Cav > Books: culture‎ (446)

"Do you imagine futuristic cityscapes? Do you feel hopeful? Do you picture billowing smokestacks? Do you feel terrified? Does it remind you of school? Does that hold a positive or negative connotation for you?
As to what you envisioned, it may have been any of the above, or something totally different still. But the general consensus of the American public on this matter can be quite easily traced through recent history. In the years following World War II, the American economy was booming. The middle class was gainfully employed, adequately fed and sheltered, and filled with optimism. Because of this, science was viewed as a gleaming obelisk of limitless advancement. It was Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. It was the Jetsons. It was longevity and prosperity."

"Prior to the internet, there were sources of information that were unanimously agreed upon to be trustworthy and reliable. Stories published by newspapers had to be heavily researched by professional journalists. Knowledge from an encyclopedia was not questioned by those who needed to reference a fact, because they were written by top specialists in every discipline, which contributed to their considerable cost. Whether we regard them as good or bad, those times are gone, and they are never coming back. Unlike the encyclopedias of old, the quality of information on the internet is not reliable. It ranges from outstanding to abysmal. For this reason, the internet can serve as a magic mirror, a place where people go to confirm pre-existing bias. Outlets that reflect what we already “know” are correct and trustworthy. Those that do not are ignored, deemed fraudulent, deceitful, paid for by malevolent institutions, or worse. This method of assessment rarely has any respect for the qualifications of those who produce the content we encounter, which has led to what is popularly referred to as the “post-truth era.”

"...History does not repeat, but it rhymes. For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. This is the way of things in all things. There is light and there is dark. Always has been. Always will be. Civilization is the superstructure built on law and order that keeps the petty, the resentful, and the cruel away from the rest of us. Some societies have been better at this than others. Those who fail at repelling the repulsive fall to unhumanity—to a state of affairs in which human thriving is impossible and surviving improbable."

"The authors argue that it is humanity itself currently under threat. They unwrap the history of Communism, a dehumanizing philosophy of oppression, of denial of human rights and nihilism.
The reader is guided around the world, revealing the stories and histories the mainstream press won’t touch … from Cambodia, Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan and the Soviets, to Apartheid in South Africa. They bring us right up to President Donald Trump and January 6th, a day they correctly call “America’s Inverse Bastille.”

"While academic and reference titles explore the motives and agenda of household-name leaders during each left-wing upheaval, this book will give you on-the-ground descriptions of what it’s really like to witness (and fight) communist forces of change. We have recast the story of communism as individuals against individuals, as real people, to reveal how and why neighbors turn against neighbors. Why even yours might, against you. Along the way, we will reintroduce you to the household names of history, but in a way you’ve never seen before—we will tell their true stories.
And unlike some popular conservative commentators—who are nakedly reactionary and hyperbolically defeatist in their retellings of left-wing political history—this book will offer a measured tone. We will take this subject as seriously as deserved. And in the process, this book will inoculate you and by extension those you love from ever falling for revolutionary ideas that accelerate the end of everything."

"The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention. Ballooning Pentagon budgets are sacrosanct. While there can be heated disagreement about how, where, and when the United States should engage in war, the prerogative of military intervention is scarcely questioned in the mass media.
Even when conventional wisdom ends up concluding that a war was unwise, the consequences for journalists who promoted it are essentially nil.
Reporters and pundits who enthusiastically supported the Iraq invasion were not impeded in their careers as a result. Many advanced professionally. In medialand, being pro-war means never having to say you’re sorry. Journalists who have gone with the war program are ill positioned to throw stones from their glass houses later on; the same holds true for media outlets.n Strong challenges to the status quo of U.S. militarism rarely get into mainstream media."

"The “war on terror” became—for the White House, Pentagon, and Congress—a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries, rarely seen, much less understood.11 Whatever the intent, the resulting carnage often included civilians.12 The dead and maimed had no names or faces that reached those who signed the orders and appropriated the funds. As years went by, it turned out that the point wasn’t to win the multicontinent war so much as to keep waging it, a means with no plausible end; the quest, in search of enemies to confront if not defeat, made stopping unthinkable. No wonder Americans couldn’t be heard wondering aloud when the “war on terror” would end. It wasn’t supposed to..."

