Comments by "OCD Man" (@ocdman202) on "Prince Harry, Meghan Markle open training facility for veterans" video.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, famous among non-pilots as the author of the fable The Little Prince, one of the best selling books ever, wrote his greatest works about his greatest passion, flying. In The Aviator, Wind, Sand and Stars, Night Flight and others, Saint-Exupéry chronicled his exploits as a mail pilot flying routes in North Africa, an aerial explorer and an air racer, and about his many crashes. He joined the French Air Force in the early 1920s and quit flying for a short time before beginning work as an airmail pilot and aerial surveyor, both in Africa and, for a time, in Argentina. Saint-Exupéry returned to the Free French Air Force in North Africa and in 1944 was on a reconnaissance mission in a P-38 over the Mediterranean Sea, from which he never returned. Starting around 1998, searchers found parts of his airplane, and some personal effects were found on the seafloor in the presumed crash area. Before and since, Saint-Exupéry’s works have inspired generations of pilots with their detailed descriptions of the actual flying and the surpassingly beautiful writing, which captures the glory of flight arguably better than any writer has before or since.
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The Beechcraft story begins with Walter Beech, Clyde Cessna, and Lloyd Stearman, three legendary figures who started out together by forming Travel Air, one of the leading aircraft manufacturers of the 1920s. After parting ways with that venture, Walter Beech and his wife Olive Ann cofounded Beech Aircraft Co. in Wichita in 1931. He was 40 and she was 27. The company’s first airplane was also one of its most iconic: the Beech Model 17 Staggerwing. During World War II, Beechcraft won numerous military contracts, supplying versions of the Model 17 and 18 Twin Beech. After the war, Beechcraft introduced the legendary Bonanza, the longest continually produced airplane in aviation history. Olive Ann had already run the company when Walter contracted encephalitis during World War II, and was able to manage the company expertly after her husband’s death from a heart attack in 1950. She was a driving force behind the company’s expansion, ushering in the Beech Baron and King Air line. She headed the company until it was bought by Raytheon in 1980. She died in 1993 at age 89.
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When Lloyd Stearman joined forces in 1925 with Walter Beech and Clyde Cessna to form the Travel Air Manufacturing Company, one of several early airplane manufacturers that set their roots in Wichita, Kansas, no one could have expected that each one of them would quickly move on to become successful independent airplane designers. After a quick stint in Venice, California, Stearman founded Stearman Aircraft Corporation in Wichita in 1927, successfully designing and building the C-3, which was used for transporting mail and passengers. In 1929, like many aviation businesses of the era, Stearman Aircraft was absorbed, by United Aircraft and Transportation Corporation, owned by William Boeing, and the company later became a division of Boeing. While Stearman left his company in 1931, his drawings were the basis for the successful Stearman Kaydet military trainer, of which Boeing built more than 8,500 in the late 1930s and early 1940s. And Stearman himself didn’t quit the business. He worked for several companies, including Lockheed Aircraft Company, designing airplanes and spacecraft until he died in 1975.
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German Otto Lilienthal’s 19th Century experiments and research in flight, which included many successful, long gliding flights in craft he designed, set the stage for the success of the Wrights and others. While Lilienthal failed to embrace new technologies, his scientific approach and practical success were crucial steps in the march of aviation. Lilienthal’s designs used weight shift principles, meaning control was achieved by the pilot maneuvering his body, instead of control surfaces like ailerons and rudders, to change the flight path. Lilienthal also failed to discard the notion that we needed to copy the mechanics of bird flight. Designs he was working on at the end of his career featured flapping wings. Lilienthal died, in a glider crash in 1896, at the age of 48, without seeing the success of the Wrights.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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I am VERY behind on my reviews, so I won't say nearly as much as I'd planned to. But the last time I alluded to Meghan Markle on Goodreads, it unleashed a wave of abuse from her fans which was quite simply staggering, even to me - and I'm used to facing down abusive comments from both authors and other readers.
Fortunately, I've never yet allowed people screeching at me to prevent me from writing my reviews honestly, so on we go.
This is not a well-written book by any stretch of the imagination. Bower is a very poor technical writer - he overuses certain words (e.g. 'pertinently') FAR too much, and his overall style is dry and repetitive. However, I do give this book kudos for being clear and easy to follow. It chronicles Meghan's life and career from birth onwards, as well as of course her introduction to Harry and explosive departure from the royal family.
Personally, I (and many other Britons) have always felt like the largest source of tension was probably Meghan's very different outlook. Royalty in the UK is not celebrity as we understand it. It means shutting up about your personal opinions, not carving your own path, and not drawing excessive attention. Someone who's been intent on a Hollywood lifestyle from a young age would understandably find that level of self-silencing quite difficult to follow.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans..
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Rather than being a well-sourced, insightful and informative documentary, Harry & Meghan is merely a boring reality TV show, loosely inspired by real events. Designed to promote the couple as benevolent victims who are only speaking 'their truth', the series unintentionally reveals the actual truth - that they are just jealous, ungrateful and unempathetic narcissists who will literally destroy anyone and anything for money. Us Brits are used to laughing these losers off - just as we did when the couple stated they were married in private or when Megain claimed that South Africa celebrated her engagement with the same intensity as they did for Mandela's freedom. But now, it's not funny anymore and they've truly crossed a line. Not only have they attacked the sacred notion of family, but their expressed hatred for our press, royal institutions and public presents the real risk of inspiring ignorant extremists to attack us. In summary - watch this trash at your peril and if you do, try to watch it in a way that won't give the Svengali and grinning idiot views. If you need some comedic relief after watching the garbage vanity project, check out the 4/5 star reviews for this show LOL.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./////////////////
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@mommapanda5736 A good glass of wine is a comforting way to end (or start) your day. And if that wine happens to be Champagne or another sparkling variation, even better. But just because you’re drinking sparkling wine doesn’t mean you can’t also have a cocktail.
No, we’re not talking about double-fisting; we speak of bubbly drinks like the French 75 and the Kir Royale. While the former requires gin, fresh lemon juice and sugar in addition to Champagne, the latter is an effortless duo featuring solely sparkling wine and crème de cassis. It’s simple, sure, but it tastes more complex than its constituent parts.
The Kir Royale is a take on the Kir, a popular French drink combining dry white Burgundian wine with crème de cassis that dates back to the 19th century and was further popularized after World War II. The Kir Royale sets itself apart by specifically calling for Champagne, while another variation, the Kir Imperial, calls for sparkling wine and raspberry liqueur rather than cassis.
Aside from being delicious, the best thing about the Kir Royale might be how easy it is. The scant half ounce of crème de cassis permeates the Champagne, resulting in a gorgeous cocktail with a hint of berry sweetness. Be sure to pour the liqueur into the glass first, followed by the Champagne, which ensures the ingredients will mix naturally. A bit more or less cassis can fine tune the cocktail to one’s individual taste, turning any glass of bubbly into a special occasion and turning heads at your next party.
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stay mad hatters==
What is the 'mad hatter syndrome'?
The term "mad as a hatter" has been inextricably linked to the madcap milliner in Lewis Carrol's classic children's book of 1865 Alice in Wonderland.
It actually relates to a disease peculiar to the hat-making industry of the nineteenth century. A mercury solution was commonly used during the process of turning fur into felt, causing the hatters to breathe in the fumes of this highly toxic metal, a situation exacerbated by the poor ventilation of most of the workshops.
This led in turn to an accumulation of mercury in the workers bodies, resulting in symptoms such as trembling, loss of co-ordination, slurred speech, loosening of teeth, memory loss, depression, irritability and anxiety - the "mad hatter syndrome"! The phrase is still used today to describe the effects of mercury poisoning, albeit from other sources.
Mercury and industry- a marriage made in hell!
Mercury (also known as quicksilver) is one of the most toxic substances known to humanity. Despite this it is still in use industrially. Indeed, most modern day exposure to mercury comes from industrial pollution and dental amalgam fillings.
It is released from burning fossil fuels, coal combustors, lead smelters and chlorine producers as well as being used in the paint, pesticide, gold mining and electrical industries (in the latter it is utilised in the production of thermometers, barometers, fluorescent tubes and alkaline batteries). The knock on effect of this continual spewing out of mercury into the environment has been increased contamination of our oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.
Methylmercury is formed when mercury settles in the sediments of the Earth's water systems, where it combines with methogenic bacteria to produce a new type of mercury that binds to protein in the small fish that eat the methylmercury-tainted plants. The concentration of methylmercury increases the further it travels up the food chain, thus the larger the fish the higher the risk of pollution.
Fish consumption has risen dramatically in recent years due to widespread media coverage of its health benefits, in particular the high concentration of low saturated fatty acids on offer. Thus, it is paramount that the fish consumed come from the cleanest waters possible - not an easy task in these environmentally polluted times. The governments of the world should be lobbied continuously in a bid to curtail manufacturing plants from dumping mercury and other toxic wastes into our waters before it is too late! stay mad hatters!!!
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Like many British writers, Mr. Bower writes as an authority on how Americans think or feel, but he doesn’t seem to have ever met one. Most Americans don’t really care about this couple, Harry didn’t “destigmatize” mental health in the US (Americans very famously are very open about mental health) and Time is NOT the most “prestigious” publication in the US. Prince Harry is currently more famous for shooting off his mouth about constitutional issues he doesn’t understand, and seems to have no interest in learning about, than he is anything else. Meghan Markle is not considered a serious political figure. I have interest in the royal family, so I read this book. A quick survey of my friends and family (all professional, college educated, politically informed and active individuals) led to puzzlement over whether or not this couple even lived here anymore, or if Harry was the bald one, or the Nazi one. This couples adoration from Americans lives sadly more in the imagination of British writers than any actual actions from the American people. I wish this myth could finally be put to bed. 17 million people (out of 320 million) is not a very large audience. As a nation, most Americans couldn’t care less.
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So we have heard the stories of Kate crying during the dress fitting for the wedding and how Meghan said that it was actually her (Meghan) who cried, well yes both are true, however the context of the discussion puts it all in perspective. (Meghan puts her spin on it in the Oprah interview to make her look like the victim.) This book talks about the stories we have heard however has put it all into context of how things happened, the Oprah interview, etc. It illustrates the transactional relationships between EVERYONE (Oprah included), and how everything Harry and Meghan do is calculated to benefit them, and how and what they do to control their narrative. Also, it shows you how disturbed Harry is and always has been and Meghan is just a reflection of where he is in his life. Meghan is an ambitious social climber and this book describes how she has planned every move up to now, including the photos, outfits, name-dropping etc. Like everyone else, I could not put it down!
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./////////
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Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//..
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//..
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Both of princess Diana's sons will have my ultimate support during all times. Based on the 1st three episodes I saw, I really feel sad for the way the British tabloids are twisting the entire documentary stories, and try to divide the British family inside even more just to get their revenge back from prince Harry for mentioning some of their names directly in the documentary!
From all my heart i wish that both brothers prince William and prince Harry will keep their mother's final wish in life which is for them to be always in eachothers lives in a positive way to show more support, love and care for each other, and not achieving the tabloids aim in separating them more and break their relation because of all the dirty games they do as part of revenging from prince Harry for what he said about them.
Regarding Meghan i know she suffered alot for joining a family from another culture who have different mind set than the people in the US, and probably what made it more difficult is the fact that this family is also a royal family so even minor mistakes are not accepted to happen and that will definitely cause lots of stress to her, but i hope next time she will be more serious when she talks about the traditions and rules of other cultures and no matter how strange these rules might look like for her.
Meghan should never lose her wise act and speech, especially, if she wanted to be heard and be understood by others regarding what truly happened there. It's not enough to be right in life, also how you are presenting the situation and defending yourself is very important too. I myself lose my logical side when too much attacks and unfair situations happen to me in life but I'm regular person I'm not part of royal family to be worried about that, and still this made me lose many situations i was right in it but i was filled with too much emotions of being treated in wrong way so i missed the opportunity of defending myself right. I hope Meghan from now and on will be more careful and win the situation by her kindness and ultimate respect to British people and their monarchy system in life because this will also be reflection of how she respects her own culture rules and others around her in life. I hope Meghan will be smarter than their dirty games and try to win hearts while she is talking about what happened and how deeply she got hurt because of some situations happened there.
