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When China got into the WTO, that allowed it to sell into any other country within the WTO - not just the United States - at the lowest tariffs that country offered. And the other countries could sell into China at the lowest tariffs that China offered. The problem, right off the bat, was that China had much higher tariffs than everywhere else, so the U.S. and Europe in particular got the short end of that stick.
Magicians are manipulating your consciousness. They are showing you something impossible. They're getting you to construct a narrative, which simply isn't true. So that means they know how to make you aware of certain things and blind to other things. What I'm hoping is that magic, this entertainment vehicle that has been around for a long time, will give us a real insight into the deep mysteries of consciousness
I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It's the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested.
What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.
Many social critics wag their fingers at what they perceive to be frivolous luxury spending. But that misses the point that consumption norms are local. It's not just the rich who spend more when they get more money. Everyone else does, too. The mansions of the rich may seem over the top to people in the middle, but the same could be said of middle-class houses as seen by most of the planet's seven billion people.
Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities—those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult—not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.
When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information
When Jesus invites sinners, 'Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,' he immediately adds,'take my yoke upon you, and learn from me' (Matt. 11:28-29). To come to him includes taking his yoke upon us, being subject to his direction and guidance, learning from him and being obedient to him. If we are unwilling to make such a commitment, then we have not truly placed our trust in him.
Nonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police and military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means. Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political "ju-jitsu" and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed.
[John] Adams's perception of Europe, and especially France, was clearly different than [Tomas] Jefferson's. For Jefferson, the luxury and sophistication of Europe only made American simplicity and virtue appear dearer. For Adams, by contrast, Europe represented what America was fast becoming - a society consumed by luxury and vice and fundamentally riven by a struggle between rich and poor, gentlemen and commoners.
Guys constantly talk about pornography in two ways: as revenge and as reassurance. When you live in a world in which beautiful, sexy women are all around you, in the same classes, on the same athletic field, competing for the same jobs, then the pornographic world - the world in which women thrill to male sexual desire - reassures men that although they may feel "one down," they're still entitled to women's bodies.
Just providing information about how bad things are, or the statistics and data on incarceration by themselves, does lead to more depression and resignation and is not empowering. The information has to be presented in a way that's linked to the piece about encouraging students to think critically and creatively about how they might respond to injustice, and how young people have responded to injustice in the past.
The different political systems, religions and social habits demonstrate that the same brain can be tuned in different manners. But the tuning capacity is limited. We can never feel as a jaguar, for example. We can imagine a man who believes or who intends to be a jaguar, but to intend is not the same as to be. We can have other ideologies, but we will continue restricted by the nature of our brain and of our body.
It seems far simpler to go ahead and say that the epic is a fantastic myth, that happens to be true of the material Universe, that other myths are true in terms of their cultural meaning, and that there's absolutely no problem with holding more than one story, just as there's no problem with viewing the sunset in terms of planetary rotation and spectra and nuclear fusions one moment and as visual splendor the next.
It is absurd for anyone to think that Soviet "Marxism" is a correct application of the thought of Karl Marx. No doubt Soviet propaganda represented it this way. But who believes Soviet propaganda? It is remarkable (but maybe not so remarkable after all, when you consider their motives) that apologists for capitalism, who would not accept Soviet propaganda on any other point, are eager to agree with it on this point.
The U theory suggests that the central integrating thought ... will emerge from building three integrated capacities: a new capacity for observing that no longer fragments the observer from what's observed; a new capacity for stillness that no longer fragments who we really are from what's emerging; and a new capacity for creating alternative realities that no longer fragments the wisdom of the head, heart and hand.
In the U.S., I think there is an ideology of not telling kids what to do. Nobody to tell you who to marry, not tell you what job to pick. You're your own person. You have the freedom to choose, including the freedom to fail in magnificent ways. And I think that's the big difference. In other countries there is basically a social norm about saving that is passed from generation to generation. In the U.S. there isn't.
And in the same way, FDR's not much of a father. Although the children in all their memoirs really talk about what a fun-loving guy Dad was, and how brooding and unhappy Mom was. The children sort of blame it all on the mother. Well, this is kind of standard and typical, and aggrieved Eleanor Roosevelt that she was not a happier mother. She wanted to be a happier mother. And I must say, she was a happier grandmother.
Did it ever strike you that goodness is not merely a beautiful thing, but by far the most beautiful thing in the whole world? So that nothing is to be compared for value with goodness; that riches, honor, power, pleasure, learning, the whole world and all in it, are not worth having in comparison with being good; and the utterly best thing for a person is to be good, even though they were never to be rewarded for it.
When everybody else is in a down market is focusing on what they're doing wrong, instead focus on what you should be doing differently, it may be that what you did in the past was perfectly right. It is possible to do all the right things in business and still have a business crisis because of what's happening in the external environment. And if you start focusing on mistakes only, you're going to miss opportunities.
The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.
A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment.
One day I went to the manager and I asked him whether his model was working and he said, "Well, haven't you seen how many customers we have in this store?" And yes indeed I had. I mean it was definitely attracting a lot of customers, even attracting tourist buses that would land up at this store and people would go through the store and marvel at all the options, even sometimes take photographs of the various aisles.
One reason there are so many short-lived management fads is that their prescriptions were derived and advocated in precisely this way. So managers read about a fad and try it, find that it doesn't work, abandon the effort, and move on to the next thing. In reality, it is usually the case that the faddish prescription was indeed sound advice in certain circumstances, but actually was poor advice in other circumstances.
Imagine you have six loans, small to huge. People want to close loans and because of that, they try to pay off the small loans, but that's not the right strategy. The right strategy, of course, is to pay the loan with the highest interest rate. People make this mistake and it costs them lots and lots of money, it's a very expensive mistake because interest rates accumulate and become very, very expensive very quickly.
