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In a letter from the Department for Transport, it has been confirmed that the bill for this very expensive train set will be picked up by the British taxpayer. There are no concrete plans to make businesses pay anything towards it.

According to government statistics, there were 29,900,000 people paying income tax in the UK in the tax year 2013-14. Based on this figure, each taxpayer will each contribute £1,672 to its construction (£50,000,000,000 / 29,000,000).

If the cost rises to £80bn, as predicted by the IEA, the taxpayer will each have to pay £2,675.

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text:
Human Design transmission by Zen Human Design

Human Design Transmission
Volume 17, number 1
January 1, 2010

Human Design transmission

If this doesn't look ok, click here

- Momentous Transit
- Classes
- Final Michael Jackson installment
- CLEARANCE SALE Books and Ephemerides up to 40% off.
- 2010: Do You Know Your Transits?

Change subscription

Momentous Transit

Here’s the transit chart for my own personal application of Human Design. Transit study is so helpful when you have significant episodes, as I did this past November 19. Hard aspects were in effect; Saturn in 46 square Pluto in the 10. These transiting powerhouses activated Ji gates, about identity, direction, the Source and totality. They came into definition in my chart, as I have South Node in Sacral gate 29, the Abysmal, connecting to Saturn and Neptune in Spleen gate 57, part of a channel definition with my natal Design Mercury and transiting Pluto.

The transiting Moon was exactly conjunct Pluto in 10.4. Saturn in the 46 defined the Sacral center that found expression through the channel with Venus (balance) and my natal Mars in gate 1 forming a definition with transiting Earth in 8.

I stumbled and fell, propelled into a row of magazine racks, which did not budge, but my left hand weaved through the wire racks before I came fully crashing to the ground with my hand still trapped. This was a real stop from going on with the rest of my day or week or even month. I couldn’t get up.

For the first time in my life, I was in an ambulance, went to the ER, was admitted to the hospital for surgery on the following day for my wrist that now has a plate and 12 screws. A small bone in my pelvis also cracked, making it completely impossible to stand or walk.

After some days in the hospital, I was transferred to a short-term rehab hospital where I learned to navigate with the help of a platform walker. The platform was so I could use my left elbow instead of the hand. In early December, I returned home to make my lovely house handicapped accessible. What a thing to just turn on the floor heat and not make a fire. Keeps the temperature very comfortable. Really nice!

This is a transformation of my identity as I embrace a walker to move about. It brings me into the Now as an unexpected benefit that just getting the daily life together is an accomplishment. My great friends shop for me, drive me to appointments or help me with household duties and encourage me in healing. I spend afternoon hours to soak up solar radiation and use the scalar wave laser to help the bones heal. It is a melting into deep relaxation; the body, unwinding, mending bones and muscle. The bone in my wrist has mended and I no longer require the platform.

More healing is on my agenda for this new year. I will now start on the PT and personal training, continue with super blue green algae and energy healing, meditation and miracles. I'm trying to avoid the use of Wishes or Hope so: May you have a stupendous year and all things that come to you, may you accept with grace. May we appreciate the divine in all its forms in our lives. Love.

Zeno with walker
This is the platform walker I use to balance and walk.

2010 intensifies these transits as Uranus enters Aries, squares Pluto in Capricorn and opposes Saturn in Libra. These three powerful planets in cardinal signs will have hard-aspect relationships to each other, forming squares and oppositions, even a three-planet cardinal T-cross. Squares and oppositions indicate challenge aspects, and the combining of those energies can be quite volatile, also potentially creative, if you can channel the extra energy rather than having a meltdown.

About skipping the first of my new classes because you’ve had other classes so you think you know the basics, sorry, you don't. You learned one structural set of assumptions as to what a Human Design chart shows, but that's not where I start at all. This class is completely different from all others. It's one you haven't had. It’s not a repeat. Centers, Conditioning and Consciousness is the foundation and a prerequisite for all my other classes.

This one powerful class gives you the tools you need for entering into your own journey of self-knowledge. It is possible to see directly in, to see what's important to you.

January will find me at the gym and my physical therapy appointments, so am postponing classes until further notice. I will teach private students in the meantime. Contact me to learn more.

The free webinar will be scheduled again, so for those of you who signed up, I’ll contact you soon with more details.

Zen Human Design uses Human Design to help you become more peaceful with yourself and the planetary transits. It is the path of consciousness and virtue. It is Human Design as a waking up meditation.

Final Michael Jackson Installment

This will be postponed until I can start a blog discussion, so everyone can participate. If you haven’t read the others, you might want to (Transmissions 16.03 through 16.09). His chart is a great study.

The last installment is the Heart-Solar Plexus definition. You maybe know enough to see the evidence for this theme in his life. Consider his support for so many different charities. Do you have the sense that his family leaned on his ability to be the money support?

the extended Jackson family

While supplies last or through January 19.

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2010: Do You Know Your Transits?2010 Pocket Ephemeris

Don't forget to equip yourself with the easiest tool to watch your transits this year!

2010 Pocket Ephemeris
• softcover, 4x6", 32 pages, $12, buy

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© 2009 Zeno

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Zen Human Design
PO Box 2366
Ranchos de Taos NM 87557 USA
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Since 1993, Zen Human Design (formerly zc design) is instrumental in introducing, establishing and developing the Human Design System in America and abroad.
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text:
DNP Insert

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Cámara de Comercio Ibero-Rusa
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Richard Matzke

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Born 1937 Graduated from Iowa State University (1959), Pennsylvania State University (1961), and St. Mary's College in California (1977). Masters in Geology, MBA. President of Chevron Overseas Petroleum and Member of the Board of Directors of Chevron Corporation from 1989 to 1999. Vice-Chairman of Chevron Corporation and Chevron-Texaco Corporation from 2000 until 2002. Awarded a non-Government (sectoral) medal 'For Development of the Russian Oil & Gas Industry' in 2006; winner of the national prize 'Director of the Year, 2006' (Russia) in the 'Independent Directors' nomination, organized by the Association of Independent Directors and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Elected to the LUKOIL Board of Directors in 2002-2009 and since 2011.

© 2020 Cámara de Comercio Ibero-Rusa • Condiciones de uso


text:
Estimating regional species richness: the case of China's vascular plant species

15:00 Tue | Apr 24, 2018 | Dr. Wen-Hsiung Li（Fellow of Academia Sinica，Taiwan/ US National Academy of Sciences/American Academy of Arts and Sciences ） B103，Jinquan Building, CEE

Dr. Wen-Hsiung Li is Distinguished Research Fellow , Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and James D. Watson Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago. He is a member of US National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the 2003 Balzan Prize for Genetics and Evolution, and the HUGO 2008 Chen Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research.

Dr. Li has been working on the developmental regulation of C4 plant leaves and is best known for his studies on the molecular evolution and methods of DNA sequence and genomic data analysis. He is the author of the first textbooks Fundamental of Molecular Evolution (co-authored with Dan Graur), and Molecular Evolution. He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed publications.

  • Category

© 2016 College Of The Environment & Ecology. Xiamen University. All rights reserved.


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text:
TitleOn foward checking for non-binary constraint satisfaction
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2002
AuthorsBessière C, Meseguer P, Freuder EC, Larrosa J
JournalArtificial Intelligence

Solving non-binary constraint satisfaction problems, a crucial challenge today, can be tackled in two different ways: translating the non-binary problem into an equivalent binary one, or extending binary search algorithms to solve directly the original problem. The latter option raises some issues when we want to extend definitions written for the binary case. This paper focuses on the well-known forward checking algorithm, and shows that it can be generalized to several non-binary versions, all fitting its binary definition. The classical non-binary version, proposed by Van Henteryck, is only one of these generalizations.