Finally i wish both harry and Meghan and their beautiful family an ultimate love,success and happy life a head for all of them which doesn't contain more sadness and struggles the way it happened before. They both should leave the past in the past and move forward in life, and stop replying those dirty tabloids back because they already made enough damages to them, and after this documentary it will be the right thing to move forward and completely ignore them.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//..
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I remember the first time I read anything about Meghan Markle when she first appeared in Harry’s life. My immediate gut response has been completely verified by Mr. Bower. She is a perfect, textbook example of a brutal narcissist. Even with all of the machinations she inflicted on the innumerable friends, colleagues, etc., for me they pale in comparison to the heartbreaking treatment of her father. If most of the history is correct, he did in essence create this monster. However, you can tell it was all in the name of love for his daughter. And now in his last days, obviously living in pain and loneliness, for her to completely throw him away is the most unconscionable thing about her. If there is any karmic justice to be had, she will receive similar treatment from one or both of her children in the years to come. And it won’t be hard to imagine, nor be more deserving, of any person I’ve ever heard of.
I also was able to put together why she cast aside the parent who helped her the most, but elevated the other parent who seemingly was absent a lot of her life. Very simply put, her father being white wasn’t what her storyline dictated. Putting her black mother out front was the much better prop for her BLM activism. I firmly believe there isn’t one single person, husband and children included, who she wouldn’t discard if needed. Truly a despicable woman.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves.
At the same time, scientists tell us we are 'simply' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. 'Human equivalent' computers are being designed that, we are told, will do our thinking for us. Humans are being simplified out of existence.
It is time, says Bryan Appleyard, to resist, and to reclaim the full depth of human experience. We are, he argues, naturally complex creatures, we are only ever at home in complexity. Through art and literature we see ourselves in ways that machines never can. He makes an impassioned plea for the voices of art to be heard before those of the technocrats. Part memoir, part reportage, part cultural analysis, THE BRAIN IS WIDER THAN THE SKY is a dire warning about what we may become and a lyrical evocation of what humans can be. For the brain is indeed wider than the sky.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.nnnnnnnn
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When reggae emerged in the late 1960s, it had a considerable cultural impact not only in Jamaica but throughout the world. Reggae has influenced societies around the world, contributing to the development of new counter-cultural movements, particularly in Europe, the United States, and Africa. Indeed, in the late 1960s, he co-founded the skinhead movement in the United Kingdom. In the 1970s, he had an impact on Western punk/pop culture and inspired the first rappers in the United States. Since the late 1970s, he has also influenced many African singers, including Alpha Blondy, Tiken Jah Fakoly and Lucky Dube. The purpose of this essay is to study the impact of Jamaican reggae in the world cultural universe, particularly in Europe, the United States and Africa.
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Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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Biographies have been a solid staple of my reading diet for the past few months. Looking deep into the lives of great people is educational, inspiring, and helps me become more of the person that I'm created to be. For most of my life, I dreaded reading the biographies that was assigned to read, or given by friends and families. But recently, I have discovered that learning from the lives of others has incredible benefits for my life.
Last night, in tears, I finished Fearless, a biographical work on the life of Navy SEAL Adam Brown. But the term "biographical" doesn't describe what this book really is. Fearless is a book about a man, displaying his failures as well as his successes, his patriotism, his courage, his love for his family and for his God. Fearless is better described as "inspirational", "motivational", and "life-changing".
Fearless is the story of Adam Brown, a home-grown boy from Hot Springs, Arkansas. The story details his life and activities as a child and teenager, his descent into drug abuse after high school, and his climb out of that pit into the elite world of specialized Navy warfare as a member of Navy SEAL Team SIX.
Fearless is inspirational. Reading this story will encourage you to higher levels of love and service, for your family, your friends, your country. The life of Adam Brown will inspire you to love more, like Christ did.
Fearless is motivational. As you read of the injuries, the challenges, the setbacks, that Adam Brown overcame, you'll quickly feel the confidence that you can achieve your dreams as well.
Fearless is life-changing. Very rarely do I tear up when I read a good story. Even more rarely do I cry. Fearless brought me to that point. In the life of Adam Brown, we see a man who loved everyone. His passion for his wife and children was overwhelming. His comradeship with his fellow teammates was deep and enduring. His compassion for the poor and oppressed Afghan children was incredible. And his desire to live for his Savior was awe-inspiring.
Adam Brown was living proof that "with God, all things are possible." He lived his faith for all to see.
Fearless was so captivating that it was difficult to put it down, even though I knew how it had to end. In the act of protecting his fellow Navy SEALs, and American freedom, Adam Brown gave the ultimate sacrifice. And his story is well worth reading.
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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The idea of a parachute that could safely lower the entire airplane to the ground in case of an airframe failure or loss of control wasn’t new in 1975, when hang gliding pilot Boris Popov’s craft suffered a structural failure at 400 feet above the ground, but no one had succeeded in building a commercially successful model. Others had imagined the idea, but no one had actually done it. This was the fact that made Popov mad as he fell toward earth. As it so happened, Popov survived the fall and went on to invent just such a device, which he succeeded to sell though his new company, Ballistic Recovery Systems, or BRS. The system, which was at first intended for ultralights, uses a rocket to safely extract a large chute, which lowers the craft to the ground. Popov’s company went on to great success, eventually getting installed on every single model of the Cirrus line of single-engine airplanes. Today, BRS counts nearly 300 pilots whose lives have been saved by one of Popov’s inventions.
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British Royal Air Force engineer Frank Whittle is the inventor of the turbojet engine, patenting the design in 1930. Without Air Ministry support, he founded his own company, Power Jets Ltd., to build a prototype, which ran in 1937. The successful test drew interest, and contracts, to build more engines, but Whittle suffered a nervous breakdown in 1940. In 1941, a Gloster E28/39 research airplane was fitted with a Whittle W.1 engine producing 800 pounds of thrust. The airplane reached 466 mph and climbed to 42,000 feet, breaking all aviation records of the day. Because the British government didn’t have the foresight to keep the jet engine design a secret, Germany had no trouble reverse engineering jet engines from Whittle’s patent. In 1944, when Power Jets was nationalized in Great Britain, Whittle again suffered a breakdown, eventually resigning from the company’s board. Despite no longer serving to advance jet design for England, he was nevertheless awarded a knighthood upon retiring from the RAF in 1948. In his career he would be instrumental in helping both Rolls-Royce and General Electric enter the jet age.
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A major force in the flight training and pilot supply market for more than 50 years, Hal Shevers is at heart a passionate ambassador for aviation. In 1961 the young flight instructor and born entrepreneur started selling radios out of the trunk of his car. Before long it was pilot supplies of all kinds, from handheld radios to kneeboards and headsets, making Sporty’s, the company he founded, one-stop shopping for cockpit supplies for pilots of three generations. Over the years Shevers added to that portfolio with award winning instructional videos, books, training guides and other courses. Today, Sporty’s is on the cutting edge of mobile technology and has partnered with Appareo and ForeFlight on a highly-rated ADS-B receiver. Through it all, Shevers has remained a passionate pilot, flying his trademark Piper Aztec as well as his Cessna Citation II and maintaining a world-class FBO at Sporty’s home base of Clermont County Airport near Cincinnati, Ohio.
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On December 14, 1986, after nearly six years of intensive research and development work, Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan departed from Edwards Air Force Base in California, embarking on the first non-stop flight around the world. The couple flew the Rutan Model 76 Voyager, a twin-engine sailplane designed by Rutan’s innovative brother, Burt. At the point of departure, the airplane was loaded to a gross weight of nearly 9,700 pounds, 20 percent more than it had ever flown with before, of which fuel comprised 73 percent. The wings were so weight laden that the wingtips scraped along the tarmac, putting the success of the flight into serious question. But the Voyager lifted and after nine days, three minutes and 44 seconds of flight, covering 24,986 miles on one tank of gas, Yeager and Rutan landed safely back at Edwards. For their efforts, the Voyager team received the Presidential Citizens Medal and several awards including the Collier Trophy — the first time a woman had been included as a recipient of this coveted award.
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A name little known even by most pilots, Fred Weick was one of the most important aeronautical thinkers of the 20th century, doing highly influential work on subjects including cowling design, propeller efficiency, stall resistance and control surface configuration. Weick, who won the Collier Trophy in 1929 for developing the NACA inlet, still in wide use today, went on to design the groundbreaking (two-axis control, nosewheel design, and spin resistant design) but ultimately unsuccessful Ercoupe, which sought to make flying easier, safer, less expensive and more accessible. Weick went on to co-design one of the most successful light planes in history, the Cherokee PA-28, which re-invented Piper Aircraft as a modern aircraft company.
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Glenn Hammond Curtiss was born in 1878 and, like the Wright brothers, started his career operating a bicycle repair shop and, later, designing bicycles, motorcycles and engines under the trade name Hercules. In 1907 he became known as “the fastest man on earth” after driving his motorcycle to a speed of 136.3 mph, a world record that held until 1911. He first ventured into aviation when balloonist Thomas Scott Baldwin placed one of Curtiss’ engines in his airship, the California Arrow. In May of 1908, Curtiss flew the Aerial Experimental Association’s White Wing, an airplane with aileron-like “horizontal rudders,” 1,017 feet, a much greater distance than anyone had flown before. His experience with White Wing led him to build June Bug, an airplane in which Curtiss won the Scientific American Trophy in a highly publicized flight across Pleasant Valley in Hammondsport, New York. He experimented extensively with seaplane operations until finally reaching success in 1911 within days of becoming the first to land on a platform on a Navy ship and also completing the first hydroplane flight to a ship. These three achievements earned him the title “the father of naval aviation.”
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Clyde Cessna was a farmer and car salesman in Enid, Oklahoma, who in 1910 was inspired to get into aviation by a traveling airshow. He became an apprentice at the Queen Aeroplane Company, which produced copies of the Bleriot XI, and used one of the company’s fuselages for his first flying machine, which he crashed multiple times while teaching himself to fly. He nearly bankrupted himself in the process and retreated to his family farm in Wichita, Kansas. There he built his first complete design, Silver Wings, a monoplane constructed of spruce and linen, in 1911. A successful Midwest show circuit followed. Each winter, Cessna would build a new airplane, each an improvement over last year’s model. After the war, which forced Cessna back to farming for a few years, he joined forces with Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman at the Travel Air Manufacturing Company. But Cessna’s strong belief in strutless monoplane designs caused him to resign from Travel Air and start up Cessna Aircraft Company in 1927. Cessna retired and went back to farming in 1936, but with much help from his nephew, Dwane Wallace, Cessna’s company became the most productive airplane manufacturer in history.
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While two Americans had already completed suborbital flights by the dawn of 1962, America’s space program was still trailing far behind that of the Soviet Union when John Glenn’s first NASA mission approached. That fact, and the growing anticipation of Americans across the nation, put all the more pressure on the success of the flight as it was repeatedly delayed and aborted a whopping 10 times. Luckily, however, try number 11 was a go, and Glenn soared into orbit aboard the Mercury 7 capsule. Within less than five hours, he had orbited the earth three times and watched the sun set and rise with each journey around. While the United States hadn’t quite caught up in the space race just yet, the accomplishment put the U.S. on a more equal footing with the Soviets and gave Americans a sorely needed morale boost. Glenn would go on to serve his country as a two-term United States Senator, and returned to space again at the age of 77, setting the record as the oldest man to fly in space. As if those accomplishments weren’t enough, earlier in his life Glenn also accomplished a slew of other feats, including the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speeds and participation in 149 missions during World War II and the Korean conflict. Throughout his life, he remained an avid general aviation pilot, making him a particularly legendary hero among fellow fliers.