It has become increasingly clear that Hungarian authorities are encouraging the whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary's past, namely the wartime Hungarian governments' involvement in the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of its Jewish citizens. I found it outrageous that the Speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly could participate in a ceremony honoring a Hungarian fascist ideologue
The dramatic importance of climate changes to the world’s future has been dangerously underestimated by many, often because we have been lulled by modern technology into thinking we have conquered nature. This well-written book points out in clear language that the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might face, and that massive world-wide actions to hedge against that threat deserve immediate consideration.
In his Philosophy of Style, Herbert Spencer gives two sentences to illustrate how the vague and general can be turned into the vivid and particular: In proportion as the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the regulations of its penal code will be severe. In proportion as men delight in battles, bullfights, and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging, burning, and the rack.
What we see at the cross is the white-hot revelation of the character of God, of his love providing the price that holiness requires. The cross was his means of redeeming lost sinners and reconciling them to himself, but it was also a profound disclosure of his mercy. It is, in Paul’s words, an ‘inexpressible gift’ that leads us to wonder and worship, to praise and adore the God who has given himself to us in this way.
Based on first-hand evidence of your own senses - the improved health and later ages at which acquaintances die nowadays as compared with the past; the material goods that we now possess; the speed at which information, entertainment, and we ourselves move freely throughout the world - it seems to me that a person must be literally deaf and blind not to perceive that humanity is in a much better state than ever before.
It should be appreciated that if the arrangement on Iran's nuclear program collapses after being so patiently negotiated, and successfully implemented since 2014 despite the intense opposition of Netanyahu's Israel and its American loyalists in Congress, it would be widely perceived around the world as a huge setback in the search for regional stability and the struggle to prevent any further spread of nuclear weapons.
If you're happy with where the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter have taken you, I'm not the Grinch. Someone called me Sherry Turkle's "evil Luddite twin." I'm not that. I enjoy the bounties of this technology. But if you fear that your connected life is running away with you, read the book, reflect, talk to your family and friends. I think we deserve better than some of the places that we've gotten with this technology.
We owe them [animals] a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible. That's my job. I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back.
I think the mild Aspergers have always been there. You see, Asperger's diagnosis did not become common in the U.S. until the early '90s. And an Aspergers has more or less normal speech development and they've always been here, that hasn't changed. I can think back to when I was in high school, this is 40 years ago, I could name kids in my high school class and college class that, today, would be diagnosed as Aspergers.
There were over 40,000 pages of FBI documents of which only about half are currently available to scholars and researchers. I think that this 40th anniversary of the assassination is a good opportunity for us to say that now is the time to declassify all FBI material on Malcolm X. There really is a need for us to challenge the US government for its refusal to open up its own archives 40 years after the death of Malcolm.
Time is a function of impact. The longer a book of mine has been in print, the greater its impact seems to be as people absorb and digest my ideas. I am especially proud of The Change Master: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation, first published in 1983, because it raised questions and addressed issues at a time when so many great changes were occurring in our society, indeed throughout the world.
If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public.
Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.
Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.
It has been my pleasure to speak at many Federalist Society gatherings around the country, and I think one thing your organization has definitely done is to contribute to free speech, free debate, and most importantly public understanding of, awareness of, and appreciation of the Constitution. So that's a marvelous contribution, and in a way I must say I'm jealous at how the Federalist Society has thrived at law schools.
Do you know how much money you would save if you changed your light bulb to compact florescent light bubs? How much would you save if you decreased your temperature of your house in the winter by one degree, or increase it by one degree? We just don't know these numbers, but I think displays could make it a memorable change in terms of attention, and also help us translate it in terms of concrete ways on what you can get.
After the privatization of public education everyone will get to choose a school that reflects only your own social values. No need for the competition of ideas or critical thinking. So the curriculum will be up to the school to determine. I am certain that the growing percentage of us who have McJobs will welcome this opportunity to spend a large portion of our income on education and choose an ideology at the same time.
All the words that George Bush used in public during the early stages of the crisis - "wanted, dead or alive," "a crusade," etc. - suggest not so much an orderly and considered progress towards bringing the man to justice according to international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences.
The absence of a focal enemy, which is what the Cold War had provided; the complexity of the developments that are occurring that mean that the world is just extremely complicated - lots of different and competing stories and strands; the continuing reality of megaterrorism; and the dysfunctionality of our politics that has neglected the foundations of the U.S. role in the world; have altogether left us somewhat confused.
Typical pay increases are not enough to motivate employees, but they are enough to irritate them. … Even when companies create seemingly significant pay differentiation between low and high performers, the actual cash increase is insufficient to sustain performance – or it drives the wrong behaviors. … Effective management is a system, not a pay plan. The mistake is that companies try to solve all their problems with pay.
In a growing number of states, you're actually expected to pay back the costs of your imprisonment. Paying back all these fees, fines, and costs may be a condition of your probation or parole. To make matters worse, if you're one of the lucky few who actually manages to get a job following release from prison, up to 100% of your wages can be garnished to pay back all those fees, fines and court costs. One hundred percent.
If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude. Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos -and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.
I believe ability can get you to the top,” says coach John Wooden, “but it takes character to keep you there.… It’s so easy to … begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.'
And what terrifies me is that we're entering a phase where if you start to speak about this as something that can be understood historically - without any sympathy - you are going to be thought of as unpatriotic, and you are going to be forbidden. It's very dangerous. It is precisely incumbent on every citizen to quite understand the world we're living in and the history we are a part of and we are forming as a superpower.
Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy. Sometimes we don't feel that way because of the wounds and the scars we carry from the past or because of the uncertainty of the future. It is doubtful that we came to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well.