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Heaven or Hell

Discussion of Whether We're Headed for Heaven or Hell

The Ridley-Pinker optimists argue, with some force, that the benign impact of globalisation has not received the recognition it is due and that the argument has been contaminated by the left’s sour grapes. In a pointed example of historical cross-dressing, the right has inherited the Enlightenment tradition of optimism: the belief that reason will invariably conquer its enemies, and that history therefore has an underlying direction as greater prosperity gradually reduces crime, indigence and ill health. Implicit in this position is an impatience with the left for refusing to acknowledge the reams of statistics deployed by the right and the role of trade in making the world a safer, healthier, less violent place.

Yet that is not the end of the matter; patently not. If everything is getting better, why doesn’t it feel that way?
- Matthew d'Ancona, If everything is getting better, why doesn’t it feel that way?, The Guardian, 28 Dec 2015

The Rational Optimist is riddled with excruciating errors and distortions. Ridley claims, for instance, that "every country that tried protectionism" after the second world war suffered as a result. He cites South Korea and Taiwan as "countries that went the other way", and experienced miraculous growth. In reality, the governments of both nations subsidised key industries, actively promoted exports, and used tariffs and laws to shut out competing imports. In both countries the state owned all the major commercial banks, allowing it to make decisions about investment (all references are on my website).

He maintains that "Enron funded climate alarmism". The reference he gives demonstrates nothing of the sort, nor can I find evidence for this claim elsewhere. He says that "no significant error has come to light" in Bjørn Lomborg's book The Sceptical Environmentalist. In fact, it contains so many significant errors that an entire book – The Lomborg Deception by Howard Friel – was required to document them.

Ridley asserts that average temperature changes over "the last three decades" have been "relatively slow". In reality, the rise over this period has been the most rapid since instrumental records began. He maintains that "11 of 13 populations" of polar bears are "growing or steady". There are in fact 19 populations of polar bears. Of those whose fluctuations have been measured, one is increasing, three are stable, and eight are declining.
- George Monbiot, This state-hating free marketeer ignores his own failed experiment, The Guardian, 31 May 2010

What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had an opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern Rock, he was responsible, according to parliament's Treasury select committee, for a "high-risk, reckless business strategy". Northern Rock was able to pursue this strategy as a result of a "substantial failure of regulation" by the state. The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the first run on a British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out.

But it's not just Ridley who doesn't mention the inconvenient disjunction between theory and practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been reviewed dozens of times, and almost all the reviewers have either been unaware of his demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied or too polite to mention it. The reason, as far as I can see, is that Ridley is telling people – especially rich, powerful people – what they want to hear.

He tells them that they needn't worry about social or environmental issues, because these will sort themselves out if the market is liberated from government control. He tells them that they are right to assert that government should get off their backs and stop interfering with its pettifogging rules and regulations: they should be left alone to make as much money as they like, however they like. ...
I also pointed out that Ridley had made a series of shocking errors and distortions in his book. I showed how he had misrepresented economic history, made claims that bore no relation to the references he gave, and reeled off facts about the environment which were just plain wrong. Again, none of this has been picked up by Ridley's reviewers.

Ridley himself has claimed that his shocking mistakes aren't mistakes at all, then proceeds to compound them with a series of spurious justifications. Here are a few examples: ...
If Ridley really believes that this passage isn't designed to suggest that the general trend is positive, his intellectual dishonesty runs deeper than I had imagined. And if he can't see that his selective treatment of the subject is blatant cherry-picking, it says more than he would care to about his standards of objectivity.
- George Monbiot, Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist is telling the rich what they want to hear, The Guardian, 18 Jun 2010

In the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley has made yet another attempt to convince the public that global warming won’t be that bad. ... The facts just don’t align with Ridley’s portrayal.
- Climate Science Watch, In WSJ, Ridley presents medley of long-debunked climate claims, September 14, 2013

Matt Ridley defends himself by appealing to testimony by Roger Pielke:

Every time I argue for a lukewarm “third way” — that climate change is real but slow, partly man-made but also susceptible to natural factors, and might be dangerous but more likely will not be — I am attacked from both sides. ...
This is what Roger Pielke Jr said in recent testimony to Congress:

"• It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases. ...
• Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.” Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.” ... "
- Matt Ridley, GLOBAL LUKEWARMING NEED NOT BE CATASTROPHIC, Matt Ridley Blog, 01 October, 2013

Pielke, however, is not a trustworthy source. For instance:

Why has there been such a buzz about FiveThirtyEight and Roger Pielke Jr.? Likely because Pielke has a history of climate claims which have been criticized by scientists — not the type of hire many of us expected by the FiveThirtyEight team. Dr. Pielke, a political scientist (not a climate scientist), was recently called out by Dr. John Holdren for statements he made to congress on droughts. ...
Unfortunately, Roger Pielke’s views are at odds with many peer-reviewed studies that look at this, and they are at odds with some of the studies he cites in his article. ...
These inexact phrases, extensions of his own work beyond their application, and inclusion of non-weather-related disasters are some of the reasons his conclusions are not taken seriously by myself and other climate scientists.
- John P. Abraham, Statistics and Climate Science: Roger Pielke Missed the Mark, THE BLOG, Huffington Post, 03/27/2014, Updated May 27, 2014

More than four centuries later, there are many who need to be reassured of their significance in the world. The Elizabethans found in divination support for their belief that history contained a hidden design that would culminate in a new world order. Obeying the same need for meaning, modern thinkers look to numbers for signs that show the emergence of a world founded on rational and moral principles. They believe that improvement in ethics and politics is incremental and accretive: one advance is followed by another in a process that stabilises and strengthens the advances that have already taken place. Now and then regress may occur, but when this happens it does so against a background in which the greater part of what has been achieved so far does not pass away. Slowly, over time, the world is becoming a better place.

The ancient world, along with all the major religions and pre-modern philosophies, had a different and truer view. Improvements in civilisation are real enough, but they come and go. While knowledge and invention may grow cumulatively and at an accelerating rate, advances in ethics and politics are erratic, discontinuous and easily lost. Amid the general drift, cycles can be discerned: peace and freedom alternate with war and tyranny, eras of increasing wealth with periods of economic collapse. Instead of becoming ever stronger and more widely spread, civilisation remains inherently fragile and regularly succumbs to barbarism. This view, which was taken for granted until sometime in the mid-18th century, is so threatening to modern hopes that it is now practically incomprehensible.

Unable to tolerate the prospect that the cycles of conflict will continue, many are anxious to find continuing improvement in the human lot. Who can fail to sympathise with them?
- John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war, The Guardian, March 13, 2015

The loose but growing collection of pundits, academics and thinktank operatives who endorse this stubbornly cheerful, handbasket-free account of our situation have occasionally been labelled “the New Optimists”, a name intended to evoke the rebellious scepticism of the New Atheists led by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And from their perspective, our prevailing mood of despair is irrational, and frankly a bit self-indulgent. They argue that it says more about us than it does about how things really are – illustrating a certain tendency toward collective self-flagellation, and an unwillingness to believe in the power of human ingenuity. And that it is best explained as the result of various psychological biases that served a purpose on the prehistoric savannah – but now, in a media-saturated era, constantly mislead us.