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Back in the early 1970s Dick VanGrunsven started work on his first homebuilt design, a reworking of the Stitts Playboy homebuilt with metal wings and a new engine. VanGrunsven, known to friends and followers simply as “Van,” was on to something. He soon turned his efforts to his own designs, starting with the single-seat RV-3 and tandem-seat RV-4, which were affordable, sporty, fast, easy-to-build and fun-to-fly all-metal homebuilt kits. At a time when futuristic composite speedsters and vintage looking tube-and-rag taildraggers were getting all the attention, Van’s company, Van’s Aircraft, was generating a ton of sales from people who wanted what the growing lineup of RV’s had to offer. Over the next 40-plus years, Van’s RVs have continued to get better, easier to build, better handling and more comfortable, and Van’s has gone from one model to many, including a beautiful four-seater and a hot-selling LSA. Today with more than 18,000 kits sold and more than 7,500 known to be completed and flying, Van’s is the undisputed leader in kit aircraft manufacturing with no sign of letting up soon.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans...........
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//..
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//.
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I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow..
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.///
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.,,
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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At first I was not sure about this book, I was concerned it was just going to be "gossip." But probably like some (many?) Americans, I had never heard of Tom Bower . But still, I was concerned about how factual it would actually be. When I received the book and saw it was over 400 (!) pages, with almost 900 (!!!) endnotes, I realized that this was a fully researched book.
Of course I knew a lot of what was presented, just by following the news these past few years, since "Harry and Megan" became "celebrities." But knowing something and then hearing names, and dates, and details, and more details, extensive details, make this book COMPELLING.
I think I, like many Americans, felt kind of sad/bad for Megan and Harry and how they were treated during the Queen's Jubilee, just a couple of months ago. But after reading this book, my opinion has changed. But you read it for yourself and see.
P.S. I must say that one thing in this book that delighted me was the use of words I see seldom used in American writing. Especially the words: Pertinently, Obsequiousness, and Panjandrums. If you are a logophile like me, you will love finding gems like these as an added bonus!
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.///////////////
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@Lynn-r8h I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans...........
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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These two are some of the most fascinating narcissists going at the present time... Their stunts and arrogant displays
of selfishness provide hours of entertainment.... I can't take my eyes off the screen when they force themselves to places
they have no business being, such as this veterans day event. The total hutzpah of this pair provides hours of
entertainment==== I can't stop watching. Who could ask for better fun on a Saturday night, our entire fraternity is
making fun of them 🤠🤠🤠🤠 We have the beer and popcorn and sit around making fun of them!!!!
Just so darn pitiful that they took over the day from the honored vets 😉😉😉😉,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
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@mommapanda5736 I notice how this pair always want to be announced as the Royal Highnesses, The Duke of Sussex, and The Duchess of Sussex,
but the poor people living in Sussex, England have never even seen them.. They have never even had the decency to visit there.
They have basically ghosted the place whose name they insist on using. They just like the sound of it, I guess. It sounds very
high and mighty, but real live people actually live there... Would someone who lives in Sussex please comment on how it
feels to be used in this way? Write in if you can, we feel for you...,,,
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//..
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./////
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I bought this book after becoming acquainted with the author's writing via Twitter. His early morning tweets of news articles make terrific reading, cutting across areas of education, philosophy, science, religion, technology and humour. You get a sense of a genuine 'renaissance man', and that's very much the delivery of 'The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky'.
"The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky" has a simple concept at its heart too; that simple solutions don't work for a complex world. Anyone who's spent time trying to prise nature's secrets from inside the cell knows from experience that this is true. Or any computer technician. Why do these systems behave in sometimes unpredictable ways? Because they are complex.
But this 'simple concept' is countercultural within the mainstream. Mainstream culture encourages us to believe that character is a matter of 'simple' genetics, one gene equals one phenotype, to Keep It Simple Stupid and a whole lot more.
When the mainstream has embraced something so fundamentally wrong, terrible consequences will follow. Banks will fail. The environment will falter. "The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky" seeks to explain why the mainstream drive for 'simplicity' is wrong and to show how it's leading us to hell in a hand-basket.
Many popular science/technology/economics books take a simple concept that is usually contentious and expound on it with example after example, giving very little in the way of new ideas beyond chapter four. This book, however, has chewy food for thought all the way to the end.
The author achieves this through his cross-disciplinary erudition and via the input of a wide network of renown specialists from the fields of art, economics, medicine and science. He even subjects himself to a two-hour long MRI scan to study the brain, which is what I'd call Commitment.
A truly insightful, fascinating read.
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Appleyard has articulated and fleshed out exactly what I have been thinking about on a basic level for months. As Appleyard states in the prologue: "This book is about, in roughly this order, neuroscience, machines, and art." It is primarily a passionate response to our technology-loving culture's over-simplification of ourselves. He doesn't condemn technology, but he patiently spells out the dangers of being seduced by our simple gadgets and scientific achievements so much that we throw away our complex sense of personhood, art, human creativity and connection. Throughout the book, he conveys his own sense of wonder, surprise and delight at what it means to be human, while remaining scientific, rational, measured, thoughtful, and curious. His style of writing, and ability to weave stories together in a seemingly disorganized way - achieve, on the whole, a resounding argument for preserving the precious, mysterious complexity of our minds. I feel inspired. Bravo!
I recommend reading Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" as a companion to this book for an even deeper look at machines, the way our culture embraces them, and what implications and effects that might have on our souls and our personhood.
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It was a great book! I had to stop reading and think about some of the ideas, to open my mind, to try to understand. It is my first book by Appleyard and I found only one more in my library. But there is a great website, with many of his articles and I plan to read a lot of his work. Appleyard analyses the contemporary culture, looks at modern life from multiple angles, be it neuroscience, finances, technology or art. Chapters on creativity and genius, and others on where we are all moving in connection with new technology are fascinating. I enjoyed reading Jonah Lehrer, Daniel Kahneman on decision making, creativity and the future and this book added to the list. Appleyard does not repeat them but somehow encompasses a lot in one relatively small book. He is a journalist, and through the book he introduced various interviews with famous scientists, artists, philosophers and celebrities. If we are the last generation before technology takes completely over it is worth to read this book.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.////
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.nn
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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Last week I received a copy of a book called “Fearless” by Eric Blehm to review. Little did I know when I started this book that by the end of it, I would be moved to emotion like I rarely am. This book is a game changer on so many levels. I honestly won’t be able to find the words in this review to express how much I wish people would get a copy and read it for themselves. It is the remarkable story of one man, his story, his struggles, his humility, his family, his addictions and oh, by the way, he was a member of the “Green Team” on SEAL team six (the same SEAL team that killed Osama Bin Laden). Again, I struggle with words to give this book a full review.
Author Eric Blehm takes us to the beginning, where it all started for Adam Brown. Early on, you are pulled into his life and his story. Blehm does an incredible job of crafting words in such a way that make you feel like you know Adam too. As you read you feel like you know his entire family. His failures frustrate you. His struggle with addiction saddens you. You feel the weight of pour decisions and repeated struggles to overcome “the voice” that is addiction. Not until about halfway through the book do we begin to share in his journey to become a Navy SEAL. An entire book could be written on the unbelievable physical and mental challenge involved in making it to the elite team which Adam Brown achieved.
My emotions were moved to the point of tears at the end of the book as Adam made the ultimate sacrifice for this country, for you, for me. Because we are pulled into the story, the knock on the door to his wife to inform her felt like you were right there. He was father. He was a husband. He was a man of faith. To best describe it, I’ll share what the author wrote in his Afterward:
Despite the impact and magnitude of the bin Laden mission, Adam’s story stands on its own. Throughout his life he inspired scores of people, and his story has continued to change the lives of many – including mine. He’s reminded me to appreciate every moment with my family, to be goofy and not grumpy, to get back up no matter how hard I might get slapped down, to sometimes buy my children a cupcake when I pick up coffee in the morning but to call it a muffin “because”, as Adam would tell Savannah, “as long as you call them muffins, they’re okay to eat for breakfast.” And though I hadn’t opened a Bible in more than twenty-five years, his faith encouraged me to question my own questioning about religion.
I can’t think of a better way to describe this book than that. I too felt these same challenges after reading it. It’s fitting that I finished the final words of the book, closed it and spent the afternoon with my daughters doing crafts and played catch with my son. I did so, not out of guilt, but out of honor. I did so in a country where we are free to do whatever we dream and wish to do. I did so with the freedom of a father because the sacrifice of another. Friends, I HIGHLY recommend that you pick up a copy of this book. It will remind you how blessed we are as fathers, as wives, as Americans. Because of the fearless sacrifice of men and women like Adam Brown.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I was really happy for them when they got married, but now I feel that Meghan Markle was very calculating and cynically based herself on Princess Diana (she does a lot of the same gestures, such as looking doe eyed up through her eyelashes). Then, knowing how adored Di is in America, she manouevred it and played the same victim trip, blatantly seeking celebrity and fame, sympathy and attention. I feel sorry for her husband who has been manipulated into a position where it feels like history repeating itself with what happened to his Mother, so he has to take his wife's side even though it will alienate him and his grandchildren from his family.
It really is a pity party, I wish she would act with some dignity, we can all have elderly relatives who are a bit politically incorrect at times, you can just stand up to them and say your piece, maintain your loyalty and integrity... not sell your story to the media to the detriment of the happiness of your husband and children.
I didn't like that about Di either, yes she was miserable, there is a high chance she had Borderline Personality Disorder. I would say she was also very manipulative, drama seeking and difficult to live with. It was an awful situation and I am sure she struggled, but there were other routes that she could have taken rather than selling her story about her husband to the press, portraying herself as the poor helpless, innocent victim, with little regard of the impact on her children. She is another one who knew how to play the press and to have a popular public persona, at the detriment of her family.
Can we stop giving this woman so much press attention, she claims to hate it, lets leave her in peaceful obscurity then.
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@kansasrose2909 This book wasn’t the book I expected. I was expecting information on how the car has impacted nearly every aspect of modern life, from land use to leisure time.
The author appears to be someone who likes cars and who likes to drive. He told me about cars: how and when they were invented (no one person can claim credit), how they are made and sold. I picked up some interesting facts: Ford, led by the vicious anti-Semite, Henry Ford, was interested in making ONE car as cheaply and efficiently as possible. GM, led by that non-entity, Alfred Sloan, was interested in selling cars. Toyota, led by Toyota, was interested in making high quality cars.
Toyota makes better cars because they shut down the assembly line when there’s a problem and don’t restart until the cause is discovered and corrected. Detroit, obsessed with speed and production…well, it doesn’t.
I’ve never owned an American-made car.
I didn’t realize how closely Hitler was associated with the Volkswagen. The photo of him examining a scale model made my skin crawl. Would this have made a difference to me when I (age 23) bought my first car, a nine-year old Volkswagen owned by a friend of my dad’s? I’d like to think so, but suspect the cool factor would have trumped history.
The Volkswagen cool factor is something that the author, a Brit, doesn’t quite get. The Volkswagen was THE CAR of the free spirited baby boom generation, for whom it represented reliable transportation that you could maintain yourself.
There are other aspects of American car culture the author misses, but you get the drift.
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“The Car” is a story of the rise and fall of the modern automobile.
It covers the early days of motor car development in Europe, the rise of Ford and General Motors in America, the ascent of Germany with the production of the Volkswagen Beetle, the introduction of luxury and sporty British cars including the Rolls Royce and Aston Martins, and the Japanese invasion in the 1970 with the famous Toyota Production System (TPS) used by Toyota and Datsun (Nissan).
It also tracks the various phases that automobiles faced from competing with horses to the rise of industrialism, the post-World War II boom, the oil crisis of the 1970s. and the start of global warming predictions beginning in 1981, the rise of diesel engines in Europe, the decline of young people wanting cars since the 1990s, the rise of electric vehicles including Tesla and the eventual entry of autonomous vehicles.
I felt that the book was a incomplete attempt to cover the history of cars. While it detailed some key highlights, there was a tremendous amount of detail missing from the book that should have been included. For example, there was no mention of the Korean, Indian, Chinese, Spanish, Czech, Swedish, and Russian manufacturers. Moreover, it did little to cover the contributions made by Ferrari and Pininfarina. How can you have a book about cars and not mention Ferrari?
Little was done to cover the alliances among the major firms, the consolidation of firms, global supply chains, motor racing and how this continues to draw audiences and promote vehicles.
