment, and erect magnetic shields, one by one; to discharge interruption masses into the current, to break up the reinforcement patterns in the storm. Not life but honor mattered to you, Helion: so you stayed a moment after that moment, and then another. (...) “You saw the plasma erupting through shield after shield (...) Chaos was attempting to destroy your life’s work, and major sections of the Solar Array were evaporated. Chaos was attempting to destroy your son’s lifework, and since he was aboard that ship, outside the range of any noumenal circuit, it would have destroyed your son as well. “The Array was safe, but you stayed another moment, to try to deflect the stream of particles and shield your son; circuit after circuit failed, and still you stayed, playing the emergency like a raging orchestra. “When the peak of the storm was passed, it was too late for you: you had stayed too long; the flames were coming. But the radio-static cleared long enough for you to have last words with your son, whom you discovered, to your surprise, you loved better than life itself. In your mind, he was the living image of the best thing in you, the ideal you always wanted to achieve. “ ‘Chaos has killed me, son,’ you said. ‘But the victory of unpredictability is hollow. Men imagine, in their pride, that they can predict life’s each event, and govern nature and govern each other with rules of unyielding iron. Not so. There will always be men like you, my son, who will do the things no one else predicts or can control. I tried to tame the sun and failed; no one knows what is at its fiery heart; but you will tame a thousand suns, and spread mankind so wide in space that no one single chance, no flux of chaos, no unexpected misfortune, will ever have power enough to harm us all. For men to be civilized, they must be unlike each other, so that when chaos comes to claim them, no two will use what strategy the other does, and thus, even in the middle of blind chaos, some men, by sheer blind chance, if nothing else, will conquer. “ ‘The way to conquer the chaos which underlies all the illusionary stable things in life, is to be so free, and tolerant, and so much in love with liberty, that chaos itself becomes our ally; we shall become what no one can foresee; and courage and inventiveness will be the names we call our fearless unpredictability…’ “And you vowed to support Phaethon’s effort, and you died in order that his dream might live.

The F.B.I. Web page on the Murrah bombing lists it as “the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history.” That designation overlooks the Tulsa riots of 1921, in which a white mob, enraged by a spurious allegation that a black teen-ager had attempted to assault a young white woman, was deputized and given carte blanche to attack the city’s prosperous black Greenwood section, resulting in as many as three hundred black fatalities. From one perspective, the Murrah bombing was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, but, as the descendants of the Greenwood survivors know, it was likely not even the worst incident in Oklahoma’s history.

Major changes were made to the RBMK design, including improving the speed at which control rods entered the core during a SCRAM event, lowering the time for a complete insertion from 18 seconds to 12; reducing the positive steam void coefficient of reactivity, and the effect of reactivity if there was a complete void in the core; installation of a Fast Acting Emergency Protection system, complete with an additional 24 control rods; removing the ability to bypass emergency protection systems while the reactor was at power, and, most importantly, a new control rod layout with a longer boron section and no empty/water section ahead of it. The graphite tip remained.264

All down the centuries, one peculiarity of the English people has cost them dear. We have always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages we gained in the struggle. The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within . . . from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians . . . Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.91

In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: It had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people. The mass bloodletting shocked the senses. At the war’s start, Senator James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina, believing that casualties would be minimal, claimed he would drink all the blood shed in the coming disturbance. Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse” invited the damnation of history.

The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves. We have been repeatedly told, with some justification, that Asia lives in the past,—it is like a rich mausoleum which displays all its magnificence in trying to immortalize the dead. It was said of Asia that it could never move in the path of progress, its face was so inevitably turned backwards. We accepted this accusation, and came to believe it. In India, I know, a large section of our educated community, grown tired of feeling the humiliation of this charge against us, is trying all its resources of self-deception to turn it into a matter of boasting. But boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in itself.

You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.” Truman understood something his legendary immediate predecessor had also grasped: that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.

The NSC, an enormous, one-of-a-kind arch, 250 meters wide by 165m long, and weighing a colossal 30,000 tons, is being assembled from prefabricated sections at a special holding ground 400m west of Unit 4. The first half was completed at the end of March 2014 and both finished halves were joined together a year later. Though it was originally supposed to be in place over the Sarcophagus by 2005, funds were difficult to come by and the NSC arch was not finished until November 2016. Upon completion, the entire structure was pushed along purpose-built tracks over the existing Sarcophagus, centimeter by centimeter, over the course of two days. It was the largest movable structure ever built. Unlike the original Object Shelter, this new confinement is designed to last 100 years, by which time most decommissioning work on Unit 4 should have concluded.