“Once upon a time, it was of great survival value to be worried about everything that could go wrong,” says Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian and self-declared New Optimist whose book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future was published just before Trump won the presidency last year. This is what makes bad news especially compelling: in our evolutionary past, it was a very good thing that your attention could be easily seized by negative information, since it might well indicate an imminent risk to your own survival.
- Oliver Burkeman, Is the world really better than ever?, The Guardian, 28 Jul 2017 [good overview with lots of references]

[SP:] But reason is not a powerful part of human nature. Innately, we favor family over strangers, our tribe over other tribes. ...
[BG:] So, when you consider a radical change, like “Hey, let’s tear up the global trade agreements; they’re a disaster,” you’re more likely to implement it if you think things are getting worse. “Let’s tear up the treaties. Let’s try a nondemocratic approach.” Your willingness to go off the current path is much, much higher. But you can hardly be serious about government — or society as a whole — unless you say: What are the measures that count, and how are we doing on those measures? ...
[SP:] We should appreciate how much better off we are and try to improve our institutions guided by what works and what doesn’t. ...
[BG:] There’s a paradox in letting yourself be very, very upset about what remains to be done. What indicator improves even faster than reduction in violence? Our distaste for violence. We’re more upset about it today. ... But to read Steven’s book and think it says, “Don’t worry, be happy,” is to misread it. ...
[SP:] You can say the same fact two ways. Extreme global poverty has been reduced from 90 percent 200 years ago to 10 percent today. That’s great! Or you can say: More than 700 million people in the world live in extreme poverty today. They’re the same fact.... ...
[BG:] And, yes, I embrace more risk. Most philanthropists don’t take huge, 10-to-15-years-type risks. ...
[BG:] There are different time frames. Take the #MeToo movement. We’re in a period of awakening now. It is not worse today than it was five years ago. We’re just more aware. And five years from now this outrage will have been a factor in making things better than five years ago, when it was hidden. ...
[SP:] When people subscribe to an ideology, they suck up evidence that supports their preconceptions and filter out evidence that goes against them. Contrary to the belief of most scientists that denial of climate change is an effect of scientific illiteracy, it is not at all correlated with scientific literacy. People who believe in man-made climate change don’t know any more about climate or science than those who deny it. It’s almost perfectly correlated with left-wing versus right-wing orientation. ...
[BG:] But I’m optimistic. I do think awareness of how things have worked is important to recreate a conservative center — that is, make us careful about what we change. ...
''[BG:] But the problem now is that innovation is not viewed as an unalloyed way to improve the human condition. And that’s fair, because it’s not pure. Does social media split us into tribes in a way that’s dangerous? Does it create, even in high school social circles, a channel for bullying, or a desire to look perfect in photos? Is A.I. going to proceed so quickly that work, which is something people worship, will suffer bad distributional effects, and people won’t know what to do? This is an unfortunate time for saying, “Take all your damn negative thoughts, and I’ll innovate away from them.” People are seeing difficulty with that argument. ...
[SP:] There’s also a dichotomy between the roles of innovation and policy. There are certain things that governments are always going to do better than private innovators.
- PHILIP GALANES, The Mind Meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker, NYT, JAN. 27, 2018

Some 1.3 billion people still live in extreme poverty....
- LANDON THOMAS Jr., The World Bank Is Remaking Itself as a Creature of Wall Street, NYT, JAN. 25, 2018 [This is on p. 4 of the Sunday January 28th Business section. On p. 5 of the same section, Steven Pinker is quoted as saying "You can say the same fact two ways. Extreme global poverty has been reduced from 90 percent 200 years ago to 10 percent today. That’s great! Or you can say: More than 700 million people in the world live in extreme poverty today. They’re the same fact...." As of Dec. 2017 the world population was said to be 7.6 billion, so 10% would be 760 million in extreme poverty, quite a discrepancy from 1.3 billion.]

“So many positive things going on for the U.S.A. and the Fake News Media just doesn’t want to go there,” [https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/962753552824365056|he [Donald Trump] wrote] on Twitter. “Same negative stories over and over again! No wonder the People no longer trust the media, whose approval ratings are correctly at their lowest levels in history!”
- PETER BAKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN, Abuse Case Exposes Fissures in a White House in Turmoil, NYT, FEB. 11, 2018

Once we had eaten, we asked one of the waitresses if we could talk to her. She nodded uncertainly and dried her hands on her apron. ...
“Things are better in Russia now,” she said. “The economy is improving, our lives are getting better and better.”

“What are you saying?” said a man over at the cash register, looking at us. “Things are worse in Russia! It’s all going downhill! Worse and worse!”
- KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD, A Literary Road Trip Into the Heart of Russia, NYT, FEB. 14, 2018

These days almost everyone has the (justified) sense that America is coming apart at the seams. But this isn’t a new story, or just about politics. Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: Political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality has soared.
- Paul Krugman, What’s the Matter With Trumpland?, NYT, April 2, 2018

But... any institution that assumes that past success guarantees the future is being foolish.”
- Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, quoted in ERICA L. GREEN, With Changing Students and Times, Colleges Are Going Back to School, NYT, APRIL 5, 2018

ROME, the Maya, Bronze Age Greece: every complex society in history has collapsed. Will our industrial civilisation be any different?

Probably not.
- Debora MacKenzie, John Horgan and Richard Webb, What happens when society crumbles and progress stops, New Scientist, 1 June 2016

There’s a mountain of evidence suggesting that the quality of our relationships has been in steady decline for decades. In the 1980s, 20 percent of Americans said they were often lonely. Now it’s 40 percent. Suicide rates are now at a 30-year high. Depression rates have increased tenfold since 1960, which is not only a result of greater reporting. Most children born to mothers under 30 are born outside of marriage. There’s been a steady 30-year decline in Americans’ satisfaction with the peer-to-peer relationships at work.

Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy summarized his experience as a doctor in an article in September in The Harvard Business Review: “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” ...

Weak social connections have health effects similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and a greater negative effect than obesity, he said.

Over the past five years, such trends have abruptly gotten worse. In 2012, 5.9 percent of young people suffered from severe mental health issues. By 2015 it was 8.2 percent.

Last year, Jean Twenge wrote a much-discussed article for The Atlantic, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation,” charting the accelerating social collapse. Teenagers are suddenly less likely to date, less likely to leave the home without their parents, more likely to put off the activities of adulthood. They are spending more time alone with their digital screens, and the greater the screen time, the greater the unhappiness. Eighth graders who are heavy users of social media are 27 percent more likely to be depressed. ...
But the big issue surrounding Facebook is not privacy. It’s that Facebook and other social media companies are feeding this epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.
- David Brooks, The Blindness of Social Wealth, NYT, April 16, 2018

The neural response patterns evoked by the videos — on subjects as diverse as the dangers of college football, the behavior of water in outer space, and Liam Neeson trying his hand at improv comedy — proved so congruent among friends, compared to patterns seen among people who were not friends, that the researchers could predict the strength of two people’s social bond based on their brain scans alone. ...
The new study is part of a surge of scientific interest in the nature, structure and evolution of friendship. Behind the enthusiasm is a virtual Kilimanjaro of demographic evidence that friendlessness can be poisonous, exacting a physical and emotional toll comparable to that of more familiar risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, unemployment, lack of exercise, smoking cigarettes. ...
Dr. Christakis and his co-workers recently demonstrated that people with strong social ties had comparatively low concentrations of fibrinogen, a protein associated with the kind of chronic inflammation thought to be the source of many diseases.
- NATALIE ANGIER, You Share Everything With Your Bestie. Even Brain Waves., NYT, APRIL 16, 2018

Even liberal economists such as Nouriel Roubini agree that Marx’s conviction that capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to destroy itself remains as prescient as ever.
- Jason Barker, Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!, NYT, April 30, 2018

Similarly, when the film World War Z premiered in the summer of 2013, the end of the world was also captured in at least five other films: Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s This Is the End, and Edgar Wright’s The World’s End. By the summer of 2014, Entertainment Weekly had to release an “Apocalypse Issue” in order to cover all of the salient new summer blockbusters set in a postapocalyctic era. It is not merely zombies that have crested culturally—it is the end of the world. ...
In other words, if citizens think that we’re teetering on the brink of chaos, the apocalyptic mindset can, in and of itself, help bring about the very disaster it fears. ...
The rise of the zombie metaphor both reflects and reifies collective perceptions of societal breakdown. Communications scholar Brian Anse Patrick (2014, 25) explicitly argues that “the zombie phenomenon represents a profound disturbance in the Western collective unconscious caused by anxieties over the decline of Western civilization.” ...
Consider the observations of a survivalist instructor (Bowser 2014):
The “defend what’s mine” mentality states that the moment “shit goes down,” every other human in the world instantly becomes either a resource to be used or a threat to be eliminated. Whomever you designate as “your tribe” are the only people with any value—all others are simply mindless sheep to be picked off with your shiny new AR-15.
- Daniel W. Drezner, Metaphor of the Living Dead: Or, the Effect of the Zombie Apocalypse on Public Policy Discourse, Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 81, Number 4, Winter 2014, pp. 825-849

The next panel asks us to consider whether the West will survive. In recent years, this question would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism. Not this year. If ever there were a time to treat this question with a deadly seriousness, it is now.