"In media frames, the routine exclusion of people harmed by U.S. warfare conveys that they don’t really matter much. Because we rarely see images of their suffering or hear their voices or encounter empathetic words about them, the implicit messaging comes through loud and clear. The silence ends up speaking at high volume: Those people hardly exist. They are others. They are not our concern. They don’t particularly matter, while our country is causing their misery."

"Charles Robert Jenkins is, quite simply, a figure of lasting historical importance. He has lived a life that’s unique in twentiethcentury history. No other Westerner has survived so long in the world’s least known, least visited, and least understood country on the planet and been able to return to tell the tale. And what he has to say is vitally important: Is there any country in the world harder to get a handle on than North Korea? And while there are certainly rivals when it comes to the intensity of American diplomatic bungling, has any country been a U.S. foreign relations debacle so consistently for so many years? While native North Korean defectors and escapees from its gulags have made some horrors of that nation known to the world, Jenkins is the first Westerner able to provide a long-term, detailed view of this secretive and brutal society from the perspective of an outsider who became intimately familiar with its inner workings. I do not profess to know much about North Korea, but I’m confident Charles Robert Jenkins knows more about it than just about any foreigner on the planet."

"The curtain Robert draws back on the mundane, relentless, dehumanizing operation of the North Korean state—its wastes of money and labor on domestic spying rather than economic output, its language-debasing doublespeak, its interference in the most intimate details of its residents’ lives—helps demonstrate how insidious and debilitating, bizarre and oppressive the country is. The story of Robert’s life was more difficult to tell since it did not reach either extreme of the sensationalism spectrum. He is neither a villain nor a hero, just a man trying to cope with the guilt of a horrible mistake while eking out an existence in a country unimaginably strange and hostile. But I hope that this attention to the quotidian, this focus on the struggle of everyday life, has produced a more nuanced and valuable contribution to our understanding of North Korea."

"Death was all around us. We’d enter the market in the mornings to find women wailing and rocking in their arms children who had died during the night. As we plunged deep into the merchants’ stalls, we found the corpses of old men and women, mouths still agape as if, in their final moments, they wanted to say something, their eyes staring out, pleading with us to hear them. I always thought the place after death was peaceful. It was how my eomeoni had described it. But what I saw on the faces of the dead was anything but. It was as if they had got stuck looking at and feeling all their grief and pain..."

"...They are doing all they possibly can to keep the American people from being able to choose who we want to vote for as president. They have no respect for us and our fundamental rights as citizens in a democratic republic. They are so afraid that we, the people, might make “the wrong choice” that in the name of protecting our democracy and saving us from ourselves, they are destroying our democracy and taking away our freedom to decide who our next president should be.
To make matters worse, those leading this fight really believe they’re doing the right thing. They say, with great concern in their voice, that if the American people elect Donald Trump again, he will destroy our democracy and be the dictator-in-chief. This is why they feel they are justified in trying to take away our right to vote for any candidate we choose … in other words, they say they need to destroy our democracy in order to “save” it.
This is lunacy. It’s the mindset and mentality of dictators..."

"What’s at stake here is far greater than Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Our democracy is being destroyed by the permanent Washington elite in both political parties who truly believe they—and not the American people —have the right and duty to determine who we want to serve and lead our country. They readily dismiss the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, and the voices of the American people, anointing themselves as the ones who have the power and justification to decide who will become president.
...Our democracy is under attack. It’s up to us to save it. We must hold those responsible accountable at the ballot box and send a strong message to leaders in both parties: those who abuse their power and undermine our democracy will not be tolerated.
If we do nothing, however, and turn a blind eye to those weaponizing our criminal justice system against their political opponents and telling us who we are and are not allowed to vote for, it will set a precedent for every election and presidency in the future and our democracy will be finished.
This is not the America my brothers and sisters in uniform and I risk our lives to defend."