And nothing was done to cover the overall economic value – beyond employment of the auto industry – and for those who support it.
For me the most interesting take-aways were some bits of trivia, including:
1. Detroit – it’s a French word for “Straits”. I should have known that!
2. Cadillac – Anotoine de la Mothe Cadillac was a French explorer who established Fort Ponchartrain de Detroit – where modern day Detroit is centred – in 1701. (Page 36.)
3. German autobahns – the German government promotes them as of the “Seven things you must do while in Germany” (Page 81.)
4. Toyota Hilux trucks – are almost indestructible (Top Gear staged many attempts to destroy one). It is also one of the most successful “Technicals” vehicle for warfare. (Page 224.)
5. The Chevy Corvair and its rear, swing-axel need to have vastly different tire pressures on the front (15-18 psi) vs. back (26-30 psi). (Page 234.)
6. Tesla – Elon Musk was an investor not the originator of this brand (Page 257.)
Overall I felt this was a very incomplete effort that covered what the author was interested in rather than a well-researched and thought out history.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@kansasrose2909 In the last few years two books took me FOREVER to get through. The first was Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and the second is Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." What caused this? What do they have in common? Both books explain, in minute detail, simple concepts with immensely far-reaching implications, and both have been... after the slog... the most intellectually rewarding reading of my adult life.
Where to begin... I have a number of theories running around in my head, and occasionally I try to corral them on paper. I organize, sequence and interconnect them in a way that will prevent my reader from meaningfully widening their eyes, in an aside, while winding their finger around one ear... ("Cuckoo!") Good writing about complex topics is very, very difficult, and Kahneman has corraled 30+ years of science, his career and all he has learned into a perfectly arranged sequence that leads the reader into a wilderness... provisioning you in each chapter with the tools you'll need for the next part of the journey.
The second most striking effect on me is the number of times I said, "Yes... YES!!! this is what I've been saying!" In my case it has usually been some sort of "intuitive"(excuse me, Mr. Kahneman... I mean "System 1") recognition of a pattern in my observations about the way we think. In Kahneman's case those intuitions have been converted into theoretical propositions, each meticulously researched in well designed experiments. Clearly, this is at least one difference between me and a Nobel Prize winning researcher.
So why does this stuff matter? In the context of broader discussions of free will, intention, choice and control over the directions our lives take, this book can provide powerful insights that might currently be obscured by these "cognitive illusions" and the inherent limitations of "System 1/System 2" thinking.
Perhaps we're not as "free" in our decisions as we might like to think, if "priming" has such a stunningly reproducible effect. Perhaps we're not so determined, if activities that initially require "System 2" attention, can be turned into second-nature, "technical-expertise intuitions." I.e. learning and training MATTERS in our ability to detect and respond to events that... if untrained... might take advantage of our brain's inherent "blind spots" or weaknesses.
Perhaps childhood religious indoctrination is a very adept recognition of these mental tendencies/flaws, so profoundly (if intuitively/naively) expressed by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, "Give me the boy until 7, I will give you the man." (paraphrased; forgive me)
Kahneman's discoveries and documentation of mental capacity and biases could form the basis of a "Mental Martial Arts" program: an alternative form of indoctrination, in which students are trained to understand their brains' weaknesses, and learn to take stances or engage in practices that eliminate or reduce the errors to which these weaknesses can lead.
This book will rearrange the way you think... about how you think.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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Go on, “over-do” the seasoning
I recommend going heavier on seasoning meatballs, especially large batches, than you would with whole meat cuts. Since the seasoning is intended to permeate throughout the meat, instead of just sitting on top like with steak, what seems like a lot of flavor will actually be spread throughout quite a bit of meat real estate.
When in doubt, set up a frying pan next to you while you’re seasoning the mixture. Fry a small patty (the size of a quarter), and taste it. If you need to adjust the flavor, you can do it now. This adds a few minutes to your prep time, but at least you can ensure a properly tasty meatball.
Don’t skimp on the fat
While you can make meatballs out of any meat—beef, pork, chicken, or faux-meat—always consider the fat content. Fats melt down and become the juicy flavor you look forward to in a good meatball. If you’re using beef, pork, turkey, or any combination of these, look for packages labeled with at least 7% fat. In the event that you can only find lean meats, or you prefer proteins like chicken instead of beef, go ahead and add the fat yourself. Use the large holes on a box grater and add a few tablespoons of cold, grated butter to your mixture.
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Air-Fried Stuffed Mushrooms Recipe
Ingredients:
8-10 medium mushrooms
Spritz of oil for the mushrooms
1 tablespoon butter
1 small shallot, minced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
4 ounces ground sausage (or turkey)
¼ teaspoon salt
1 ounce cream cheese
¼ teaspoon dried parsley
1 tablespoon shredded parmesan cheese (or grated)
1. Pull the stems out of the mushroom caps. Line up the mushroom caps, round side up, on a plate. Spray the bottoms with a bit of oil and flip them over so the de-stemmed side is up.
2. Chop the mushroom stems roughly until they’re about the same size as the minced garlic and shallot. Add the stems, shallot, and garlic to a frying pan with the butter. Sauté the veggies over medium-low heat until they begin to soften and sweat. Add the ground sausage and salt, and break it apart into small pieces while it cooks in the pan. Once the meat has just finished cooking, turn off the heat and pour the mixture into a small bowl.
3. Add the cream cheese to the warm mixture and stir it until well combined. Stir in the parsley and parmesan cheese.
4. Using a small spoon, add just enough filling to fill each of the mushroom caps. Press the mixture firmly with the back of your spoon. Divide the remaining filling amongst the mushrooms, mounding the stuffing on top.
5. Set the air fryer to the “air fry” setting at 325°F and cook the stuffed mushrooms for 10 minutes. Then allow them to sit and cool off for 5 to 10 minutes. (This rest time allows the mushrooms to reabsorb any loose juices in the cap. Also those juices are hot, so this gives them a chance to cool.) Enjoy as a side to a larger snack dinner, or on its own as a mini-meal.
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Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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his is going to be a long review, fair warning.
I'm going to start this review with the end of the book. The very last chapter (they are long chapters) is the only one to mention Meghan. In my opinion, it was very neutral, and not overly pro-Sussex. He took most comments at face value, and didn't really (that I remember) draw conclusions or assumptions or speculate on anything. The only time I can recall the author speculating about anything is in regards to Meghan wanting therapy while pregnant and being denied it, while Harry later admitted Meghan advised him to get therapy just the year before and he was able to. Other than that, I felt the touchy topic was handled well, considering the circumstances.
As for the rest of the book, I found it interesting. I have not read too many books discussing the boys childhood and the immediate aftermath of Princess Di's death, so perhaps because of that I found it all rather interesting to read. It was the little tidbits that stick out to me, like the day before Princess Diana died she had bought Prince Harry a PlayStation and that was part of the last conversation Prince William has with his mother, and that ultimately it was her sister who gave the PlayStation to Prince Harry for his birthday a few weeks later. It's small details like that that I really connected with.
I loved the insight into the relationship between the boys growing up, and how they really only had each other growing up and while teenagers (who would've guessed William was such a wild child and that Harry was the quiet one?). It was also amazing to see the parallels between Catherine and Meghan, in regards to the press. While I personally think the British Press has added the factor of race into their reporting of Meghan, it wasn't as if Catherine's family got off scot-free when she first started dating William. Her brothers antics and her uncles habits definitely ended up spread across the headlines, and it's amazing how she was able to stick it out for as long as she did until he finally proposed. The press is definitely ruthless and unrelenting, and that was proven many times in this book.
The book also touches on Prince William and Harry's previous relationships, the military service of both boys, Prince Williams efforts to delay the inevitable by becoming a rescue pilot, and the joint efforts of the brothers in regards to charity/patrons. None of it was really new information but it is part of their story. The end of the book goes through Prince Philip's death and Princess Diana's statue unveiling. If you follow the Royal Family, there wasn't really any new information contained within those pages either.
Overall I would recommend the book, if you're wanting a nice overview of the major moments of Prince William and Harry's life. Hopefully these books can have a happier ending at some point, where the brothers are at least on speaking terms. As it is, it almost ends on a cliffhanger of a sorts, because we don't know what the future will hold for at least one of these two.
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Naval Combat Demolition Units (NCDUs)
On 6 June 1943, the Naval Combat Demolition Unit (NCDU) training school was established at Ft. Pierce, Florida and organized by LCDR Draper Kauffman. He assembled volunteers from the Bomb and Mine Disposal School, Washington, DC (which he organized), and the Civil Engineering Corps and Naval Construction Corps (Seabees) School at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Virginia to fill the first training classes.
LCDR Kauffman is given credit for instituting the infamous “Hell Week,” a period of intense instruction that remains a fundamental component in modern-day Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training program. By the end of Ft. Pierce training there was an overall attrition rate of 65-75%, much like it remains today in BUD/S.
In some accountings, LCDR Kauffman has also been given credit for the establishment of the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) in the Pacific during WWII, but this is not factual. The UDTs were formed in December 1943, while LCDR Kauffman was still at Fort Pierce. He left his training position at Fort Pierce in April 1944 to become commanding officer of UDT-5 in Maui, Territory of Hawaii.
Each NCDU was comprised of one officer and five enlisted sailors to make up a single boat crew. The first NCDU Class graduated in September 1943; after several months of arduous training with primary emphasis on demolition of submerged beach obstacles (submerged in a surf zone). Seven units were dispersed to the Third and Fifth Fleets in the Pacific, three units went to the Eighth Fleet in the Mediterranean, and only one unit went to England. By April 1944, however, a total of 34 NCDUs had collected in England in preparation for Operation OVERLORD, the amphibious landing at Normandy.
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MacArthur’s Frogmen
Many of the early Fort Pierce-trained NCDUs were deployed to the Pacific Theater of Operations. NCDU-1 went to Alaska in August 1943 to participate in the Aleutian Islands Campaign– before actually finishing their formal training class. These operations were a struggle over the Aleutian Islands, which were then a part of the Alaska Territory. The NCDU men were never engaged, since the Japanese had already departed the islands. They were subsequently transferred to Waimanalo, Territory of Hawaii to be embedded with the provisional UDT-1.
NCDU-2, NCDU-3, NCDU-19, NCDU-20, NCDU-21, and NCDU-24 went to the Southwest Pacific, and remained together for the war’s duration (the only NCDUs never to be subsumed into a UDT). LTjg Frank Kaine was the leader of this group, which later became known as “MacArthur’s Frogmen.”
NCDU-4 and NCDU- 5 also went to the Southwest Pacific. They were the first Fort Pierce men to actually be committed to battle in the Pacific, when they operated with the 4th U.S. Marines at Green Island and Emirau Island in the Bismarck Archipelago of the South Pacific at New Guinea. These men were eventually returned to Hawaii and assigned duty with the UDTs.
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Post-War UDTs
Thirty UDTs were organized during World War II. UDT-1 and UDT-2 were disbanded almost as quickly as they were formed, there were at most 28 teams at any one time. All teams were trained at Fort Pierce except UDT-1 and UDT-2 (the provisional teams), and UDT-14, UDT-16, and UDT-17, which were made up largely of fleet volunteers, all trained in Hawaii.
Four 50-man teams were established during the post-war period. UDT-1 and UDT-3 were home ported at ATB, Coronado, CA, and UDT-2 and UDT-4 were sent to ATB, Little Creek, Norfolk, VA. All were organized under Amphibious Forces Pacific and Atlantic respectively. These were the only WWII maritime commando units to survive doctrinally after the war and thus, provided a direct lineage to the modern-day SEAL Teams.
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Naked Warrior
Glorietta Bay Coronado, California
The third Naked Warrior installation was dedicated in Coronado, California on Veterans Day, November 11, 2016. It represents one of the four locations where UDTs got their start: Ft. Pierce, Florida; Bellows, Hawaii; Coronado, California; and Little Creek, Virginia.