This question was real, half a century ago, for Ewald von Kleist and the founders of this conference. Indeed, it is why they first started coming to Munich. They did not assume the West would survive, because they had seen its near annihilation. They saw open markets give way to beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism, and the poverty that imposed. They saw a world order fracture into clashing ethnic and nationalist passions, and the misery that wrought. They saw the rise of hostile great powers, and the failure of deterrence, and the wars that followed.

We've lost hope for the future in all these different ways. ...
We should not let our ideological biases obscure the sort of objective decline that has happened. ... I think the universities have played a big role in this decline.... The real scientists have been replaced by people who are nimble in the art of government grants....''
You never really push the envelope, you never ask tough questions. ... It's always easiest for us to see a lot of the conformity and political correctness in the humanities.... ...
There are all these things you could no longer do. ... The history about the stagnation, sclerosis of the United States — the conservative versus liberal debate is always when did this start. ... The liberals always say it started in the eighties with Reagan. The conservatives say it started in the seventies. And I think the conservatives are really right about that. ...
We landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later. And I think with the benefit of hindsight we can say that that's when the hippies took over the country and when the true sort of cultural war — this question of progress — was somehow lost and the stagnation of the seventies really set in.

- Peter Thiel, The Reasons for the Decline of Western Civilization and Science, PhilosophyInsights, published on Sep 17, 2017 [excerpt from Peter Thiel Speech at ISI's 2014 Dinner for Western Civilization]

“This is always a problem with élites, they’re always skewed in an optimistic direction,” he said. “It may be true to an even greater extent at present. If you were born in 1950, and you were in the top-tenth percentile economically, everything got better for twenty years automatically. Then, after the late sixties, you went to a good grad school, and you got a good job on Wall Street in the late seventies, and then you hit the boom. Your story has been one of incredible, unrelenting progress for sixty-one years. Most people who are sixty-one years old in the U.S.? Not their story at all.” ...
“I actually think it is a big step just to ask the question ‘What does one need to do to make the U.S. a better place?’ That’s where I’m weirdly hopeful, in spite of the fact that a lot of things aren’t going perfectly these days. There is a very cathartic crisis that’s gone on, and it’s not clear where it’s going to go. But at least everyone knows things are rotten. We’re in a much better place than when things were rotten and everyone thought things were great.”
- Peter Thiel, quoted in George Packer, No Death, No Taxes: The libertarian futurism of a Silicon Valley billionaire., The New Yorker, November 28, 2011

The real question is whether digital technology can produce the enduring changes in the brain that addictive drugs do. There is little evidence that this is the case. And while an alcoholic deprived of his drink can go into life-threatening withdrawal, I have yet to see an adolescent in the emergency room with smartphone withdrawal — just a sullen teenager who wants his device back.

Considering all this, why do so many parents still insist that their teenager has a problem with anxiety? I fear that it reflects a cultural shift toward pathologizing everyday levels of distress.

There is a difference between an anxiety disorder and everyday anxiety. The first impairs people’s ability to function because they suffer from excessive anxiety even when there is little or nothing to be anxious about. The second is a perfectly normal and rational response to real stress. Teenagers — and people of all ages — will and should feel anxious occasionally.

Some would argue that young people today are more worried because the world is now in a more parlous state, what with intense competition for college and the lingering effects of the Great Recession, among other factors. Sure, but then that anxiety is an appropriate response to life’s challenges — not a disorder.
Of course this is anecdotal, but as a psychiatrist, I haven’t seen an increase in the number of patients suffering from true anxiety disorders, who need therapy and often medication to keep their affliction in check. What I have noticed is that more of my young patients worry a lot about things that don’t seem so serious, and then worry about their worry. ...
It’s good to keep in mind that the advent of new technology typically provokes medical and moral panic. Remember all those warnings that TV would cause brain rot? Never happened.
- Richard A. Friedman, The Big Myth About Teenage Anxiety, NYT, Sept. 7, 2018

The worry that “today’s young people are reading less books” seems to be a theme for each successive generation. One can imagine a similar adult worry about the decline of college student book reading in the 1980s (when I went to school) or the 1880s.

Each generation of older people seems to be convinced that today’s young folks are succumbing to the latest distraction. Smart phones are the new rock and roll. Social media is the new comic book.

I suspect that today’s college students are just fine. That they read books today, and will read books in ever greater numbers long into the future.
- Joshua Kim, Is NYTimes Correct That College Students Don't Read Books?, Inside Higher Ed, September 3, 2018

After hearing conflicting opinions about the matters of the day, Mrs. Lee sighs and wonders: “Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right.”
- Madeleine Lee ["who is young, rich and beautiful"], in Henry Adams ["Great-grandson and grandson of presidents, historian, professor and journalist]"], Democracy: an American Novel ["created a sensation and was a best seller in the United States and England"], published in 1880, quoted in Jon Meacham, Henry Adams’s 1880 Novel, ‘Democracy,’ Resonates Now More Than Ever, NYT, Sept. 11, 2018

Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last.

The result is an accelerating paradox. Over the last five decades, millions of lives have been remade for the better. Yet within this brighter tomorrow, we suffer unprecedented despair. In a time defined by ever more social progress and astounding innovations, we have never been more burdened by sadness or more consumed by self-harm. And this may be only the beginning. ...
The trends in suicide in both America and abroad are mirrored by devastating changes in behavior and mental health. In the last two decades, for example, there’s been a 37 percent increase in the years of life lost to clinical depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse, and other disorders of the mind, according to the batch of previously unpublished GBD data provided to Newsweek. As a group, these disorders are the leading cause of disability in the world, vexing developing countries in particular, and the United States most of all. ...
“The strength of the association between media violence and aggressive behavior,” the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded in 2009, “is greater than the association between calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, and condom nonuse and sexually acquired HIV infection, and is nearly as strong as the association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.”
- TONY DOKOUPIL, Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic--and What We Can Do to Help, Newsweek, 5/23/13

The heroine of a sensational and successful novel, “Democracy,” published anonymously in 1880, Madeleine Lee, who is young, rich and beautiful, moves from New York to Washington to pass a season in a house on Lafayette Square. ...
Adams wished things were different. The corrupt politician is the putative villain of his book, the idealistic wayfarer his heroine. A cleareyed reading of the novel, however, suggests that his view of democracy has much in common with that of Machiavelli, Sidney, Emerson and Truman. After hearing conflicting opinions about the matters of the day, Mrs. Lee sighs and wonders: “Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right.”
- Jon Meacham, Henry Adams’s 1880 Novel, ‘Democracy,’ Resonates Now More Than Ever, NYT, Sept. 11, 2018

Other sources of sexual inhibition speak distinctly to the way we live today. For example, sleep deprivation strongly suppresses desire—and sleep quality is imperiled by now-common practices like checking one’s phone overnight. (For women, getting an extra hour of sleep predicts a 14 percent greater likelihood of having sex the next day.) In her new book, Better Sex Through Mindfulness, Lori Brotto, an obstetrics-and-gynecology professor at the University of British Columbia, reviews lab research showing that background distraction of the sort we’re all swimming in now likewise dampens arousal, in both men and women.

How can such little things—a bad night’s sleep, low-grade distraction—defeat something as fundamental as sex? One answer, which I heard from a few quarters, is that our sexual appetites are meant to be easily extinguished. The human race needs sex, but individual humans don’t.