I despise people who are forever taking pictures and go around with cameras hanging from their necks, always on the lookout for a subject, snapping anything and everything, however silly. All the time they have nothing in their heads but portraying themselves, in the most distasteful manner, though they are quite oblivious of this. What they capture in their photos is a perversely distorted world that has nothing to do with the real world except this perverse distortion, for which they themselves are responsible. Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one. Practitioners of of photography are guilty of one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit--of turning nature into a grotesque. The people in their photographs are nothing but pathetic dolls, disfigured beyond recognition, staring in alarm into the pitiless lens, brainless and repellent. Photography is a base passion that has taken hold of every continent and every section of the population, a sickness that afflicts the whole of humanity and is no longer curable. The inventor of the photographic art was the inventor of the most inhumane of all arts. To him we owe the ultimate distortion of nature and the human beings who form part of it, the reduction of human beings to perverse caricatures--his and theirs. I have yet to see a photograph that shows a normal person, a true and genuine person, just as I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature. Photography is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century.

This book is fiction and all the characters are my own, but it was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. I first heard of the place in the summer of 2014 and discovered Ben Montgomery’s exhaustive reporting in the Tampa Bay Times. Check out the newspaper’s archive for a firsthand look. Mr. Montgomery’s articles led me to Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Their forensic studies of the grave sites were invaluable and are collected in their Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is available at the university’s website. When Elwood reads the school pamphlet in the infirmary, I quote from their report on the school’s day-to-day functions. Officialwhitehouseboys.org is the website of Dozier survivors, and you can go there for the stories of former students in their own words. I quote White House Boy Jack Townsley in chapter four, when Spencer is describing his attitude toward discipline. Roger Dean Kiser’s memoir, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy, and Robin Gaby Fisher’s The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South (written with Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley) are excellent accounts. Nathaniel Penn’s GQ article “Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement” contains an interview with an inmate named Danny Johnson in which he says, “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement; I have recast that quote in chapter sixteen. Former prison warden Tom Murton wrote about the Arkansas prison system in his book with Joe Hyams called Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal. It provides a ground’s-eye view of prison corruption and was the basis of the movie Brubaker, which you should see if you haven’t. Julianne Hare’s Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee is a wonderful history of that African-American community over the years. I quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. a bunch; it was energizing to hear his voice in my head. Elwood cites his “Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools” (1959); the 1962 LP Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, specifically the “Fun Town” section; his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; and his 1962 speech at Cornell College. The “Negroes are Americans” James Baldwin quote is from “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son. I was trying to see what was on TV on July 3, 1975. The New York Times archive has the TV listings for that night, and I found a good nugget.

They sat on fold-up beach chairs and were talking about polio. The older ones, like his grandmother, had lived through the city's 1916 epidemic and were lamenting the fact that in the intervening years science had been unable to find a cure for the disease or come up with an idea of how to prevent it. Look at Weequahic, they said, as clean and sanitary as any section in the city, and it's the worst hit. There was talk, somebody said, of keeping the colored cleaning women from coming to the neighborhood for fear that they carried the polio germs up from the slums. Somebody else said that in his estimation the disease was spread by money, by paper money passing from hand to hand. The important thing, he said, was always to wash your hands after you handled paper money or coins. What about the mail, someone else said, you don't think it could be spread by the mail? What are you going to do, somebody retorted, suspend delivering the mail? The whole city would come to a halt.

To control the release of energy by a nuclear reactor, ‘control rods’ are used. RBMK control rods are long, thin cylinders, composed mostly of neutron-absorbing boron carbide to hinder the reaction. The tips of each rod are made of graphite to prevent cooling water (which is also a neutron absorber) from entering the space the rod’s boron had occupied as it is withdrawn from the core, in order for that section to have a greater impact upon reactivity when reinserted. Chernobyl’s 211 control rods descend down into the core from above as necessary, and are aided in their role by an extra 24 special shortened ‘absorber rods’. These absorber rods ensure an even distribution of power across the entire width of the core by inserting upwards from below. The more control rods that are inserted into the reactor core, and the further they penetrate, the lower the levels of power will be. Conversely, fewer rods equals more power. Every control rod can be inserted together, penetrating as near or as far as the operator wishes, or they can be disconnected and inserted in groups, depending on requirements.77

Akimov didn’t understand what was happening either. He, like the other poor operators in the control room, was unaware of a devastating fatal flaw in the reactor’s design. While around 5 meters of each control rod was composed of the neutron-absorbing element boron to halt the reaction, the ends of each rod were made of graphite - the same reaction-increasing moderator as was used throughout the core of the RBMK. Between the graphite and boron was a long hollow section. The purpose of the graphite tips was to displace cooling water (which is also a moderator, albeit weaker than graphite) in the rod’s path, thus increasing the boron’s dampening effect on the fuel.119 The moment all those graphite tips began to move inside the reactor, there was a surge in positive reactivity in the lower half of the core, resulting in a huge increase in heat and steam production. This heat fractured part of the fuel assembly, distorting the control rod channels and preventing their smooth travel through the core. When a control rod is fully inserted, the tip extends below the core, but now over 200 were lodged in the centre.