At the Bellows commemorative dedication in Hawaii, someone suggested we should really have one at BUD/S. Brian Barbata, Class 52, contacted Bob Rohrbach at the Bucklew Center, who put together a meeting with NAVFAC and JAG. Based on that meeting, Barbata contacted Tom Hawkins and Rick Kaiser at the Museum to solicit their support again. The prospective location was at the trainee exit to the beach, with IBS storage and a large boulder that was a class gift. But the more Barbata pushed, the deeper and more complicated the project became. Part of the problem was the billion-dollar move of the Teams to Imperial Beach, leaving the BUD/S configuration uncertain.
Seemingly at a dead end, Barbata was ready to give up when he noticed that the American Flag on the Coronado City Hall was not being flown above the California and Coronado flags. So he called the Mayor. In a strange coincidence, Mayor Tanaka was from Hilo, and hid dad had been in the SEAL Teams. An immediate connection was made. The Mayor said Coronado would love to have a Naked Warrior, with a pledge to support it financially.
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans....
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@ingridpaluzzi4524 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//////////////////////
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.///
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@kansasrose2909 1. the royal family is dysfunctional and emotionally challenged:
this is not a family so much as a business and whatever affection the members of the family may have
for each other the institution of the monarchy is more important The members of this family seem to
suffer from repressed emotions or emotions run wild [see Harry].
2. Just as there is a deep state in this country made up of bureaucrats, there is a deep state in Britain --
the so called "men in gray" who actually run the monarchy. Their influence seems pernicious and
pervasive.
3. The author seems contemptuous of the Middleton family. If Meghan Markle faced a racist press, the
Middleton family were and are mocked for their class -- heaven forbid, they weren't born into the
nobility, they actually work for a living.
4. The author swallowed Harry and Meghan's narrative whole. I don't doubt that Harry had a difficult
childhood. I don't doubt that he found a woman who affirmed his neediness and gave him a purpose. I
don't doubt that he and Meghan love each other, but I am sick to death of hearing constantly
regurgitated lies and excuses for the couple's self-serving behavior from the time they left the royal family until now. Take for example the lie that Prince Charles cut H&M off financially and without warning. That has been disproved by the official records of Clarence House. Do I need to say how inappropriate the Oprah interview was while his grandfather was dying? Or the fact that 17 of the statements in that interview have been proven false or less than accurate. Or the fact that Harry returned for Philip's funeral but didn't bother to stay one day to visit his grandmother. Nobody made him do these things -- he chose to do them. I'm also tired of the subtext in books of this ilk that Harry's treatment as "the Spare" is somehow William's fault. He didn't choose his birth order, and in a family that is also an institution this favoritism should surprise no one.
5. The Paparazzi can be parasites on the planet, but they did not kill Princess Diana and the continuance
of this myth is false history. Harry goes on about this all the time. He is constantly being triggered by
it. It's his truth, but it's not true. Diana chose of her own will to give up her protection officers. She
did this over the objections of those same officers. This exposed her to the paparazzi. She damaged
her own dignity with the Panorama interview and in a sense opened a door to her personal life that no
royal had ever done before. She wanted to be photographed when it suited her, but only when it suited
her. She played a very dangerous and foolish game. The paparazzi harassed her and that was
despicable. They chased her that last night in Paris, but they didn't kill her. A drunk driver and the
personal decision not to wear a seat belt killed her. One of Harry's repeated complaints is that the
paparazzi took pictures of her dying in the car and didn't help her. They did indeed take pictures of her
dying in the car and they sold them. This is truly horrible and ghoulish, but the first doctor on the scene
confirmed the paparazzi did not get in his way nor did they hinder other emergency workers. It's hard to
know what they could have done in a positive way to help. Harry has clearly never confronted Diana's
part in the paparazzi frenzy around her and her failure to put on the seat belt that probably would have
saved her life. It's impossible not to feel compassion for the child that Harry was, but it is time for him
to deal with his past and move on
6. This brings me to my final comment. The book tells the story of Meghan's difficulty with the royal family. It accepts that this is a love match. The book also gives examples of some of the racist comments made about Meghan in the press. It describes the rivalry between various royal households that made constructive work between the families difficult. I accept this as probably realistic, but I don't accept as reasonable the charge made by Harry and Meghan and regurgitated in this book, that when Meghan experienced mental distress and had thoughts of suicide that she was denied help by the palace. I've always been puzzled why nobody asked the couple why they needed to ask anyone on the palace staff for help. Harry had had counseling before, he was active in mental health work with his brother. Why didn't Meghan ask him for help and if she did, why did he have no answer? This has never made sense to me and isn't addressed here.
This book has nothing particularly new and it answers no open questions. It is a well written waste of time and money.
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It seems that Harry has well and truly made a mess of his life. Some of the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the Royal Family, for not better instilling in him a purpose in life and a raison d'etre. Most of the responsibility though, falls on Harry himself for being a 30-something year old man baby who never outgrew his childhood trauma.
The main issue with this book is not the book itself, but who it is ultimately about. The only interesting thing about Meghan is her SHEER AUDACITY in thinking she could come in and change a 1000 year old institution, and her ability to completely sever people from her life once she has gotten every scrap of use out of them. There is not an authentic bone in her body.
In Meghan's own words: She is such a fraud.
She claims her treatment in England was unfair when: she never tried to fit in with the Royal Family, she acted like a spoiled brat from day one, she bullied staff, demanding the family change for her instead of the other way around. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted the fame, the money, the adoration, and none of the work.
And when she didn't get what she wanted, she ran away to whine about "racism" to Oprah. It seems like with Meghan, anything and anyone that doesn't kiss her ass is "racist". Give me a break.
Will Harry one day wake up and smell the roses, and realize the absolute mess he has made of his life? How big of a clown he is making himself out to be? The fact that he is now"Just Harry" while his social climing wife demands to be THE Duchess of Sussex, a place she probably could not find on a map of England.
Overall, if you know anything about Meghan and Harry, this book is nothing new. There are no bombshell revelations, mainly confirmation of what has up til now been mostly speculation. But, Tom Bowers has done his homework, and he's brought his receipts. It's well worth a read.
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As soon as I first set eyes on Meghan Markle, I took an instant dislike to her. She reminded me so much of another divorced American adventuress who ensnared a member of the Royal Family, who became so besotted with her that he gave up the throne to marry her. I speak, of course, of Wallis Simpson, who ensnared King Edward VIII, the former Prince of Wales in 1936 - the year of three kings. They became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, friends of Adolf Hitler, and in exile lived a frivolous and meaningless life of self-indulgence.
Harry reveals himself as another weak person, obsessed with a ruthless adventuress, who cares only about her own self-promotion. It seems that, from an early age, she had set her sights and iron will on attaining fame and fortune, using people to further her own ends and discarding them - including her own family, - as soon as they ceased to be of any use to her, and abusing them if they deviated one iota from total compliance to her own megalomaniac and narcissistic fantasies.
Harry was ripe for the picking, a prize catch, a passport to attain her life-long dreams. All around her suffered in the process, but she did not care in the least. The two became entangled in a folie a deux, and Harry became her lap-dog, indulging her paranoid delusions about her supreme importance and suing the press for every imagined slight. It was obviously not going to end well. Our late Queen, a shrewd judge of character after so many years on the throne, described her to confidants as 'evil'. After reading Tom Bower's book, I can only echo 'Amen'. Clearly Harry is not a happy man, snatched away from his home and family to California, where he acts more as a servant than a husband.
I had predicted from early in the marriage that she would discard him as soon as he ceased to serve her purposes. I can only hope for his sake that the break comes soon enough for him to re-establish a life in which he is not perpetually beholden to her incessant demands and complaints. He is reported as saying to those who do not go along with her whims and unreasonable demands: 'Whatever Megan wants, Megan gets'. One can only hope that what she gets is a well-deserved comeuppance.
I did not relish reading this book about two very self-serving and unpleasant people. But one needs to try to understand how and why the whole sorry business came about. In this process, one could not wish for a better guide than Tom Bower.
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Firstly, I've never liked Harry, even before he met that woman. I stopped watching Suits because of her. Safe to say, I didn't like either of them as individuals, but wow, as a couple, I really dislike them.
Harry feels trapped and wants out, but wants all the privileges, whereas that woman wants fame and fortune, without having privacy invaded. They are contradictory and only out for their own selfish gains. I'm a huge Royal fan, more so of our late Queen, and it's her I feel for. The last 5/6 years of her life she's had to deal with a man-child and then his wife, both of whom seem to be childish.
The woman firstly - where to start. She uses people for her gain and then tosses them aside. This book shows many times where she's done that. She changes her stories depending on the day of the week, who she's talking to and how she's feeling. Things don't add up. I feel for her father. Her mother was made out to be some angel, but her background isn't all that pleasant; her father seemed to be the one who was more stable. She had a temper that makes her very unpleasant. Many stories of that are covered here too. I could go on.
Him - a spoilt brat. Using his mother to his advantage any time something doesn't go his way. Nothing like his brother, who seems like a decent human being. He and his uncle Andrew are both "spares" and are both as bad as each other by being brats and believing they deserve the best. Harry definitely has mental issues, there's no doubt about that, but as a grown man (physically), he could easily have dealt with those issues in a more mature way, rather than blasting his family publicly.
That Oprah interview was rubbish - they both played the victim card yet again, and they did not deal with things the right way by talking to that God awful American talk show host (I can't stand Oprah). Stories again don't add up.
I feel sorry for their kids, growing up behind their walls without any interaction with anyone other than themselves and their grandmother.
Americans should not be allowed into the Royal Family. First Wallis and now this woman. They don't understand protocol and traditions given they don't have a history.
Easier said than done, but I would want their Duke/Duchess titles taken away from them. Unfortunately, as Harry is born a Prince, I don't think that can be taken away, but I would love to see that. Given this is unlikely to happen, the best I can hope for is that they split up. Now THAT would be entertaining!
I could go on for hours, but all I can say is that this book is an eye opener to the people they are behind the scenes and how unpleasant they are, how they lie for their benefit and what brats they are.
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Finally, someone has dared to explore the 'spin', alternative reality and blatant lies that the public has been subjected to for years. Much was already known, but there are some revelations. The fact that this book pulls together the proven incidents, presenting them in one place, helps to expose the nature of the subject and the extent of the mis/disinformation and gaslighting that the public has been subjected to. Mr Bower admits that he was not able to include a lot more - simply because he only wanted to include things that could be proven and would 'stand-up' if challenged in court. There now appears to be some backtracking from contributors, but given Mr Bowers experience, his knowledge of the 'dirty tricks' that can be perpetrated by subjects and their obsessed followers, potential vexatious litigants and his experience in the legal profession, I am sure that he has his files of evidence, has recorded all interviews and has only included robust information. Hopefully other 'truths' will start to emerge now.
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In a book such as this, especially on my side of the pond, it is difficult to ascertain the veracity of what is written. I know little about Meghan, did not watch Suits, nor since I'm not an Oprah fan,watch the much talked about interview. This was, however, an titillating listening experience, sort of like being the proverbial fly on the wall. Was there bias? Quite possibly. Is there truths revealed? Also possible. So, all I can say I conclusion is that even if half of this is truth, Harry may have bitten off more than he can chew. At the very least, he has his hand full.
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This book is meticulously researched. This author has written other books about royals and celebs, and he has (so far) never lost a libel lawsuit. The book did change my opinion on the Duchess, particularly in reading about her relationship with her father. I had initially given her the benefit of the doubt with regard to her family, but as they say, it takes two to tango.
It’s clear that Bower is no Meghan fan. When you read the sometimes mind-numbing descriptive evidence of her character, it’s no wonder. The end notes and citations are extensive. If you are not a Meghan fan, this book will confirm all your suspicions. If you are a Meghan fan, this may outrage you or you’ll just dismiss this book as another character assassination of the Duchess.
And yet for all the scoop, I was kind of bored – or maybe just exhausted – by the time I got to the end of the book. Plus, I’m not sure what the title refers to … whose revenge are we talking about?
I got the impression from this book that the machinations of the Duchess are lodged against anyone who gets in the way of her ambitions. So is she really bent on an unprecedented level of revenge against the royal family? Or, is this simply another offensive against an opponent who themselves has more than a few centuries of experience with taking and staying in power???