Among the contradictions of our time is this: We live in unprecedented physical safety, and yet something about modern life, very recent modern life, has triggered in many of us autonomic responses associated with danger—anxiety, constant scanning of our surroundings, fitful sleep. Under these circumstances, survival trumps desire. As Emily Nagoski likes to point out, nobody ever died of sexlessness: “We can starve to death, die of dehydration, even die of sleep deprivation. But nobody ever died of not being able to get laid.”
- KATE JULIAN, Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?, Atlantic, DECEMBER 2018

Pessimists tend to prosper in uncertain times, and British politics at present is very much a catastrophists’ market. Critics and doomsayers are agitating more noisily as the prospect of the U.K. leaving without a deal becomes more likely.
We’re being told British shops will run out of food and medicines, aeroplanes will be grounded, and the economy could shrink by as much as 8 percent (that's the Bank of England's worst case scenario) if we leave the EU without a deal in place. Officials in both London and Brussels are talking publicly about contingency planning, while Labour and pro-EU Tory MPs have repeatedly pressed May to rule it out. In the last Cabinet meeting of the year, Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd supposedly compared Brexit to a car crash and Justice Secretary David Gauke said the concept of a "managed no-deal" was as mythical as a unicorn.
But doomsayers should hold their fire — Britain will be just fine.
Even if some instability does follow a no-treaty withdrawal, it would be short-term. Life would continue. Chickens would continue to lay eggs.
Trading restrictions work both ways, so any attempt by Brussels to punish the disobedient Brits by preventing them exporting agricultural goods to the EU might encourage the British government to find sudden reasons to stop the importation of German motor cars. Or Irish beef. Or French wine. Have you tried new-world merlots? They can be rather good. And good value.

No deal would, in fact, have tremendous advantages. It would allow Britain immediately to negotiate and sign trade deals beyond Europe. It would force May’s government to cut taxes to make us more competitive. It would result in a tremendous boost to national unity. ...
The EU's nightmare, alas, will continue.

The question in Britain will then not be “why did we leave?” but “why did it take us so long?”
- QUENTIN LETTS, Brexit Britain will be just fine, Politico, 12/26/18

Henri Clement
This opinion piece is the embodiment of “in this media age perception is reality”.
Dream on for all i care.

Posted on 12/26/18

Gerhard Lenz
Right. Several European governments are in trouble. So what about the British one? Everything is coming up roses, I assume.

The usual piece of Brexit glorification ...
This is just the usual display of the obvious combination of boastfulness and a profound lack of contact with reality that tags so many Brexiters.

Perhaps that instability will indeed not be as big as the greatest pessimists predict. Perhaps.

More likely: Britain will be poorer, significantly poorer. And, given the class structures still in place in todays’ Britain: Those who supported Brexit the most – large part of the working classes or lower middle classes – will certainly suffer most.

Posted on 12/26/18

Elena Adaal
It always strikes me from these type of articles, that with more positivity comes less detail.

There is no discussion on how the meat industry is going to cope with 30% tariffs, how the electricity production in NI will be handled, how the border will be handled, what will happen to the airport of Gibraltar, how the congestion at Dover will be dealt with, etc, ect.

Its going to be all right in the night because “chickens will still lay eggs”; Come on..

Posted on 12/26/18

Pascal St-Pierre
As a Frenchman who has lived and worked in London for more than ten years, I agree the UK will be fine, deal or no deal. The feeling in the City is great and very optimistic – far more so than my friends and family in France who all despise Macron.

Posted on 12/26/18

Antoine uk
... Our government unable to manage a drone in Gatwick or an identity card project.. or many other small changes. How do you expect this bunch of incompetent m….s to be able to handle the complexities of the biggest change in history in trade relationship with their neighbours… without a transition. ...

Posted on 12/26/18

- Comments on QUENTIN LETTS, Brexit Britain will be just fine, Politico, 12/26/18

In the event of a no-deal Brexit, trade would be governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization. That would mean tariffs reaching as high as 64 percent on dairy and other agricultural products, discouraging business. In that event, economic growth in the Republic of Ireland could be cut in half, according to a recent report from the Economic and Social Research Institute, a think tank in Dublin.

The Bank of England recently warned that a no-deal Brexit could plunge Britain into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. ...
The company ships yarn from Asia to the port in Dublin, then trucks it across the border to be spun into fabric in Strabane. The fabric gets trucked back over the border to be dyed at a plant in Dublin. Some of the material comes back to Strabane, where workers cut and sew it into uniforms for rugby, Gaelic football and cricket teams. Making some products involves eight separate border crossings, Mr. Kennedy says.

On a recent trip to Brussels, European Union officials assured him that the border would not return.

Many analysts assume Europe and Britain will find a finesse that avoids a border, even if they fail to complete a Brexit deal.

“A hard border is unlikely, even in the event of a no-deal Brexit,” says Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy based in London. “Flexibility is likely to present itself.”

But Mrs. May is intent on limiting immigration, something Britain can do only by leaving the European marketplace, which requires free movement of people. Europe is adamant that Britain not be allowed to leave the bloc and keep the benefits of membership: It should not be able to sell its wares unhampered into the Republic while breaching European rules.

“There will need to be checks,” Mr. Rahman said. “The question is how onerous, and where those checks take place.”

For people in Ireland, history offers little comfort, teaching time and again that policies hatched in England tend to play out here with ill effect. Many see Brexit as the latest in a long string of indignities, a reckless bit of political histrionics that again puts Ireland in the cross hairs.

“Those politicians in London, they don’t give one dirt about Ireland,” says Willie McKeever, a retired woodcutter who lives in a pro-Republican neighborhood in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, where a 1968 police crackdown on protesters marked the beginning of The Troubles. “It could start up again.”

- Peter S. Goodman, The Border Dividing Ireland Has Long Been Invisible. Brexit Threatens to Make It Real., NYT, Dec. 26, 2018

This is the most extreme form of project fear yet, these people are an absolute disgrace.” That was how Nigel Farage, ever the patriot, dismissed the voice of the nation’s doctors last week. The British Medical Association had set out some of the harm a no-deal Brexit would cause. Its prediction that the UK’s ability to fight pandemics would be undermined grabbed the headlines. But in the small print were warnings of “delays in diagnosis and treatment for cancer patients” and adverse effects on “nearly a million patients receiving treatment for rare diseases”. ...
“It has become clear that Project Fear – the scare-mongering campaign carried out by those who want to remain in the EU – is alive and well,” well-known medico-legal expert Iain Duncan Smith . “Hardly a day goes by without another scare story about the UK failing to get medical isotopes.” And who among us, if they had cancer, wouldn’t turn to a failed party leader and benefits system for advice, as opposed to, say, the BMA council chair, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, with his 28 years’ as a doctor and CBE for services to primary care?

Somehow, we are back to having “had enough of experts”, in the words of cabinet minister Michael Gove. Or, at least, that’s the kind of mood Brexiteers want to stir up. Being able to paint expert advice as an elitist project to frustrate the will of the people may be their last chance to salvage the “Brexit Dream”. Let’s be entirely clear about what that dream is, because few of them have ever been honest about it: a legal separation from our closest neighbours that will retard growth, cost jobs, undermine consumer rights and disadvantage citizens.
- David Shariatmadari, Brexiteers are using the notion of Project Fear to manipulate you, NYT, Tue 21 Aug 2018

Alexander Dana Noyes, veteran financial editor of the New York Times, issued pessimistic forecasts. Paul M. Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. said that if the "orgy of unrestrained speculation" were not stopped it would "bring about a general depression involving the entire country." The economist Roger W. Babson disseminated such gloom that he was nicknamed the "Prophet of Loss." But the Cassandras were accused of "sandbagging American prosperity." The urge to talk up the market in 1929 was as powerful as the impulse to speak peace in 1939. Even the likes of Bernard Baruch... made bullish prognostications. Baruch stated in June that the "economic condition of the world seems on the verge of a great forward movement." Others were even more starry-eyed. The optimistic incantations of bankers and brokers were understandable. But most commentators and academics echoed them, none more famously than Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, who estimated that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
- Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007, pp. 72-73.