"The party I joined over twenty years ago no longer exists today.
I could no longer remain in today’s Democrat Party, which is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers fueled by cowardly wokeness who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, allow our borders to remain open while claiming they are “secure,” weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and, above all, drag us closer to nuclear war with each passing day."

"Our Founders intentionally passed the Second Amendment right after the First. They knew how fragile this new, free democracy was, and how susceptible it would be to those who sought to abuse their power and take away our freedom. We must defend our right to bear arms, not only for recreational purposes, but to defend ourselves and our loved ones, and to serve as a check on the abuse of power by an increasingly tyrannical government."

"For too long, United States foreign policy has consisted of enacting crippling sanctions and waging regime-change wars, all under the banner of “defending freedom and democracy” around the world, and usually in the guise of humanitarianism. That was true under Democrat Bill Clinton,
Republican George W. Bush, and Democrat Barack Obama. And true to form, President Biden has made waging a “global battle for democracy” against the rise of autocracies in the world the central pillar of his foreign policy agenda.30
The truth is, this worldview is based on the propagation of lies that set up a paradigm of good versus evil in the world, all so the war uniparty can have a mechanism—or an excuse—to feed their insatiable desire for more power and more money..."

"Time is a motherfucker. Time reveals shit. It wears things down. Breaks things. Crushes things. Kills things. Reveals truth. There’s nothing greater than Father Time.
If you have patience, time will be on your side. And if you recognize how valuable time is, and if you know the right time to make your move, you’ll be a bad motherfucker.
That’s how I feel right now writing this book. The time is now for me to write all this shit down. It’s time to write down not only my legacy, but the story of nine dirt-bomb street thugs who took our everyday life— scrappin’ and hustlin’ and tryin’ to survive in the urban jungle of New York City—and turned that into something bigger than we could possibly imagine, something that took us out of the projects for good, which was the only thing we all wanted in the first place..."

“C.R.E.A.M.” is a true song. Everything Inspectah Deck and Raekwon said is 100 percent true. Not one line in that entire song is a lie, or even a slight exaggeration. Deck did sell base, and he did go to jail at the age of fifteen. Rae was sticking up white boys on ball courts, rocking the same damn ’Lo sweater. And of course, Meth on the hook was like butter on the popcorn. Meth knew the hard times, too, being out there smoking woolies and pumping crack, etc. That raspy shit he was kicking just echoed in everyone’s head long after the song was done playing.
The realism on “C.R.E.A.M.” is what resonates with so many people all over the world. People everywhere know that sentiment of being slaves to the dollar. Cash is king, and we are its lowly subjects. That’s pretty much the case in every nation around the world, the desperation to put your life and your freedom on the line to make a couple dollars.
Whether you’re working, stripping, hustling, or slinging, whether you’re a business owner or homeless, cash rules everything around us..."

"...But I still kept getting kicked out of the booth. The only thing I knew was that I had to keep going. I had no other choice to get it right. No was not an option for me. That’s when I learned about the difference between being a warrior—a champion, really—and a regular person. It was the
difference between giving up and getting back up and trying again. Some people take a loss and it breaks them spiritually. A true champion is a motherfucker who can take a loss and rise back up with a full heart and keep going until he wins. I got kicked out of the booth over and over, but every time I picked myself back up and got back in there. I never, ever stopped trying."

"Our journey here was rough, no doubt. We lost our brother Dirty along the way, but the rest of us are still here, still alive, still bringing it. We’re not posted up in front of 160 anymore, ducking cops and bullets, scrambling for drug money while dreaming of stardom and getting out of the projects. We’ve done that. We’re not locked up or on parole pissing in cups. We left all that shit behind us years ago. We’ve achieved fame and success the likes of which most people can only dream about, and in the right circumstances, we’ll do it again.
Yeah, we don’t always get along, but what family does? But just give us time to come back together, and we’ll show everybody that the Wu- Tang Clan still ain’t nothin’ ta fuck wit’!"