Systrom and Krieger didn’t want any of this to be on Instagram and knew, as the site got bigger, that they wouldn’t be able to comb through everything to delete the worst stuff manually. After just nine months, the app already hosted 150 million photos, with users posting 15 photos per second. So they brainstormed a way to automatically detect the worst content and prevent it from going up, to preserve Instagram’s fledgling brand. “Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.

Despite international calls for Chernobyl to be decommissioned at once, it endured a very gradual demise. On October 11th, 1991, just five years after the Unit 4 explosion, there was a third major accident at the plant, this time at Unit 2. Prior to the event, the Unit had been taken offline following another accident - this time a fire in its section of the turbine hall, which had broken out during minor turbogenerator repair work. After extinguishing the blaze, the generator had been isolated and its turbine coasted down to about 150 rpm when a faulty breaker switch closed, reconnecting it to the grid. The turbine rapidly sped up to 3000 rpm in under 30 seconds, then, according to a 1993 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “the influx of current to TG-4 overheated the conductor elements and caused a rapid degradation of the mechanical end joints of the rotor and excitation windings. A centrifugal imbalance developed and damaged generator bearings 10 through 14 and the seal oil system, allowing hydrogen gas and seal oil to leak from the generator enclosure. Electrical arcing and frictional heat ignited the leaking hydrogen and seal oil creating hydrogen flames 8 meters high, and dense smoke which obstructed the visibility of plant personnel. When the burning oil reached the busbar of the generator it caused a three-phase 120,000-amp short circuit.”265

Radioactive reactor fuel and graphite lay everywhere. Part of the roof had collapsed into Unit 4’s section of the turbine hall, setting turbine 7 on fire and breaking an oil pipe, which spread the fire still further and set the hall’s roof alight. Falling debris had broken the pressure valve on a feed pump, which was gushing out boiling, radioactive water.135 Men and women rushed past chunks of uranium fuel as they battled to contain the blaze, isolate electrical systems, and manually open oil-drain and cooling-water valves. Many of these brave souls later died, unaware they had been running among pieces of reactor fuel. For their part, Akimov and Toptunov stayed at the plant after the morning shift relieved them from duty at 6am, choosing to join the desperate effort to salvage the situation. The pair decided water flow to the reactor must be blocked by a closed valve somewhere, so they went together to the half-destroyed feedwater room, where they opened valves on the two feedwater lines. Next, they moved to another room, where they stood knee-deep in a highly radioactive mixture of fuel and water for hours, turning half-submerged valves by hand until the radiation drained their strength and they were evacuated to Pripyat’s hospital.136 Their noble efforts were in vain. The water lines had been destroyed along with the reactor - they were opening valves to nowhere - yet still the control room operators continued redirecting water towards the reactor even six hours after the explosion.

We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else's in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada's structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn't image the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculating it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.

On the third day, I asked if she would like to climb Ben Loyal with me--with anyone else who fancied coming along. None of the guys wanted to join me and I ended up with a group of four girls, including Shara. We spent two hours crossing the marshy moon grass to reach the foot of the mountain before starting up the steep slope toward the summit ridge. It was fairly sheer, but essentially we were still going the “easy” way. Within two hundred feet, half of the girls were looking pretty beat. I figured that having slogged across the marsh for so long, we should definitely do some of the climb. After all, that was the fun bit. They all agreed and we continued up steadily. Before the slope eases at the top, though, there is a section where the heather becomes quite exposed. It is only a short, few hundred feet, and I wrongly figured the girls would enjoy a safe, steep scramble that didn’t require any ropes. Plus the views were amazing out to sea. But things didn’t quite go to plan. The first panicked whimper seemed to set off a cacophony of cheeps, as, one by one, the girls began to voice their fears. It is funny how quickly everyone can go from being totally fine to totally not-fine, very fast, once one person starts to panic. Then the tears started. Nightmare. I ended up literally having to shadow the three girls who were worst struck by this fear, one by one down the slope. I had to stand behind them, hands on top of their hands, and help them move one step at a time, planting their feet exactly where I did, to shield them from the drop. The point of this story is that the only girl who was supercool through the whole mission was Shara, who steadily plodded up, and then just as steadily plodded down beside me, as I tried to help the others. Now I was really smitten. A cool head under pressure is truly irresistible to me, and if I hadn’t been totally besotted before, then our mountain experience together tipped the balance. I had a sneaking feeling that I had met the girl of my dreams.