Technology may have liberated us from the old gatekeepers, but it also created a culture of choose-your-own-fact niches, elevated conspiracy thinking to the center of public consciousness and brought the incessant nightmare of high-school-clique drama to every human endeavor.

It also skewed our experience of daily reality. Objectively, the world today is better than ever, but the digital world inevitably makes everyone feel worse. It isn’t just the substance of daily news that unmoors you, but also the speed and volume and oversaturated fakery of it all.
- Farhad Manjoo, You Should Meditate Every Day, NYT, Jan. 9, 2019

ARNP, Des Moines, IA, 1/14/2019
Most of Iowa is disgusted with King, and mortified that his district supports him. I, for one, cannot fathom how anyone can stand King. But obviously a big chunk of the country likes Trump, too. Yikes. We seem to be moving backwards awfully rapidly. I'm scared for my daughter and other young adults who have never known a U.S. before Reagan.
- Comment on Trip Gabriel, Jonathan Martin and Nicholas Fandos, Steve King Removed from Committee Assignments Over White Supremacy Remark, NYT, Jan. 14, 2019

Who is in charge of the clattering train?”

Nobody knows. With Mrs. May’s cabinet, the country, political parties and Parliament all hopelessly split over how or whether to carry out Brexit, Britain’s political universe is imploding and so are its political norms.
- Jenni Russell, Britain Is a Nation in Desperate Need of a Driver, NYT, Jan. 15, 2019

The world, Fukuyama reminded us, was not going to hell in a handbasket.

The only flaw in the brilliance of The End of History was that its thesis turned out to be wrong, and wrong in a huge way. ...
Far from avowing the triumph of liberal democracy, in 2019 many believe we will be lucky to hold on to the dwindling number of liberal democracies we have.
- ALAN WOLFE, Francis Fukuyama’s Shrinking Idea, New Republic, January 16, 2019

So why does it seem as if the world is in decline? Largely because we are much less willing to tolerate misfortune and misery.
- Bill Gates, What Are the Biggest Problems Facing Us in the 21st Century?, NYT, Sept. 4, 2018

In so many domains, life is improving across the world.

It doesn’t always feel that way. In surveys, Americans overwhelmingly believe that world poverty is getting worse or staying the same (it’s getting much better). And they tend to underestimate, by a wide margin, the percentages of children in the developing world who are receiving vaccines. ...
The giant strides that have been made in recent years show things are far from hopeless, and point the way toward the possibility of more progress.
- Austin Frakt and Aaron E. Carroll, Giant Strides in World Health, but It Could Be So Much Better, NYT, Feb. 4, 2019

By many measures, America is thriving. The economy is humming, and unemployment is at 4 percent. High-school graduation rates are at an all-time high, and teenage pregnancy rates are at an all-time low. The crime rate is way down, and illegal immigration has been declining for over a decade.

And yet: Polls show that three in five Americans think the country is on the wrong track. A majority expect things to get worse in the coming year. The president’s job approval numbers are underwater; Congress’s even more so.
- The Editorial Board, A More Honest State of the Union, NYT, Feb. 4, 2019

Collectively, 82 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about their future, and there was a fairly uniform positive outlook across the nation. ...
Individuality and family, not wealth and real estate, are what Americans seek and believe they are finding in the national “dream.”

What conclusions should we draw from this research? I think the findings suggest that Americans would be well served to focus less intently on the nastiness of our partisan politics and the material temptations of our consumer culture, and to focus more on the communities they are part of and exercising their freedom to live as they wish. After all, that is what most of us seem to think is what really matters — and it’s in reach for almost all of us.
- Samuel J. Abrams, The American Dream Is Alive and Well, NYT, Feb. 5, 2019 ("Dr. Abrams is a political scientist. ...and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.")

He is one of a number of left-wing French intellectuals—among them the novelist Michel Houellebecq, the historian Georges Bensoussan, and the essayist Michel Onfray—who in recent years have argued that their beloved patrie has drifted into inexorable decline, a classic critique of the French right since 1789.
- James McAuley, Low Visibility, New York Review of Books, MARCH 21, 2019

Daniel Silliman, a Valparaiso University professor of religion, called Beth Israel and its pastor part of a long tradition of Americans “looking to prophecy as a way to absorb the chaos” of current events. “It can make someone feel that God is working through human history,” he said, “transforming anxiety into a sense of fullness.”
- Sam Kestenbaum, #MAGA Church: The Doomsday Prophet Who Says the Bible Predicted Trump, NYT, March 15, 2019

Pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. It leads only to despair, despair to inaction, and inaction to a future world David Attenborough has described as “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.” To avoid the most terrible possible versions of our future, we have to stay positive; it’s the only moral response to this crisis. ...
The science of global warming has been settled for 40 years, but we have not just continued to pollute, we have accelerated the rate at which we’ve been doing so. Most of the carbon humans have put into the atmosphere has been emitted in the last three decades. As Wallace-Wells tartly puts it, “We have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on the climate than in all the centuries — all the millenniums — that came before.” ...
t’s not just that we know what’s happening, it’s that we’ve known for years and done nothing. Nathaniel Rich observes in “Losing Earth: A Recent History” that “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979.” His gripping, depressing, revelatory book is an expanded version of a whole-issue article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine last year. It is an account of what went wrong — of how it was that a moment of growing awareness of climate change, and an apparent willingness to act on the knowledge, was allowed to dissipate into stasis and inaction.
- John Lanchester, Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis, NYT, April 12, 2019

"One response occasionally heard from neoliberal economists... is that people are better off, but they just don't know it. Their discontent is a matter for psychiatrists, not economists."
- Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited, 2018, p. xvi.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.
- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address.

America is thriving like never before, and ladies and gentlemen of Minnesota, I will tell you this with great certainty, the best is yet to come.
- Donald Trump, Minnesota Rally Speech, October 10, 2019, 4:03:42

The American public had been sold a war through outright fabrications; the economy was in free fall thanks to Wall Street greed and the failure of Washington regulators.
- Josh Owens, I Worked for Alex Jones. I Regret It., NYT, Dec. 5, 2019

Still, it’s easy to get conspiratorial and to fall comfortably into black and white notions of good versus evil. “Uncanny Valley” is a reminder that the reality is far more muddled but no less damning. Our dystopia isn’t just the product of mustache-twirling billionaires drunk with power and fueled by greed — though it is that, too, sometimes. It’s also the result of uncritical thinking, blind spots caused by an overwhelmingly white male work force and a pathological reluctance to ask the bigger question: Where is this all going? What am I building?
- Charlie Warzel, The Flawed Humanity of Silicon Valley, NYT, Jan. 28, 2020

(See also Heaven on Earth and Going to Hell.)

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I Have Brewed Too Much Beer

I was thinking about what I was going to brew this week when it dawned on me, I can’t brew beer this week.  Not because I don’t have time.  Not because I couldn’t go to the store and buy supplies.  I can’t brew beer this week because I have no where to put it.

You see, I have gone a little nutty with the beer brewing.  I decided to see what would happen if I brewed 5 gallons beer every.single.week.  5 gallons of beer is about 2 cases and a 6 pack of beer, but you drop some volume during brewing, so we’ll just say 2 cases.  That’s a lot of beer.  I can do a keg a week (with a little from my friends), but it’s not the norm.

Currently I have 2 kegs of beer in the fridge, and 4 buckets (5 gallon each) fermenting.  I have no more kegs, I have no more buckets, I have no room for more beer.  6 weeks straight of brewing have finally brought me to a place of rest.