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For context: I’m writing this after Harry’s ghost-written biography came out (on top of all the rest of it). I don’t want to read it but since it was leaked I already know what it says anyway. It seemed like people couldn’t stop talking about it. And worse taking his word for it (that is a privilege that would not be given to ordinary people for good reason). I will never stop being surprised that with a war on, inflation, people who cannot afford to pay their bills, climate change, people suffering from life long effects of illness, etc this is the situation that is supposed to deserve all our compassion. Really, this is supposed to top all of that?
So I read this to see how we got here. Everyone wanted them to succeed (their family because it would be good for the monarchy and the public because they loved Harry). It should have been a great success and yet, here we are. A biography, docuseries, interviews and even guest appearances on comedy shows later and the story keeps changing and the truths keep contradicting themselves.
I for one will be thrilled when he stops invading his own privacy.
And while he is at it stop invading the privacy of others by sharing private conversations. They did not chose his path of a "private" life in Hollywood and so their lives are not fair game to talk about.
That being said I am not looking at this from a conservative or progressive standpoint, just common sense. Not politics of any kind.
Now on to the review.
When I saw this book I was like let me read this instead Tom Bower is a practiced biographer and as I saw here he doesn’t just sum up rumours for sales. He talked to over 80 people to make sure he got his facts straight and it reflects on the quality of this book.
He gives us an overview of Meghan’s life before Harry, the family she grew up in and the hopes and dreams she had. Which reveals an unwavering single-minded determination. I have the impression that this is a defining characteristic for how this is going to go in future.
He also addresses Harry and his life (though being a son of Diana we already know far more about it) and partly how he and William dealt with the loss of their mother as teenagers. He is not romantizing that and mistakes were clearly made. Nor do I get the impression that royal life is always easy (the fact that it is so public and everyone has sky high expectations either good or bad has something to do with that).
So fast forward until Harry and Meghan meet since that is when things kick off properly. They have some key similarities. They both want to have a happy marriage, which is good. They have hopes of making their mark on the world (which could have been good, especially considering the resources they had), but then came their obsession with what the gossip rags said about them. True or not. And Diana. The fact that he keeps saying she is so much like his mother, telling everyone while few people agree with him, is not good. Which of course leads to the fact that he does not prepare her for what is to come ahead. She was underprepared, there was never going to be any hitting the ground running. In my country we have a constitution monarchy as well. It is an institution that goes slow since they exist by the publics consent. Meghan (due to her job) is used to being her own brand. If you are a working royal your brand is your country, the love for your country, the work you do for the charities in your country and lifting your country up. That is the goal of a constitutional monarchy. It has to be there for everyone which means you cannot put your own personal stamp on it. Harry should have told her that, but no. He was, as he is now, so in awe of her that he did not tell her when her assumptions on their future life were wrong. Which is why I do not understand when she said she was struggling during her pregnancy that he did not get her the same psychological help that he got himself. There are several other members of the royal family who have attended therapy for one reason or another, so there is no shame in it.
The rest of the family and the country of course cannot blindly share his devotion or show her the way he does and that is where it went wrong. If he, like her parents, wants to live by the motto what Meghan wants Meghan gets then he can do that in a private life, but it was never going to work for the rest of the family. They had to respect the system even when they did not like it and so of course they expected them to do the same. In ordinary families it would be very different of course, but that could not be here.
So when they said no more we will go and get ourselves some privacy in Vancouver, Canada (it is later on that they moved to the film stars neighbourhood of California) and step down that could have worked. If they stopped worrying about the press, but that is not meant to be as history has shown. This is one of the great could have been's of the century and that is not all on the outside world. Looking at ones own actions would be useful here as well.
And in this quest for privacy they did the Oprah interview. Having to share their story. This in itself is again not a problem, but his grandfather was dying and Meghan was pregnant, so I have serious questions about the wisdom of that timing. As it turned out there were a lot of questions about other things as well. Especially with regards to race and who said what in the family. Later in an interview Harry would say that this whole thing was not about race. Let everyone get upset and now it is all for nothing. Same with the titles and how their kids would not get them because of their looks. They have since gotten their titles because they are now the grandkids of the monarch. That is how it works. Like I said supposed facts are always changing.
Also I have the impression that they are fonder and more talkative with press who does agree with them (after all some people are just here for the tea, not looking at it as a family tragedy or consider the serious consequences of taking someones word for it without fact checking). So what is that about just wanting a private life out of the limelight?
It seems like such a waste of what could have been a wonderful change and lifelong opportunities for good. No instead this is a story of people obsessing over gossip rags, pretty much from day one as this book shows and trying to shape whole nations in accordance to their views and that just can't happen. All it does is cause a fuss until the fact checkers arrive and then it is headlines about things that could not have happened or did not happen or were walked back. There are better ways to earn a living and having an ordinary life. Not to mention do all that and still have a good relationship with your family and friends.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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Up until Thursday (May 16), the least popular celebrity of all was Meghan Markle, preceded by Amber Heard. Growing backlash on social media has since influenced new results. As per The Mirror, which tracked the Ranker website that features crowdsourced rankings, yesterday, users voted the Duchess of Sussex as the most disliked celebrity of 2024. Not at all surprised at this revelation, we can only go by the astronomical number of votes..,,,,
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./////
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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Tired of Trevor's mindless devotion
Ms. Meghan decided to seek a promotion
Contact FedEx and off with the rings
With one little package, “a New Life,” she sings.
Where shall I go, she said with a sigh.
I'm tethered to no one, I have no real ties.
“An Englishman” she quickly thought.
“Anyone Famous.” I can be bought.
And so she jumped across the pond.
Good Bye, USA, I haven't a bond.
Time's a wasting. I'm getting old.
Gotta be fast. Gotta be Bold.
Harry Windsor was still on the shelf.
She'd next turn him into her personal elf.
He twice denied; no college degree.
The plan was soon hatched. They'd soon become WE.
Off to Botswana and off with the dress.
Less would be more, she had to confess.
Harry was smitten. He'd had quite a ride.
Meghan called Mama. Her voice filled with pride.
I've closed the deal, Mama. I have special skills.
The Palace, the money, oh so many thrills!
The Queen I can handle. She's no match for me.
I am an Actor, and that's all that she'll see.
I've managed to work for a very short time.
Now I can live on the taxpayers' dime.
I'll get rid of Dad. Put Kate in her place.
If people talk smack, it's because of my race.
The Baby is key. It must be born fast.
The kid guarantees that the party will last.
Harry is mine; I'll tighten my grip.
I deserve this and more. Oh, what a trip!!!!
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.////////
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Two titans of Nasty collide in this regurge of old stories, inaccurately recounted, on many fronts. Meghan Markle is excoriated by TB for failing to appreciate her role in marrying into the royal family. However Her blood lust bleeds through every chapter. Bower's book is the definition of revenge. However, he is just another one of the gang who are, rightfully, angry and disappointed that their prince hasn't had nearly enough therapy that would have prevented him from looking for a "mommy'. Bower is ridiculously coy with his pronouncements (likely to dodge litigation) which makes this a stupifiyingly mean spirited read. His research is flawed. His quotations inaccurate. TB has had all the available media quotes to get this right and yet he, remarkably, misses a lot of targets. The Markle Squad will be apoplectic. These two deserve each other. BTW I was in London for the Jubilee Outside of St. Pauls. THEY WERE BOOED. The Harkles. Once this all settles down, the tragic unfolding of this match made in hell, will ripple through the Royal Family. It is a nasty, uncomfortable, dodgy read. Markle and Tom Bower consort in the same evil circles. It is completely understandable when America "loves" this woman. Their ignorance of Royalty enables them to cheer her on. Shame on all of them.
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I have always been intrigued by the British monarchy. I remember watching Charles and Dianna’s wedding and following their children as they grew up. I too was devastated when Dianna died. I did believe in the hope that Meghan Markle would bring more to the monarchy and happiness for Harry. Unfortunately after watching the Oprah interview, I knew something was not right. The more I read and watched, the more I felt that this couple were self centered hypocrites. They are the epitome of everything that is wrong in the US and especially California my own home state. I am sick and tired is elitists telling the rest of us how to live our lives. I’m really tired of everything being related to racism and white privileged. My family were very poor Irish settlers who came to America to make a better life for themselves through hard work. Not unlike many other minorities. And yes, the Irish were minorities at one time and treated just as poorly as any immigrant group. For people who have been given everything in life, fed with silver spoons, standing on their soap boxes telling me I have what I do in life because of white privileged is just BS! It’s no wonder everyday Americans have turned their backs on these celebrities, politicians, etc and have embraced pro American movies, shows and politicians. One day the Harkles will answer for their “crimes” to the monarchy, the UK and The US. Until then, I hope more people will come out with the truth.
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I ordered mine as soon as I found it was available in America, but by then I'd already read it, thanks to a friend in the U.K. Bower did a decent job, given that so many of Meghan's friends would not talk to him. That was a perverse decision on the part of the Markle p.r. people, because the book would have been better balanced had the author been able to talk to friends who might have had good things to say about her or been able to offer different takes on some of the same events. Readers must be aware of those limitations, which Bower himself acknowledges, and also understand that not everyone is quoted by name, so we are left to wonder who some of the "sources" are.
The above are the caveats. Given those, the book is a good read by an established biographer, and Bower has clearly worked hard to track down people who have a story to tell. He paints the portrait that he has to paint, given that his "palette" of sources and information apparently was limited because Markle & her p.r. team did not allow friends to talk.
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I loved parts 1-3 of Harry and Meghan's documentary. I've read some of the reviews both here and through the British media and wonder what, people who make comments about the price Netflix paid for the story, expected them to do to make money. Certainly Harry could have stayed in the UK and became another Andrew-selling access to the Royal family/King Charles to human rights offending countries and or dignitaries, or he could have stayed and been dependent on the public list salary, or his Dad's largesse, in exchange for doing walk abouts or foreign tours-in my mind, at least, it seems he chose to be a man and take care of his family, protect his wife and children from the bigotry and back biting of the UK press and royal courtiers.
I'm of the opinion that the Palace stirred up the whole Kate v. Meghan campaign, because Kate's image was suffering after Meghan came along, so she/Kate needed to be painted the victim. I've been, like a lot of Americans, a huge fan of the Royal family. Loved watching the pageantry, the pomp, the weddings, every girls fantasy of the prince sweeping in and carrying away his chosen princess. The apparent reality pales upon close inspection.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.///
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//////////////////////
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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@sallyire1 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.///
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.///////////////
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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"If they're stripped of their Royal titles they'll need to work quickly to tie in brand collaborations, otherwise their celebrity appeal will diminish and offers for work will disappear," Laura said. "The fact that Meghan is appearing in an advert for a brand that she's invested in feels a little self-indulgent."
"However, it does show that she's invested in the success of the brand and the brand will know that being aligned with the ex-Princess will create the kind of hype that start-up businesses simply cannot create on their own, without spending hundreds of thousands on a celebrity ambassador," she added.
"Despite the fact that Meghan courts a lot of negative publicity, it keeps her relevant, it keeps people talking about them and does still give her power when it comes to arranging brand deals," Laura finished. "It's a smart move to make and will turn the tides on their run of negative press, showing that she's moving on and focussing on a positive future, away from the bombshells that have been dropped in recent months."
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I said it here, and I will repeat it one last time, for the most part I avoid reading gossip books or royal biographies, unless the subject's been dead for a mininum amount of time....Hello Queen Victoria!
That being said, I more or less knew that, sooner or later, I would likely end up reading something on these two.
Why Bower's book? He's the only one of whom I can say, never heard the name, don't think I've ever read anything by him.....and I do so very much love a rebel spirit :)
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, it allows you to pass judgement on events from 100 or even 300 years ago from the confort of the 21rst century, even if on ocasion you are aware you end up sounding like a stuck up know it all....lol.
I grew up on the shadow on Princess Diana, her marriage, her husband, her children, they were so much a part of my life that I do remember where I was when I learned she had died, and my shock at what followed.