No two individuals, it would seem, could be further apart politically than [Eldridge] Cleaver and [George] Wallace. Cleaver, on the one hand, embodies and articulates the rage that has gripped large segments of the black community in recent years. Born of desperation and despair, this rage has produced burnings and lootings in the ghetto as well as a philosophy of black separatism that represents more a withdrawal from an intimidating and unresponsive white society than a positive program for political action. This rage was also the source of Cleaver's influence. He could ride its powerful currents to fame and notoriety--which the mass media were more than willing to heap upon him--but he could not begin to propose a solution to the injustices that had produced it. Indeed, to assuage the anger and frustration in the black community would have threatened his own base of power. Wallace, on the other hand, has often been called the embodiment of white racism and reaction. That he is, but, more precisely, his preeminence was a result of the fear which gripped large sections of the white community throughout the country. The Wallace movement grew to frightening proportions not because of anything that Wallace did but because the politically polarized atmosphere in the country called forth the need for a man who would represent the fears and the very worst instincts of millions of people. While Cleaver and Wallace seem on the surface to be so very different, they are both simply the manifestations of the same social evils. Black rage and burnt-out ghettos are the product of the economic deprivation of Negro Americans; and white fear and the Wallace vote are the result of the economic scarcity that motivates whites, particularly those in the lower middle class, to feel that they must protect the little they have against the rising demands of blacks. The conditions of deprivation and scarcity, and the consequent growth of racial hostility and political polarization, formed the context within which the events of 1968 unfolded.

One question.” I managed to gather the two words as his struggling breath entangled in my hair. “This isn’t fair. There is so much I want to know.” He laced his fingers into mine as he dipped his head down to my ear. “I want to know how you like your coffee, and what your favorite song is. I want to know what annoys you, and the worst thing you’ve ever done. I want to know your greatest fear, and whether or not you talk in your sleep. If you prefer chocolate over vanilla, and if you cried watching The Notebook … if you’ve ever seen The Notebook, or like movies at all. What gives you the greatest high, and what can take all the pain away …” Ollie drew in a deep breath, and at the same time, my heart skipped in my chest. “But what I need to know is … are you willing to open yourself up to me so I can find out?” “Is that your question?” I stammered, lost in all his words. “Yes.” He exhaled. “That’s my final question.” Turning to face him, his eyes filled with hope and wonder, but his absent smile expected the inescapable truth. We both knew there wasn’t anything inside me to open up, an empty shell. So, what exactly did I have to lose? And, so, it was there, in the middle of the romance section of the maze-like library at Dolor University outside of Guildford in the United Kingdom where I decided I was willing to show him I was nothing more than a hollow soul. “I will only disappoint you.” “I doubt it.” “And I’m difficult,” I warned. “Good.” Ollie grinned. “I wasn’t expecting anything less, Mia. I’m only asking you to knock down a wall. Not even a wall—fuck, carve me out a door. I only want to know you.” He grabbed my hand, and a calmness washed over me. I didn’t have the tools to destroy a wall, let alone carve out a door. The barriers had endured ten years. Tough and sturdy and placed for a reason. Each one had a purpose, and even though I’d forgotten why they stood there in the first place, I was scared what would happen if I started carving out holes. The walls became my friends—they were safe. But I nodded, anyway, because the small glimmer of hope in his eyes spread like an infection. “And to clarify, no, I’ve never seen The Notebook, and I don’t plan on it, either.” Ollie threw his head back and a raspy laugh echoed in our maze. A laugh I had quickly grown to adore.

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL

It was time to panic, Scotty thought. The only thing she could think of was to faint. Scotty had never fainted before, not even in the worst moments of her life, but she was so frightened that very little acting was required. She simply placed a hand on her forehead, then crumpled in sections at Bo's feet like an elongated sack of oranges. Bo's inexperience with fainting apparently matched Scotty's, because he reacted as if she had taken an arrow to the chest.

that everyone else has probably completely forgotten the incident, but I think it’s going to take quite a while for me to get over it. For some reason though, I suspect that one particular girl in our class had something to do with it all. Call it gut instinct or intuition, but I have a sneaking suspicion that somehow she was involved. Thinking back before that doomed day, life had been pretty good. My best friend, Millie and I had auditioned for the school musical and we were both selected for major roles. Being in grade seven gave us an advantage over the younger kids, that and of course the fact that we were both dancers. The best part was that we’d also been asked to choreograph sections of the performance and this was a huge honor. Miss Sheldon, the performing arts teacher who was in charge of the production, had given us the responsibility of coming up with some routines and teaching the other kids the dance moves they needed to learn. We were so excited about this, especially because we’d been left in charge. Miss Sheldon is the coolest teacher ever!

The inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation’s work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst.1

We barely knew each other, but she was the only person who could calm me down. She didn't even know it either. Every time I looked up into the student section of the bleachers during a hockey game. Every time my thoughts got the worst of me at school in AP Calc. Every time I made an excuse to hang out with Oliver when I really just wanted to see her.

The men over there are gay or married. Stay out of the lumber section too. Real carpenters have timber delivered on-site; you won’t find anyone in the lumber section who knows what to do with their wood.

When I got my copy, I flipped all the way to the back of the book. There were sixteen sections and twenty-six pages total. In other words, we were going to be lucky to get out of this assembly by Christmas.