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A Concrete Case for Christian Education

You’re a
great parent. Just skim through your Facebook mobile uploads and an array of magical memories (pumpkin patch, summer vacations, special outings) will reveal your parenting prowess. You love your kids—which is why you coach them, teach them, play with them, and pray for them.

It’s also why you’ve likely thoughtfully weighed where your children will attend school. After all, children will spend more waking hours at school than at home between the ages of 5 and 18. That’s a big deal.

“Where young children spend their school hours, and under whose guidance they spend them, has a great impact on who they will one day become,” affirms Tawanna Rusk, the Assistant Head at Mount Paran Christian School (MPCS). So the question then emerges: With whom will I partner to make that happen?

According to the Council for American Private Education, 10 percent of American parents (representing over 5.5 million children) have opted to partner with private schools — the majority being private Christian schools — to mold their children.
1  Why? Well, let’s take a statistical look at how a Christian education impacts long-term success for children.

Acing Academics

LSbible IMG_1928vert.jpgAccording to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), students in private schools (most of which are Christian-affiliated) consistently score well above the national average on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a test that evaluates the nation’s fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders. These students outscore their public school peers on reading, math, and science achievement tests, too.2 These academic advantages are credited in part to smaller class sizes and to more teachers holding advanced degrees.

But does the more rigorous academic experience in Christian schools really matter for student success in the long run? It does. NCES studies show that students who attend private Christian schools through eighth grade are twice as likely as their public school peers to complete a bachelor’s or higher degree.1

Focusing on OthersMPwrap LScross.jpg

Children enrolled in Christian schools from a young age also tend to be more outward-focused, as supported by a NCES study revealing a significantly higher level of community service done by private Christian school versus public school students.1

At Mount Paran Christian School, this fact is exemplified in an annual “Family Serve Day,” during which students of all ages volunteer throughout the community. “We emphasize servant-leadership to all students, from our young preschoolers to our high school seniors, focusing on how to be a strong leader while also putting others before oneself,” explains Rusk. “This principle defines everything we do, from community service to classroom instruction to the ball field.”

Instilling Responsibility

This type of direct moral instruction has been found to have big benefits when it comes to students’ decision-making abilities. Statistically, students who study Christian values and principles at school are much less likely to engage in activities like carrying arms, underage drinking, and promiscuous sex.4

“The Christian values taught in the Christian home and reinforced in the Christian school enable a child to deal with a troubled world without succumbing to its troubles,” explains Dr. Charles Walker, former education director of the American Association of Christian Schools.

MSbible IMG_1436.jpg

In addition, according to a study by the Barna group, a child’s spiritual foundation is set by the age of 13. And — even more critical — a person’s moral foundations are in place by age nine.5 “This is why, at MPCS, we believe in getting to the heart of the child early in his/her school career,” affirms Rusk. “It makes the difference in who they become in their teens, and ultimately as adults. Placing your child in a Christian school may mean a financial sacrifice, but watching your child grow academically and mature spiritually makes it all worth it.” 3

Article reposted with © permission from Black Dress | Red Wagon Magazine serving northwest Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1976, MPCS is fully accredited (SAIS/AdvancED) and located near Kennesaw Mountain on a 68-acre collegiate-like campus.

Want to know more? Schedule a personal tour using the form above.

Nowland, Harvey. Is Christian Education Worth the Cost? http://www.christianpost.com/news/is-christian-education-worth-the-cost-7100/
4  http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Importance-of-Christian-Education-in-Todays-World&id=134683
The Barna Group https://www.barna.com/research/research-shows-that-spiritual-maturity-process-should-start-at-a-young-age/


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Friday, January 31, 2020

Internet Nightwick Report: Losing an Heir and Slaying a Master

Characters Present
Uein, Fighting man from Nordovulgaria
Stavros, Fanatical fighting man and devotee of St Deodat
Frederick Bull, Fighting frog in the service of the van Toad house
Abraham Nermal, graverobber turned landowner
Johanna d'Ligne, Averois cleric and devotee of St Santa Claus
Janos Balazsfi, Vulgarian changeling dedicated to St. Gax

Unodecember 17th, 1395

  • The various members of the leadership of the Howling Kommandos met outside Lord Albrecht's manor house, along with Gawain Sunbringer from the home group (who was an NPC in this interaction) and Father Roderick to see to a disturbing issue.
  • Lady Grumpke, Albrecht's wife, had suddenly become very pregnant - seemingly in her third trimester - after her husband had only been back three months. It was clear to all who knew the couple and who interacted with her during Albrecht's absence that infidelity was completely out of the question. She was also pregnant at the time of his absence and had already given birth to a baby girl, which had been a mixed blessing for the couple as it reinstated the precarity of their position by not providing him with a male heir.  That was only a month ago.  This pregnancy was an act of magic.
  • Johanna d'Ligne decided to try to act as a kind of midwife for Grumpke while Gawain and Roderick aided her with magic.  The plan centered around the casting of dispel magic (which seemed not to work) and remove curse.
  • Janos, also a cleric, sought the divine wisdom of St Gax using the augury spell, find that the result of casting remove curse would be "both weal and woe."
  • Uein advised that the party prepare for the hideous, clearly demonic infant to burst forth as a monster, though Johanna did not seem to give this idea much thought.
  • Abraham and Stavros were somewhat surprised by Sir Albrecht's willingness to hand this issue over to them, but he has come to see them as competent problem solvers since they rescued him from the clutches of the White Lady.
  • Remove curse terminated the pregnancy.  The stillborn infant had green skin, a full head of platinum blonde hair, solid black eyes, and pig's feet.  Abraham noted it was clearly a changeling and that it was somewhat perverse for Gax to have told Janos that the death of one of his own kind would be "weal."
  • Father Roderick, who had seen changelings born before, found this one especially disturbing, noting that it should be burned immediately and not offered any funeral rites less it come back in some more hideous form.
  • The party heeded his advice, and Johanna was gripped with a terrible sorrow for not being able to save what  could've been a male heir to a seemingly innocent couple.
  • These acts done, the party rested for a day before heading to Nightwick Abbey on Devilsday, 18 Unodecember.
  • They debated clearing out some of the garden level, where they had recently evicted a number of "lost souls," but instead chose to head to the third level and seek out one of the warlocks who were attempting to open the seals to level 4.
  • Checking unexplored rooms on their way, they found a chamber containing an enthroned undead Hochmeister of the Sword Brothers seated on a throne (that was actually the lid to a tomb), and his 6 blind bruder body guards.
  • A battle ensued with the addition of new clerics in the party and semi-recently acquired blunt weapons proving their effectiveness.
  • They found about the hochmeister's neck a seal (the stamp kind not the magic kind) that they believe to be part of a puzzle on the "Baroness level."
  • Within the tomb was a huge sum of gold, and the party felt it best to escape with this treasure and call it a day rather than push further.
Monsters Defeated
A changeling child, A Blind Meister, 6 Blind Bruders

Treasure Gained
1 suit of smoking halfplate (unidentified), 5000gp, Sword Brother Seal

XP Per Player

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Welcome to the Picture Gallery. Click on any picture to go to a full size (and unadulterated) photo.

My stash of Scarlet pics is sadly limited to what can be found in the CD inlay booklets. If anyone has any Scarlet photos that they’d like to share, . If I put them up on the site then you will certainly be credited as the donor!


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2017 CC Winners

Kaylie Kaitschuck
College for Creative Studies

This design was inspired by the weather patterns and mapping in everyday society. It represents humanity, nature, and community within it. This pattern is composed of a singular unit made from couching on a long arm quilting machine. By building up layers and layers, I was able to make my own textile through different dyed yarns. This is a story about everyday life and what we are granted with on a daily basis.

JUNE 2017

Shelby Williams
Savannah College of Art & Design

Jane Eyre

Ever since reading the book, Jane Eyre, I’ve been inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s novel. Every flower used in the design is mentioned within the book, and the birds are a reference to Jane as she often calls herself a bird of sort.