Now, about the subjects of this book, there's a very tiny age difference between me and her so, to hear her say in the "engagement interview", she had never heard of Harry or Diana or the RF...say what?
You can't be an American, with her background in Hollywood and her years in Canada and not know them....ridiculous thing to say.
Give her the benefit of the doubt Ghostie, probably nerves....ok ok....and I could go on and on, but it all kind of pilled up for me from there and well the rest is history...still in the making, but history for sure.
Do they deserve each other? Oh yes for sure, its actually scary how identical they are....I keep getting stronger and stronger Wallis and Edward vibes the more this soap opera advances.
This will end one of two ways I believe - eternal happiness because he's why she's famous, and she will never let go of that fame, or a spectacular divorce followed by a 50/50 asset split...Bless those California divorce laws....and a very bitter custody battle with few chances of him succeeding, I think.
Why is this book different? For starters it is, blessedly in my opinion, devoid of any sensational language and "histerical tone", it simply picks up the thread of how it all began and brings it almost to present day. I for one being ignorant of several details have to say thanks for such a detailed timeline, since it puts the pieces together from all those lurid headlines we've been bombarded with and, with a lot (seriously A LOT) left unsaid, it confirms pretty much my own personal (and interely irrelevant) opinion.
Bower is extremely careful in his language, in how he describes both of them, and even on ocasion makes a point of showing positives actions that they took, to then surgically pinpoint all the flaws and inconsistencies, not through insults but through facts with dates, names, places and testimonies.
The author never says it out loud, nor does it write it down, but I believe he sees the pararells with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and how that story ended....talk about another cluster&^%*! Edward's hatred of his position, his family, his life but his love of luxury, beautiful things (and women) and his ability to relate to the middle classes - ring any bells? Wallis, her past life, her lovers, her travels and the smoke screens and mirrors used around her - the awful twice divorced American who is taking our Prince, as someone no doubt said.
The difference? Wallis I believe never wanted to marry Edward, was fully aware of his shortcomings and only married him due to society conventions at the time - my own personal belief.
Here, its a whole other story.
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The classic, bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Charles A. Lindbergh's historic transatlantic flight
Along with most of my fellow fliers, I believed that aviation had a brilliant future. Now we live, today, in our dreams of yesterday; and, living in those dreams, we dream again…
Charles A. Lindbergh captured the world's attention—and changed the course of history—when he completed his famous nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. In The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, bringing to life the thrill and peril of trans-Atlantic travel in a single-engine plane. Eloquently told and sweeping in its scope, Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning account is an epic adventure tale for all time.
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Charles A. Lindbergh was the first American aviator to make the first non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York City to Paris, in 1927.
Lindbergh’s college education ended during his second year in the University of Wisconsin when his growing interest in aviation led to enrollment in a flying school in Nebraska and the purchase of the WWI-era Curtiss “Jenny”, with which he made stunt-flying tours through Southern and Midwestern states. After a year at the army flying schools in Texas, he became an airmail pilot flying the route from St. Louis to Chicago. During that period he obtained financial backing from a group of St. Louis businessmen to compete for the Orteig Prize, which had been offered for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris.
In early 1927, Lindbergh had a single-engine monoplane built to his in San Diego. It was equipped with extra fuel tanks, including one in front of the cabin, which required him to use a periscope to see forward. On May 10–12 Lindbergh flew what was named the Spirit of St. Louis from San Diego to New York in preparation for the transatlantic attempt.
After, only a few days earlier, WWI French flying ace Charles Nungesser and his navigator François Coli disappeared after beginning their effort to collect the Orteig Prize by flying from Paris to New York, Lindbergh proposed to attempt alone.
Lindbergh was delayed by bad weather for several days, but on the morning of May 20th he took off from Long Island. Shortly before nightfall, he passed over Newfoundland on the way to open sea. After flying circa 6.000 km in 34 hours, he landed near Paris, where he was greeted by a large crowd. Overnight, Charles A. Lindbergh had become a hero on both sides of the ocean and a well-known figure worldwide.
Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of Saint Louis isn’t an autobiography only, but an outstanding, compelling story of an unprecedented feat. I devoured this book like some of the best adventure novels I’ve ever picked up. Although I knew he’d land safely in Paris, I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out what happened next. Charles Lindbergh lacked neither humor nor amazing style. I never thought a story about aviation could intrigue me that much, but Lindbergh’s autobiography did it. Highly recommendable.
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This was my first time reading about Chernobyl, so I didn't know what to expect, and I can't compare it to other books. The author did a terrific job for someone who wrote this mainly out of sheer interest and determination. The photos, though few, show the emptiness of the contamination zone and the scale of the disaster. The reason for the radiation leak wasn't human error, but rather a fatal flaw in the design of the plant. On April 25, 1986, the night of the leak, the force of the explosion blew the roof off, leaving the stunned, terrified employees looking up at the night's sky while radiation scorched their skin black. Fifty tons of deadly steam escaped into the air that night, turning the nearby forest bright red as trees, soil, and water were burned where they stood. The military barricaded the escape routes from the nearby town of Pripyat, (northern Ukraine) leaving desperate mothers to flee with their children through the contaminated forest, pushing their babies in prams through the toxic air. Over the next few weeks, many first-responders, pilots, nurses, ambulance drivers, military personnel, doctors, hospital staff, and their families, neighbors, and children died horribly of radiation exposure. Their skin rotten and their organs failed. The number was placed at 4,000 dead in the immediate aftermath, but authorities were far from honest about these numbers. It may have been much higher.
One aspect that intrigued me was how the ruling Communist Party acted quickly and efficiently to cover up the events at every turn, in order to protect the USSR's nuclear program. I would've liked more information on this, but it could probably be another entire book, so I won't fault the author for not expanding on it.
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Ero più o meno in terza elementare quando due funzionari dell'Enel vennero ad illustrare alla classe – proiettore alla mano – il funzionamento di una centrale elettronucleare. Erano gli anni di Caorso, di quando l'Italia sembrava volesse abbracciare, come buona parte dell'Europa, l'energia atomica.
Io colloco il mio definitivo interesse per la scienza in quel preciso momento. Ricordo con precisione le animazioni, i dettagli di funzionamento, le domande poste. Forse è per questo che, quel 26 aprile 1986, la notizia del disastro di Chernobyl impattò su di me con grande forza.
Con la recente uscita della miniserie tv dedicata al disastro ho sentito la necessità di approfondire l'argomento, ed ho trovato in questo volume un reportage dettagliato, attento e ricco di particolari, in grado di restituire la portata della tragedia in tutti i suoi aspetti.
La narrazione si alterna tra due piani temporali: la cronologia degli eventi del 1986 ed il racconto del viaggio compiuto dall'autore al tempo della stesura del testo, a Chernobyl e dintorni.
La lettura comparata di questi due distinti momenti accentua il senso di straniamento di fronte all'enorme quanto assurda portata del disastro. Il rigore dell'analisi compiuta dall'autore stride con ciò che resta, congelato a quel 1986 ed abbandonato a sé stesso.
La cosa più incredibile, inconcepibile, inumana è la bieca negazione del disastro da parte dell'allora governo sovietico. Se di crimini si parla – perché la catena degli eventi dimostra chiaramente un supponente pressappochismo che non può essere che criminale – questo è in assoluto il più pesante. Senza alcuna possibilità di giustificazione.
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È veramente difficile scrivere questa recensione. All'interno di questo libro ci sono centinaia di informazioni e migliaia di emozioni e rinchiudere tutto in poche righe non è semplice (e infatti non saranno poche righe).
Andrew Leatherbarrow è appassionato alla storia riguardante il disastro avvenuto a Chernobyl, tanto da essersi informato leggendo diversi libri, guardando documentari, parlando con persone informate dei fatti e spulciando documenti. Ha inoltre fatto un viaggio per visitare la zona, vedendo con i propri occhi ciò che resta.
Questo libro racchiude tutto ciò: dettagli tecnici, storie personali, il viaggio e le emozioni dell'autore, risvolti politici ed economici.
Una scelta sbagliata, una frazione di secondo, un tasto premuto, possono cambiare le sorti di una potenza come l' Unione sovietica? Possono segnare la storia del mondo?
26 Aprile 1986
Ore 01:23:40
Nella centrale nucleare di Chernobyl si stanno facendo dei test, ma qualcosa non va per il verso giusto e il disastro nucleare peggiore di sempre ha inizio.
Questa storia è lastricata di SE... se il test fosse stato rimandato, se quel tasto non fosse stato premuto, se si fossero accorti immediatamente dell' entità del problema, se la centrale fosse stata costruita nel modo giusto, rispettando gli standard di sicurezza, se il personale fosse stato adeguatamente formato per intervenire... valanghe di SE.
Ma la realtà è che a Chernobyl tutti quei SE non contano più. L'incidente è avvenuto e, a prescindere dalle colpe che si vogliono dare, e a chi le si vuole dare, la gente è morta. Tanta. In modo eroico, inconsapevole, tremendo, doloroso. Chi non è morto ha perso tutto, ha portato i segni del disastro addosso con malformazioni e malattie.
La storia presenta lacune non indifferenti, dovute al vizio dell'Unione sovietica di insabbiare ciò che è scomodo. Le colpe sono ricadute su poche persone e sui loro errori (che sicuramente sono stati fondamentali per dar via al disastro ma non ne sono la sola causa), ma la questione è davvero più ampia di così. Perché le colpe affondano le radici in un modo di fare davvero lavativo ed incosciente, nel sottovalutare la sicurezza a favore del risparmo, delle tempistiche, degli interessi politici. Un modo di fare che purtroppo ancora oggi causa disastri, incidenti sul lavoro e fa crollare ponti, strade e palazzi in tutto il mondo.
Io credo che in questa storia il male assoluto non sia il nucleare, ma l'uomo. L'uomo arrogante, che si crede invincibile, che sottovaluta il pericolo, che mette al primo posto i soldi e non le norme di sicurezza, che nasconde la verità mettendo a rischio la vita di centinaia di persone per "salvare la faccia" del paese, che manda la gente a morire tra le radiazioni per cercare di sistemare la situazione, peggiorandola.
Ma in questo caso non vi è perdono. Perché il nucleare non perdona. La natura delicata dell'essere umano si scontra con una potenza nucleare ingestibile e non vi è scampo né possibilità di redenzione.
È evidente, gli incidenti capitano, ma quello che è successo a Chernobyl è molto più di un incidente: è il vero volto dell'uomo che si manifesta.
Il libro comunque è molto bello. Da vita a tante riflessioni, smuove le coscienze, mostra la polvere nascosta sotto i tappeti. È tecnico, com'è giusto che sia, ma è anche narrazione. La parte relativa al viaggio dell'autore nella zona di esclusione è interessante. È pazzesco "vedere" con lui la città deserta, la natura che riprende il proprio posto, la vita interrotta di centinaia di persone. Perché il tempo si è fermato a Chernobyl. Devo dire che apprezzo che la zona non sia stata trasformata in un "luna park" commerciale di musei, negozi e monumenti. Certo, ovviamente le radiazioni residue non lo avrebbero permesso, ma anche la mentalità della gente che è in qualche modo ostile a questo tipo di turismo fa riflettere.
E poi c'è il nucleare. Fonte di energia pulita quasi inesauribile, la scoperta del secolo che avrebbe potuto salvare il mondo e invece probabilmente lo distruggerà. Bombe nucleari, armi nucleari, centrali nucleari piene di falle da far spavento, gestite con totale inadeguatezza. Ribadisco, il problema non è il nucleare di per sé (che certo è mortalmente pericoloso se mal gestito), ma l'uomo.
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@mommapanda5736 In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
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@mommapanda5736 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@malindaheadlee2470 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@kansasrose2909 In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
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This is a fascinating book. Reading this book means not having to read so many others. For example, you could avoid having to read, Sway, Blink, Nudge and probably a dozen or so other books on Behavioural Economics. And the best part of it is that this is the guy (or, at least one half of the two guys) who came up with these ideas in the first place.