School Code of Conduct. Everything you need to know about how to behave at school—and how not to behave—is right here in this book.” A bunch of teachers came around and started handing out a copy to each student in the gym. “When you receive yours, open up to page one and follow along with me,” Stricker said. Then she started reading… really… slowly. “‘Section One: Hills Village Middle School Dress Code…’” When I got my copy, I flipped all the way to the back of the book. There were sixteen sections and twenty-six pages total. In other words, we were going to be lucky to get out of this assembly by Christmas. “‘… All students are expected to dress appropriately for an academic environment. No student shall wear clothing of a size more than two beyond his or her normal size….’” HELP! That’s what I was thinking about then. Middle school had just started, and they were already trying to bore us to death. Please, somebody stop Mrs. Stricker before she kills again! Leo took out a pen and started drawing something on the inside of the back cover. Stricker turned to the next page and kept reading. “‘Section Two: Prohibited Items. No student shall bring to school any electronic equipment not intended for class purposes. This includes cell phones, iPods, cameras, laptop computers….’” The whole thing went on and on. And on. And on. By the time we got to Section 6 (“Grounds for Expulsion”), my brain was turning into guacamole, and I’m pretty sure my ears were bleeding too. People always talk about how great it is to get older. All I saw were more rules and more adults telling me what I could and couldn’t do, in the name of what’s “good for me.” Yeah, well, asparagus is good for me, but it still makes me want to throw up. As far as I could tell, this little green book in my hands was just one long list of all the ways I could—and probably would—get into trouble between now and the end of the school year. Meanwhile, Leo was drawing away like the maniac he is. Every time Stricker mentioned another rule, he scribbled something else on the page in front of him. Finally, he turned it around and showed me what he was working on.

Supplier Consolidation Once the purchasing process has been streamlined, as was described in the preceding sections, the next step is to pursue cost reduction activities. A significant cost reduction technique is to reduce the number of suppliers with which a company does business. By concentrating its orders with a smaller number of suppliers, it can use higher purchasing volume to negotiate price reductions, rebates, and discounts. This concept is addressed in more detail in Chapters 8 and 9. The following subtopics address various supplier consolidation issues at a general level. Bottom 10 Percent Besides concentrating order volume, another reason to consolidate suppliers is to eliminate the worst-performing ones. These are the suppliers that deliver the wrong items late and with low quality. Even if these suppliers offer what appear to be rock-bottom prices, the total cost of doing business with them is much higher, because the company is endlessly dealing with receiving inspections, product returns, and the processing of credits. Consequently, having a separate program to identify and eliminate a company’s lowest-rated suppliers can also reduce costs.

This book is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. It explores the neurology of habit formation, how to build new habits and change old ones, and the methods, for instance, that one ad man used to push toothbrushing from an obscure practice into a national obsession. It shows how Procter & Gamble turned a spray named Febreze into a billion-dollar business by taking advantage of consumers’ habitual urges, how Alcoholics Anonymous reforms lives by attacking habits at the core of addiction, and how coach Tony Dungy reversed the fortunes of the worst team in the National Football League by focusing on his players’ automatic reactions to subtle on-field cues.

I found him, with a little hint from Mika, in the gardens where we had met when I first came back to the city. “He goes there every day,” she had said. “Waiting.” He was standing with his back to me, as if regarding a particularly elaborate section of flowers. But he didn’t move when I crunched across the gravel path, and I realized he wasn’t seeing the flowers at all. Still, he didn’t jump when I tapped his shoulder and said, “I’m here.” Kiernan turned slowly, one arm twitching like he wanted to hug me. But he didn’t move. “I’m sorry it took so long,” I said. “But I had so much to think about, and I didn’t…I didn’t know...” Still, he waited. I blew out an impatient breath. “She’s made me her councillor, you know. I’m to help her learn how to be queen, be the voice whispering advice behind her throne. And then she’s going to help me open a school for magic.” He only gazed at me, not helping in the slightest. I jigged up and down a little where I stood, scowling at him. Once, I might have given in to the worries that had plagued me since that first kiss. That he might have loved me once, but had decided it was too much trouble. That he was too angry over the spell I cast over him to forgive me. That our stations were so different that his family would never allow us to be together. I might have faltered when faced with the doubt that nettled me as he continued to stare at me so implacably. I might have turned red and slunk away, rather than stand firm before him. Once, back when I had left my life behind without a fight. But not now. I was stronger now, braver. I had faced my worst fears, and survived them. “So I really think that your parents should let you marry me. Not right now--I have so much to do, with Mika and Philantha and the magic--but someday. Someday not too far away. I did save Thorvaldor, after all, and I expect that Mika will pay me well in exchange for my years of knowledge. She even threatened to title me--it would be just like her to want to rub everyone’s noses in my commonness. And I think that, if they have any objections, you should just--” “Break with them?” he asked. He was trying to be serious, but one corner of his mouth kept twitching. “Well, yes,” I admitted. “I already did,” he said, and my mouth fell open. “Or at least, I threatened to, if they wouldn’t give me their blessing.

choreograph sections of the performance

At the end of this section we will create a grand list of the facets of the apostasy from the seven churches, other Scripture, and the ancient church fathers that will manifest in the Laodicean church before the Rapture of the true church.   We have already seen the major steps of the apostasy from the seven churches and in so doing we have also looked at the teaching of the ancient church fathers on this subject. Before we build our master list, we want to look at a few other Scriptures and quotes from the fathers to be as complete as we can. Then we can see how far we have to go to reach the worst and thereby how close we might be to the Rapture of the church.