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Nonprofit Spotlight: Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic

Photo Courtesy of LA Child Guidance

Photo Courtesy of LA Child Guidance

Intersections’ Nonprofit Spotlight series profiles organizations that are propelling positive change in South L.A. _________________________________________________________________________

What is the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic’s purpose? To provide quality mental health services to a community in great need by ensuring easy access and promoting early intervention.

When was the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic founded? Since its inception in 1924 as the first child guidance clinic west of the Rockies, the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic has built a rich history of leadership and innovation in the field of pediatric mental health.

Photo Courtesy of LA Child Guidance

Photo Courtesy of LA Child Guidance

Which areas does the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic serve? Central and South Los Angeles.

What services does the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic provide? Comprehensive array of mental health programs include the following:

Early Intervention and Community Wellness Division – Since the 1980s has pioneered programs including home visitation by early childhood experts, clinic-based services for children whose explosive behavioral problems often result in expulsion from preschools, assessments of young children in foster care to assure safety and emotional well-being in future placement, and a family resource center meeting basic needs in economically stressful times.

Outpatient Services Division – Includes specialty services for children experiencing school failure and/or involvement in probation and child welfare systems, as well as a one-of-a-kind no-fee, no-appointment Access Center where annually an average of 1,700 highest-need children are immediately seen, enrolled into Clinic services, or referred to regional center, domestic violence and other appropriate placements.

City Hall declares Children Mental Health Awareness Day in Los Angeles | Photo Courtesy of LA Child Guidance

City Hall declares Children Mental Health Awareness Day in Los Angeles | Photo Courtesy of LA Child Guidance

Intensive Services Division – Employs a nationally recognized model designed to keep together families struggling to overcome mental illness, domestic violence, substance abuse and extreme poverty, while also providing comprehensive, coordinated services 24/7 for highest-needs children – especially those in foster care – who exhibit severe behavioral and emotional problems.

Life Learning Division – Serves youth ages 15 to 25 who are homeless, at risk for homelessness, aging out of foster care, or struggling with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, by blending job placement services, treatment, case management and medication services to support essential skills for independent living.

The Early Intervention Training Institute trains approximately 650 mental health and allied professionals annually in identifying, intervening and referring very young children at risk for emotional, behavioral or social delays. A unique Child Psychiatry Residents Training affiliation with USC Keck School of Medicine Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry trains all child psychiatry residents to diagnose and treat children ages 0 – 5.

What are the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic’s recent accomplishments?

  •  3,403 children and family members benefited from Clinic services.
  • 51,707 mental health outpatient visits were provided at three community-based Clinic offices, s well as on-site at 20 local schools, in clients’ homes, and at other community sites.
  • 1,174 children, family members, and caregivers received immediate assistance at the no-appointment, no-fee bilingual Access Center.
  • 5,085 days of service were provided through our intensive day treatment program.
  • 6 residents from the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine served rotations at the Clinic through the Child Psychiatry Residents Training Program, receiving specialized training in the diagnosis and treatment of young children.
  • 4 doctoral students participated in our Psychology Internship Program, providing clinical treatment services and receiving specialized training.

Video Courtesy of LA Child Guidance Youtube Channel

What does the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic consider as…

…top safety issues in South L.A.? As resources become available through the Affordable Care Act and California’s Mental Health Services Act, it is imperative that silos be broken between our health, mental health and public education system to ensure children and youth of all ages benefit.

…top education issues in South L.A.?  School based health centers offer great promise, but easy referrals between service providers at the school site is a goal that must be realized – otherwise students don’t get access to the care they need to succeed in life.

…top housing issues in South L.A.? Supportive housing for individuals with mental health needs and disabilities continue to top the list.

…top recreational issues in South L.A.? The continued focus on access to healthy, affordable food is important, as is the completion of the Expo line and new enthusiasm around biking.

Social Media: Facebook, Twitter

Hours: Weekdays 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Contact info: Cesar Portillo, Vice President of Clinic Advancement, [email protected]

Speak Your Mind


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collapse – find existing chains of 3 or more bubbles;
cause avalanches – manage to pop enough bubbles as to cut off an entire section – causing all of the bubbles underneath to pop as well;
collect new chains of balls;
sort out marbles by colors and shooting them at different angles to quickly create a desired combination.

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Real life example on how NOT to apply for a job in IT

In one of the companies I worked for, I held the position of a senior software engineer which made me involved in our hiring process and all the emails from our info@ and jobs@ email addresses were being forwarded to me (as well as every other senior dev and to HR people). One day, we got a job application from this guy, let’s call him John Doe, that contained exactly the following (translated in English).

“Greetings, when can I come over for a job interview”.

And again, the above was EVERYTHING there was in the email we received, no more, no less. I was staggered that someone can be ignorant, uninterested and at the end, stupid, to this level. Before I start ranting about his email, let me break down this “job application” and tell you everything I think was wrong with it.

  1. There was no email title
  2. He did not introduce himself
  3. He did not specify which position he is applying to
  4. He did not provide any background on himself
  5. He did not attach a CV
  6. He did not have a cover letter
  7. He did not write an email in English
  8. There was no greeting at the end of an email

I know there’s a lot of companies who do not track their job applicants history, but good and serious ones mostly do. It’s very hard to find good help in software engineering these days so if by some miracle you get two great candidates for one job opening you either hire both and then think about where to engage each of them, or you hire the one you like better and save the other person’s CV somewhere so you can call them once there’s a spot for them as well. This is great for serious applicants, however, what if you get saved to the HR DB as a very bad candidate. Do you think next time you eventually apply it will take you same effort to make us like you?

If you, by some miracle, even get to the interview part of the hiring process, we’ll be much more careful and even reluctant to pick you over other candidates because of the previous bad experience.

First impressions matter!!!

At the time, we used a Trello board for keeping track of EVERY candidate who applied for a job in our company. Among other, there was a column titled “No, no, no, not Ever“. Yes, you guessed right, this is the column for people who came out as total failures, either with their personality, or with their technical knowledge, but mostly with their personality. But in order to prove themselves “worthy” of  the column, they we usually have to first meet with them. John Doe, I think, is the first who was able to break that rule. He reserved his spot on the column without hearing a word from us. I’m relieved though, He saved us an hour or two we may have spent on meeting him.

Anyways this guy’s job application left me so befuddled I decided to write a series of articles on bad and good practices when applying for a job, from my own perspective, in the next few weeks. This article is the first one in the series. In the next article I’ll go through all of the bad practices when applying for a job, because in my opinion it’s far worse if you do something you shouldn’t, than not do something you should.

Peace out.

2 thoughts on “Real life example on how NOT to apply for a job in IT

  1. Hi. This is my background. Guy you are referring to might have been real genius who needed a bit of guide how to represent himself, but u didnt give him chance. Though, partially i understand your point, i disagree to reject completly on bad intro. Might have been wrong humor.

    1. I see where you’re getting at, and actually I agree. He might have been a genius in disguise. Problem is, we have quite a load of job applications and we can barely meet all the candidates who spent actually more than 4 seconds writing their job applications. How can we rank him if there’s literally no information about himself? We might have responded asking for everything he should have provided by himself, but he just does not leave impression of a guy giving #*@& about the job (whichever he wanted to apply for).

      However your comment makes me rethink my approach once more and looking for eventual better course of action. Maybe separate column for incomplete applications??

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Irvine (IHS) Class of 1988 Alumni List

Help us Update the Irvine 1988 Class List by adding any names missing from the list below:

1988 Class List

1988 Irvine High School Yearbook

1988 Irvine High School Yearbook
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If you are trying to find people that graduated in '88 at Irvine High in Irvine, CA, check the alumni list below that shows the class of 1988.

For former Irvine High students from CA, you can view the class reunion information that has been posted by other site visitors. In addition, we encourage you to post your profile in the alumni directory, share information about the school activities you were involved with and reconnect with Irvine High School alumni.