"It’s now that I remember that India is like Wonderland. In this other universe everyone seems mad and everything is upside down, back to front and infuriatingly bizarre. I’m Alice: fuzzy with feelings about my previous trip down the rabbit hole, I’m now flying straight back through the looking glass to a place where women are blamed for sleazy men and planes are sprayed when they fly from a clean city to a dirty one. In this world we applaud a dreadful landing that’s as fast and steep as a take-off, we jump up and tackle fellow passengers in a scrum at the door while the plane is still moving, and the air hostess gets off first."

"...I begin to regurgitate my repressed memories of why I never wanted to come here again. It’s a vomit of hatred and a rambling rage against the bullshit, the pushing, the shoving, the rip-offs, the cruelty, the crowds, the pollution, the weather, the begging, the performance of pity, the pissing, the shitting, the snotting, the spitting and the farting..."

"...in her place is a woman begging.
She hasn’t got a face.
Above her neck is a mass of melted flesh like burnt candle wax. Two pools of black stare out and stumps of burnt flesh wrapped in rags plead up at me. I retch in horror and run. This is my first glimpse of a dowry burning – where a woman is set alight in a ‘cooking accident’ because her husband or mother-in-law want more dowry money and attempt to kill to get it. If the bride dies, the husband can marry again and collect another dowry; if she lives, she can be shamed into leaving the house as damaged, useless goods. I want to scream with shock, fury and sadness but there’re too many people staring at me, following me and grabbing me. There’s just no room for rage."

"...Amid the manicured lawns of the embassy district cars slow down to avoid what appears to be a branch on the road. But it’s not a branch. It’s the twisted limbs of a beggar who’s been hit by a car; he is lying in the middle of the road crying and reaching out his hands for help. We pull over and Jonathan jumps out. But as he approaches the stricken man, a bus lurches to a halt; its driver gets out, grabs the beggar by his arm, drags him to the gutter and dumps him, his face and abdomen bleeding from the bitumen.
He’s dragged in anger, not in sympathy; human debris removed. The driver, his route now clear, jumps back on his bus and drives away.
India is the worst of humanity..."

"...It struggled through five years of bloody civil conflict with the destructive intervention of bellicose foreign powers, four years of a genocidal revolutionary regime, then liberation through invasion and a decade of military occupation by Vietnam, a hated and feared big neighbor, and throughout these years unceasing internecine warfare on its soil, continuing to this day."

"What follows is an attempt to retrace the events of nearly three decades as seen by a reporter who was granted the privilege of being taken into the confidence of many Cambodians, men and women whom I admired and whose hopes for their country I shared, as well as others. I recall with infinite sadness those among them who paid with their lives for staying when they could have fled, before total darkness enveloped Cambodia for four years that have known no equal in history."

"...I myself became curious about the drug when my father, a retired judge, started to consider giving microdoses of LSD to my mother to treat her Alzheimer’s disease. He had asked me why, if the drug was actually supposed to help, he couldn’t just get it at the pharmacy. This launched me on my research.
The more I dug into the history, the more fascinated I became. I began to see how much of the early history of LSD was shaped by the shadow that lies over the molecule, a result of the personal connection between a Swiss pharmaceutical CEO named Arthur Stoll, a kind of unwilling forefather of psychedelics, and Richard Kuhn, the leading biochemist for the Third Reich. This relationship aided the National Socialists, who were beginning to study the use of psychedelics as potential “truth drugs”—questionable research, which, after the war, sparked the interest of the US military and its intelligence agencies in these substances.
This book is what emerged from my curiosity. In this moment when, after many decades, we are finally reconsidering the nature of our laws surrounding psychedelics, it feels more important than ever to look backward and understand how we arrived at those regulations in the first place."