I do not wish to ban antibiotics or Cesarian sections any more than anyone would suggest banning automobiles. I ask only that they be used more wisely and that antidotes to their worst side effects be developed. The truth is always obvious in retrospect. How could people really have thought that the sun revolves around Earth or that Earth is flat? Yet dogma are powerful and to their adherents infallible.

Homologous recombination.”               “Homo-what?”               “It’s precision genetic engineering.  Basically, two enzymes fix sections of broken DNA.  They scissor out the broken section and replace it with a new chunk of DNA.  No one knows how it works, but it happens occasionally in Petri dishes.” “Could that cure someone?” “Absolutely.  Defective genes and gene mutations play a primary role in some of the worst diseases that exist today: heart disease, diabetes, immune system disorders, and birth defects.

The world over, the rhetoric of modern democratic politics has been marked by two rather opposed rhetorical styles. The first appeals to hope, to popular aspirations for economic prosperity and social peace. The second appeals to fear, to sectional worries about being worsted or swamped by one’s historic enemies.

By the time we got to Section 6 (“Grounds for Expulsion”), my brain was turning into guacamole, and I’m pretty sure my ears were

I opened up my copy of the Code of Conduct and turned to Section 11, Rule 3: “Students shall not tamper with smoke or fire alarms under any circumstances.” Then I took Leo’s pen and drew a line right through it. That felt pretty good too. One rule down and… well, all the rest to go.

Stay away from the garden and paint sections,” Jillian said. “The men over there are gay or married. Stay out of the lumber section too. Real carpenters have timber delivered on-site; you won’t find anyone in the lumber section who knows what to do with their wood.

Hey, God! I hope you’re there. I want you to hear my prayer. That graven image on my shelf; Is it really you or just myself? Well, anyway, here it goes: Please keep me on my toes. Help me past my worst mistakes, Doing it for both our sakes, For an example of perfection To the Proctors of my section; Or merely for the Heaven of it, Like bread, for the leaven of it. For whatever reason may incline, Please act for yours and mine.

Even though I knew—knew—it was a terrible idea, I ended up scrolling down to the comments section underneath. Christ. I’ve seen that bile on there before, but when it’s directed at you it feels particularly poisonous, especially personal. It was like stumbling into an echo chamber of my own worst thoughts about myself.

My father left Jaffa that April certain that in the worst case, even if other parts of Palestine were lost to the Jewish state, Jaffa would return to Arab hands. According to the UN partition plan, the city was in the Arab section, where the proposed Arab state was to be established alongside the Jewish state.

Some say America's forgotten workin' men rose up in a single, inchoate scream of rage at a system that for too long had provided them with nothing but empty promises, bad trade deals, and government-subsidized carbs. Some claim it's from a generation weaned on talk radio, Fox News, and the comments sections of a million tea party websites. Some say it's a sign of a merciless god testing us to the breaking point. I still think it's because we didn't let that old gypsy woman vote when she couldn't produce a photo ID back in 2012.

That’s what the suitcase farmers were doing. Salesmen, druggists, barkeeps, docs, mechanics, teachers—the range of day-jobbers who thought they wanted to be wheat farmers, ripping up a half-section here and there, trying to hit a crop—they were getting out before they got in any deeper.

Hey, God! I hope you’re there. I want you to hear my prayer. That graven image on my shelf; Is it really you or just myself? Well, anyway, here it goes: Please keep me on my toes. Help me past my worst mistakes, Doing it for both our sakes, For an example of perfection To the Proctors of my section; Or merely for the Heaven of it, Like bread, for the leaven of it. For whatever reason may incline, Please act for yours and mine.

Guide Note: Remembering is generally a two-stage process involving dialogue between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain. The subconscious opens proceedings by throwing up the relevant memory, an act which releases a spurt of self-congratulatory endorphins. Well done, matey, says the conscious. That memory is really useful right now, and I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. You and me, pal, says the subconscious, delighted to have its contribution acknowledged for once, we’re in this together. Then the conscious reviews the memory in its in-tray and sends a message down to the sphincter telling it to prepare for the worst. Why did you remind me of this? the conscious rails against the subconscious. This is awful. Terrible. I didn’t want to remember this. Why the Zark do you think I shoved it to the back of my brain? That’s the last time I help you out, the subconscious mutters and retreats to the darker sections of itself where nasty thoughts are housed. I don’t need you, it tells itself. I can make myself another personality out of these things you’ve discarded. And so the seeds of schizophrenia are sown with kernels of childhood bullying, neglect, low self-esteem, and prejudice

Stay away from the garden and paint sections,” Jillian said. “The men over there are gay or married.

Sanctuary is a seaport, and its name goes back to a time when it provided the only armed haven along an important caravan route. But the long war ended, the caravans abandoned that route for a shorter one, and Sanctuary declined in status—but not in population, because for every honest person who left to pursue a normal life elsewhere, a rogue drifted in to pursue his normal life. Now, Sanctuary is still appropriately named, but as a haven for the lawless. Most of them, and the worst of them, are concentrated in that section of town known as the Maze, a labyrinth of streets and nameless alleys and no churches. There is communion, though, of a rough kind, and much of it goes on in a tavern named the Vulgar Unicorn, which features a sign in the shape of that animal improbably engaging itself, and is owned by the man who usually tends bar on the late shift, an ugly sort of fellow by the name of One-Thumb.

I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks. In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.” At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.)

I look away when the Russian nurse comes in, holding a tray with Mom’s dinner on it. “Good evening, Mrs. Messing,” she says, her accent thick. Mom eyes her suspiciously. “I hope there’s plenty of sauce this time.” The nurse is polite and patient, even goes back to the kitchen to see if they have cracked pepper instead of the little packets. While Mom eats she talks about the parties she and Dad used to throw at the house. Those were the days, she says, sighing. Composers and producers; actresses like her and screenwriters like Dad, all of them vibrating with youth and beauty. The world was going to be ours. I readjust the napkin so that it covers a larger section of her blouse. How cute the two of you were in your matching outfits, she says about Emily and me. I refill her water cup, ask the nurse for more Parmesan cheese. Everyone said I was crazy to have daughters so close in age, but I thought one could watch out for the other. And you were always so mature, so it worked out. I dress her salad, tossing it with the flimsy plastic fork. Do you remember demanding white wine spritzers at your twelfth birthday party? Yes. I nod.

Does he know the Minotaur of this cave from experience? . . . I doubt it, indeed, I know otherwise: – nothing is stranger to these people who are absolute in one thing, these so-called atheist ‘free spirits’, than freedom and release in that sense, in no respect are they more firmly bound; precisely in their faith in truth they are more rigid and more absolute than anyone else. Perhaps I am too familiar with all this: that venerable philosopher’s abstinence prescribed by such a faith like that commits one, that stoicism of the intellect which, in the last resort, denies itself the ‘no’ just as strictly as the ‘yes’, that will to stand still before the factual, the factum brutum, that fatalism of ‘petits faits’116 (ce petit faitalisme,117 as I call it) in which French scholarship now seeks a kind of moral superiority over the German, that renunciation of any interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying and everything else essential to interpretation) – on the whole, this expresses the asceticism of virtue just as well as any denial of sensuality (it is basically just a modus of this denial). However, the compulsion towards it, that unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if, as an unconscious imperative, make no mistake about it, – it is the faith in a metaphysical value, a value as such of truth as vouched for and confirmed by that ideal alone (it stands and falls by that ideal). Strictly speaking, there is no ‘presuppositionless’ knowledge, the thought of such a thing is unthinkable, paralogical: a philosophy, a ‘faith’ always has to be there first, for knowledge to win from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist. (Whoever under- stands it the other way round and, for example, tries to place philosophy ‘on a strictly scientific foundation’, must first stand on its head not just philosophy, but also truth itself: the worst offence against decency which can occur in relation to two such respectable ladies!) Yes, there is no doubt – and here I let my Gay Science have a word, see the fifth book (section 344) – ‘the truthful man, in that daring and final sense which faith in science presupposes, thus affirms another world from the one of life, nature and history; and inasmuch as he affirms this “other world”, must he not therefore deny its opposite, this world, our world, in doing so? . . . Our faith in science is still based on a metaphysical faith, – even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire from the blaze set alight by a faith thousands of years old, that faith of the Christians, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that God is Logos, that truth is divine . . . But what if precisely this becomes more and more unbelievable, when nothing any longer turns out to be divine except for error, blindness and lies – and what if God himself turned out to be our oldest lie?’ – – At this point we need to stop and take time to reflect. Science itself now needs a justification (which is not at all to say that there is one for it). On this question, turn to the most ancient and most modern philosophies: all of them lack a consciousness of the extent to which the will to truth itself needs a justification, here is a gap in every philosophy – how does it come about? Because the ascetic Christian ideal has so far been master over all philosophy, because truth was set as being, as God, as the highest authority itself, because truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this ‘allowed to be’? – From the very moment that faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is a new problem as well: that of the value of truth. – The will to truth needs a critique – let us define our own task with this –, the value of truth is tentatively to be called into question . . . (Anyone who finds this put too briefly is advised to read the Gay Science, s 344)

SECTION I: THE GOAL Think through best/worst-case scenarios but only write down a specific goal that represents the best case.