"...I’ve always wished there was a parenting book out there that went right down the middle and was filled with real information about day-to-day life with kids. You know, one that shared things like, “Yup, it’s totally normal that your kid just licked that tree.” I’ve decided to write that book and FYI, I have seen all three of my kids eat bark before and it’s been fine.
I’m an actual mom. I have three actual kids and I actually really like them. I don’t always love that they like to hang out with me when I’m going to the bathroom or that they ask for a second helping of dinner the moment I sit down (solid eyeroll), but they’re still pretty awesome.
I also look at parenting life from a teacher’s angle—it’s given me a unique perspective and background for this job. I taught kindergarten and first grade for eight years, and I have applied my knowledge of education and child development to help my family flourish. Through my Busy Toddler website and Instagram account, I’ve also helped hundreds of thousands of others with quality parenting tips and appropriate learning techniques. I’m so honored to get to help you now too."

"Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement.
It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.)
At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”
Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction. He recently published an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

"By the end of this book, you will be able to effectively read adults, children, teenagers, and even those with personality disorders who are experts at hiding their emotions.
It has taken me over a decade to master the skill of speed-reading others. Like you, I had severe issues misinterpreting people, creating barriers, and living in continuous conflict. My own journey led me to become a life coach and my drive to help others only grew from there.
My personal and professional experiences as a personal growth, stress management, and social interaction specialist motivated me to publish books on topics that drive me. After my book How to Stop Overthinking became a #1 bestseller on Amazon in both the UK and the US, I knew I could keep reaching more people and helping them turn their lives around.
And this is where we are today. No change is easy, but we can make it easier with simple-to-follow strategies that you can start implementing right away. Knowledge is power and your knowledge begins with what it really means to be able to read someone."

"...In the United States, the most well-defined Alzheimer’s risk gene, carried by one in four people, increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease anywhere between two- and fourteenfold. In other parts of the world, that same gene has little impact.2 Many cancers are thought to be triggered by our environment as well and are becoming more common. A woman’s lifetime risk of developing breast cancer, for instance, was about one in twenty in the 1960s. Today, it is one in eight.3
Over the last seventy years, our genes haven’t changed, but our environment has—a lot. New research is emerging all the time that points to the key role that environmental factors play in your health. Everything from the temperature and lighting of your home to the utensils you use to cook your food to the chemicals used to make your furniture are having a profound effect on your health and how you feel—and you likely aren’t even aware of it."

"Have you ever experienced anxiety, fatigue, or brain fog? What about sluggishness, memory problems, or despair? Today these feelings are commonplace, but they needn’t be. After all, we live in a time of unprecedented insight into the workings of the human brain, with millions of dollars spent annually to uncover truths about our most powerful organ.
But these insights often go unnoticed, leaving many of us to suffer in silent desperation.
This book is going to change that. In the following seven chapters, you’re going to discover powerful strategies that can help your brain function the way it ought to—not just the way you’ve accepted it to. That means less sluggishness, anxiety, and depression, and more energy and a better memory. If followed routinely, these strategies will even reduce your risk for some of humanity’s most feared conditions—Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease, to name a few."

"Before we deep dive into it, let me share with you what I did and bdidn’t do. The primary source of data for this book is the seven years of research I did between 2016-2023. I conducted interviews with over a hundred people in London, San Francisco, New Zealand, Hungary, Germany, Portugal, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. In the beginning, these were very ordinary interviews as I didn’t have any knowledge of dating cultures – I was in the dark.
However, as I started to gain more and more awareness, these interviews got a lot deeper and more personal. For this reason, whenever people shared their experiences with me, I promised them anonymity. Consequently, following best practice in qualitative social science research, all the names of those whose stories I tell are pseudonyms.
To expand my reach beyond those cities, my assistant, Maria Nosyk, did an outstanding job helping me. She gathered information from all around the world through several Facebook groups. She collected hundreds of quality responses – many of which you will find throughout the book. Without her dedication, this book would not be where it is today. Huge thanks to Maria and everyone who contributed with their valuable feedback!"