When I filed my stories on the ‘Children of the Tsunami’ I had thought there was no special eloquence needed to convey such visceral sadness and loss. Children dead in their thousands in one of the worst natural disasters the country had experienced—this was a story that told itself. But that night, after the telecast, I got a call from a friend who said, ‘Do we really have to watch this depressing stuff on television right now?’—as if life’s grim reality was an optional item on a movie menu in a hotel room and you could pick out only the cheery stuff to view. In several of my reports I actually began editorializing more than ever before, appealing directly to those vacationing in happier, sunnier spots to pause and at least think about these children. The callousness of the well-heeled was eye-opening. To be reminded that for a section of Indian society the deaths of the children of poor fisherfolk mattered not at all was both disconcerting and disturbing.

Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

Jamie considered herself outside that, but there was a definite feeling of distrust that underpinned every conversation, and a palpable sense of contempt that beat in the background.  She put it out of her mind and pressed on, hoping to hell that they weren’t going to find Grace dead with a needle in her arm.  That would turn a shit-clap into a shit-pie.  Her dad had practically been a poet.  But she wasn’t hungry. A two-lane road swept across a bridge headed north out of the city. Below it, an old line ran perpendicular, the rails buried in stone chips grown over with brambles. It hadn’t been used in years, and provided a sheltered area stretching across its width.  The banks on either side were fenced off and let down around twenty feet onto the flat at the bottom, and the space beneath the bridge was filled with tents and tarps, all huddled together out of the worst of the weather.  A section of fence had been pushed down, one of the posts dug out and shoved over. It had been trampled flat and an old blanket had been laid over the crushed barbed wire at the top so that the denizens could make the traverse without getting nicked.  They’d walked the last stretch up a pretty much deserted street that had been blocked off at the bottom when the line had been put out of commission. Jamie and Roper moved between the bollards and up the cracked pavement towards the gap in the fence in silence.  Three homeless people were sitting on the street — two by the makeshift entrance to the old line and one opposite.  He was wearing a bright green wind-cheater and had his arms folded under his armpits.

Guide Note: Remembering is generally a two-stage process involving dialogue between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain. The subconscious opens proceedings by throwing up the relevant memory, an act which releases a spurt of self-congratulatory endorphins. Well done, matey, says the conscious. That memory is really useful right now, and I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. You and me, pal, says the subconscious, delighted to have its contribution acknowledged for once, we’re in this together. Then the conscious reviews the memory in its in-tray and sends a message down to the sphincter telling it to prepare for the worst. Why did you remind me of this? the conscious rails against the subconscious. This is awful. Terrible. I didn’t want to remember this. Why the Zark do you think I shoved it to the back of my brain? That’s the last time I help you out, the subconscious mutters and retreats to the darker sections of itself where nasty thoughts are housed. I don’t need you, it tells itself. I can make myself another personality out of these things you’ve discarded. And so the seeds of schizophrenia are sown with kernels of childhood bullying, neglect, low self-esteem, and prejudice.

Manipulative advertising based on personal characteristics is far from the passive distribution of third-party content Congress envisaged when it adopted Section 230 a quarter century ago. And behavioral ads drive many of tech platforms’ worst pathologies—the surveillance, the addiction race, the data pilfering. But Section 230’s shield from liability is worth far more to Big Tech than even behavioral advertising. Section 230 is the giant government subsidy on which Big Tech feeds and has built its empire.

Speculation still continues regarding the worst conditions produced by the storm, but in 2005, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) teamed up with the National Weather Service to create a computer simulation of what the weather conditions were probably like that night.  According to the simulation, by 4:00 on the afternoon of November 10, there were actually two storms hitting Lake Superior, and both had winds blowing in excess of 45 miles per hour.  Unfortunately, the worst winds were in the southeastern section of the lake, where the Fitzgerald was sailing. Since the Fitzgerald was so heavily loaded, it was already sitting lower in the water than it normally would, which would have exacerbated the effect of the waves on the ship.  Also, as the waves rolled over the top of the ship in one direction, they swirled around and pushed against the ship’s deeply seated hull.

Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.” Truman understood something his legendary immediate predecessor had also grasped: that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

The government props up the heartland, ensuring that the most politically connected farms will remain profitable. But huge sections of mid-America no longer function as working, living communities. The subsidy system that was started in the New Deal to help people such as the Lucas family stay on the land has become something entirely different: a payoff to corporate farms growing crops that are already in oversupply, pushing small operators out of business. Some farms get as much as $360,000 a year in subsidies. The money has almost nothing to do with keeping people on the land or feeding the average American.