I was thinking that perhaps the best way to explain those other books would be to compare them to Monty Python. I want you to imagine something - say you had spent your entire life and never actually seen an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. That wouldn't mean you wouldn't know anything about Monty Python. It is impossible to have lived at any time since the late 60s and not have had some socially dysfunctional male reprise the entire Parrot sketch or Spanish Inquisition sketch at you at some stage in your life. I suspect, although there is no way to prove this now, obviously, that Osama bin Laden could do the Silly Walk like a natural. Well, if you had never seen an episode of Monty Python and your entire experience of their work was via the interpretation of men of a certain age down the pub - then finally getting to see an episode of the original would be much the same effect as reading this book. Hundreds of people have already told all this guy's best stories in their own books - but all the same it is a pleasure to hear them again by the guy that first said, 'this parrot is dead' or rather, 'framing effects make fools of us all'.
You need to read this book - but what is particularly good about it is that you come away from it knowing we really are remarkably easy to fool. It's because we think we know stuff that this comes as a constant surprise to us. Years ago I was talking to a guy who liked to bet. Everyone needs a hobby and that was his. Anyway, he told me he was playing two-up - an Australian betting game - and he realised something like tails hadn't come up frequently enough and so he started betting on tails and sure enough he made money. I told him that coins don't remember the last throw and so the odds of getting a tail was still 50%, as it had previously been. But I had no credibility - I'd already told him I never bet - so, how would I possibly know anything if I wasn't even brave enough to put my own money on the outcome? And didn't I understand the point of this story was he had already WON?
Still, when faced with a series of coin flips that run - H, H, H, H, H, T, H, H, H - it does feel like tails are 'due'. This is the sort of mistake we are all too prone to make. The thing to remember is that while there is a law of large numbers - toss a coin often enough and in the very long run there will be as many heads turn up as tails - that isn't the case in the short run - where just about anything is possible.
We (that is, we humans) are remarkably bad at mental statistics. And what makes it worse is that we are predictably bad at statistics. And this brings me to Bourdieu and him saying that Sociology is kind of martial art. He means that Sociology allows you to defend yourself from those who would manipulate you. Well, this book is the Bruce Lee book of advanced self-defence. Learning just how we fool ourselves might not make you feel terribly great about what it means to be human - but at least you will know why you hav stuffed up next time you do stuff up. I'm not sure it will stop you stuffing up - but that would be asking for an awful lot from one book.
If you want the short version of this book, he has provided the two papers that probably got him the Nobel Prize - and they are remarkably clear, easy to understand and comprehensive. But look, read this book - it will do you good.
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In the last few years two books took me FOREVER to get through. The first was Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and the second is Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." What caused this? What do they have in common? Both books explain, in minute detail, simple concepts with immensely far-reaching implications, and both have been... after the slog... the most intellectually rewarding reading of my adult life.
Where to begin... I have a number of theories running around in my head, and occasionally I try to corral them on paper. I organize, sequence and interconnect them in a way that will prevent my reader from meaningfully widening their eyes, in an aside, while winding their finger around one ear... ("Cuckoo!") Good writing about complex topics is very, very difficult, and Kahneman has corraled 30+ years of science, his career and all he has learned into a perfectly arranged sequence that leads the reader into a wilderness... provisioning you in each chapter with the tools you'll need for the next part of the journey.
The second most striking effect on me is the number of times I said, "Yes... YES!!! this is what I've been saying!" In my case it has usually been some sort of "intuitive"(excuse me, Mr. Kahneman... I mean "System 1") recognition of a pattern in my observations about the way we think. In Kahneman's case those intuitions have been converted into theoretical propositions, each meticulously researched in well designed experiments. Clearly, this is at least one difference between me and a Nobel Prize winning researcher.
So why does this stuff matter? In the context of broader discussions of free will, intention, choice and control over the directions our lives take, this book can provide powerful insights that might currently be obscured by these "cognitive illusions" and the inherent limitations of "System 1/System 2" thinking.
Perhaps we're not as "free" in our decisions as we might like to think, if "priming" has such a stunningly reproducible effect. Perhaps we're not so determined, if activities that initially require "System 2" attention, can be turned into second-nature, "technical-expertise intuitions." I.e. learning and training MATTERS in our ability to detect and respond to events that... if untrained... might take advantage of our brain's inherent "blind spots" or weaknesses.
Perhaps childhood religious indoctrination is a very adept recognition of these mental tendencies/flaws, so profoundly (if intuitively/naively) expressed by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, "Give me the boy until 7, I will give you the man." (paraphrased; forgive me)
Kahneman's discoveries and documentation of mental capacity and biases could form the basis of a "Mental Martial Arts" program: an alternative form of indoctrination, in which students are trained to understand their brains' weaknesses, and learn to take stances or engage in practices that eliminate or reduce the errors to which these weaknesses can lead.
This book will rearrange the way you think... about how you think.
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@kansasrose2909 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.////
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@mommapanda5736 This book was a fabulous, guilty pleasure. There was a ton of research done, and it revealed everything one needs to know about Meghan Markle's manipulative attempts to find fame and fortune through the British Royal Family. Unfortunately for her, she found that you don't change the Royal Family; the Royal Family changes you. Of course, that was untenable to her, and so began her cries of racism, etc. I never knew anything about her pre-Suits life, so this book filled in many gaps. As for Harry, I learned a lot too. He's not very impressive, to say the least. I was never a fan of the twosome, but after reading this book, I'm even more astounded at the number of lies and the amount of deception for which the two of them are responsible. The writing style is easy to read, and I've already ordered another book for my sister-in-law. Well done.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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@Snowflake1374 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.////
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“I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Twopence a week, and jam every other day."
Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire me - and I don't care for jam."
"It's very good jam," said the Queen.
"Well, I don't want any today, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said.
"The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never today."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam today'," Alice objected.
"No it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: today isn't any other day, you know.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
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Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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Use bread crumbs
A few months ago, I was lifting more weight in my workouts and trying to eat more protein so I could build. In an effort to pack in as much lean protein as possible, I started to leave out the bread crumbs in my meatball mixture and go full-meat. These were the most dense and rubbery meatballs the world has ever known. Bread crumbs in your mix aren’t just nonsense, they serve a greater purpose for keeping the texture tender.
All animal proteins, whether it be egg proteins or muscle tissue, go through the same denaturing process when cooking. The protein strands tighten up, expel water, and become firmer. This is part of what you see when meat cooking in a pan shrinks. A meatball does all this too, and if there’s nothing breaking up those protein strands, you get a tight, rubbery meatball.
You don’t need much—a quarter cup of breadcrumbs (or even graham crackers), with a bit of liquid for moisture is just the thing to break up these tight protein connections. When you bite into the meatball, the starchy pockets provide easy breaking points, which reads as tenderness to your palate.
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The best stuffed mushrooms I’d ever eaten were packed with so much filling, they could have just as easily been called meatballs with mushroom bottoms. They were so savory, juicy, and delectable that I probably had half the platter; I was at a party, and this appetizer made me completely antisocial. But the good news is they inspired this simple recipe for air-fried stuffed mushrooms.
Every time my boyfriend or I suggest stuffed mushrooms for a meal, it’s like announcing “Pizza Party!” to a group of 10-year-olds. There’s an excited gasp, eyes light up, maybe a fist pump happens—that’s how good this recipe is. We used to make them in the conventional oven, which is fine for large batches if you’re feeding a crowd, but for small to medium batches, the air fryer knocks off about 30 minutes of cooking time. And that, my friends, is great news.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans..................
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@kansasrose2909 Up until Thursday (May 16), the least popular celebrity of all was Meghan Markle, preceded by Amber Heard. Growing backlash on social media has since influenced new results. As per The Mirror, which tracked the Ranker website that features crowdsourced rankings, yesterday, users voted the Duchess of Sussex as the most disliked celebrity of 2024. Not at all surprised at this revelation, we can only go by the astronomical number of votes..,,,,
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@mommapanda5736 1. the royal family is dysfunctional and emotionally challenged:
this is not a family so much as a business and whatever affection the members of the family may have
for each other the institution of the monarchy is more important The members of this family seem to
suffer from repressed emotions or emotions run wild [see Harry].
2. Just as there is a deep state in this country made up of bureaucrats, there is a deep state in Britain --
the so called "men in gray" who actually run the monarchy. Their influence seems pernicious and
pervasive.
3. The author seems contemptuous of the Middleton family. If Meghan Markle faced a racist press, the
Middleton family were and are mocked for their class -- heaven forbid, they weren't born into the
nobility, they actually work for a living.
4. The author swallowed Harry and Meghan's narrative whole. I don't doubt that Harry had a difficult
childhood. I don't doubt that he found a woman who affirmed his neediness and gave him a purpose. I
don't doubt that he and Meghan love each other, but I am sick to death of hearing constantly
regurgitated lies and excuses for the couple's self-serving behavior from the time they left the royal family until now. Take for example the lie that Prince Charles cut H&M off financially and without warning. That has been disproved by the official records of Clarence House. Do I need to say how inappropriate the Oprah interview was while his grandfather was dying? Or the fact that 17 of the statements in that interview have been proven false or less than accurate. Or the fact that Harry returned for Philip's funeral but didn't bother to stay one day to visit his grandmother. Nobody made him do these things -- he chose to do them. I'm also tired of the subtext in books of this ilk that Harry's treatment as "the Spare" is somehow William's fault. He didn't choose his birth order, and in a family that is also an institution this favoritism should surprise no one.
5. The Paparazzi can be parasites on the planet, but they did not kill Princess Diana and the continuance
of this myth is false history. Harry goes on about this all the time. He is constantly being triggered by
it. It's his truth, but it's not true. Diana chose of her own will to give up her protection officers. She
did this over the objections of those same officers. This exposed her to the paparazzi. She damaged
her own dignity with the Panorama interview and in a sense opened a door to her personal life that no
royal had ever done before. She wanted to be photographed when it suited her, but only when it suited
her. She played a very dangerous and foolish game. The paparazzi harassed her and that was
despicable. They chased her that last night in Paris, but they didn't kill her. A drunk driver and the
personal decision not to wear a seat belt killed her. One of Harry's repeated complaints is that the
paparazzi took pictures of her dying in the car and didn't help her. They did indeed take pictures of her
dying in the car and they sold them. This is truly horrible and ghoulish, but the first doctor on the scene
confirmed the paparazzi did not get in his way nor did they hinder other emergency workers. It's hard to
know what they could have done in a positive way to help. Harry has clearly never confronted Diana's
part in the paparazzi frenzy around her and her failure to put on the seat belt that probably would have
saved her life. It's impossible not to feel compassion for the child that Harry was, but it is time for him
to deal with his past and move on
6. This brings me to my final comment. The book tells the story of Meghan's difficulty with the royal family. It accepts that this is a love match. The book also gives examples of some of the racist comments made about Meghan in the press. It describes the rivalry between various royal households that made constructive work between the families difficult. I accept this as probably realistic, but I don't accept as reasonable the charge made by Harry and Meghan and regurgitated in this book, that when Meghan experienced mental distress and had thoughts of suicide that she was denied help by the palace. I've always been puzzled why nobody asked the couple why they needed to ask anyone on the palace staff for help. Harry had had counseling before, he was active in mental health work with his brother. Why didn't Meghan ask him for help and if she did, why did he have no answer? This has never made sense to me and isn't addressed here.
This book has nothing particularly new and it answers no open questions. It is a well written waste of time and money.
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SEAL History: Origins of Naval Special Warfare-WWII
The origins of Navy SEALs actually began with specially organized maritime commando units during World War II, where legacy capabilities were adopted and remain embodied in today’s SEAL Teams.
Amphibious Training Base, Little Creek, VA
During preparation for amphibious warfare operations in the Chesapeake Bay, two special-mission units were formed almost simultaneously at the Amphibious Training Base (ATB), Little Creek, Norfolk, VA in late August 1942. Each was to perform specific missions in Operation TORCH – the allied invasion of North Africa the following November; however, there is no evidence that either knew about the other or their assigned tasks during this period.
Amphibious Scouts and Raiders (S&R)
Amphibious Scouts and Raiders (Joint) were created specifically to reconnoiter prospective landing beaches and to lead assault forces to the correct beaches under cover of darkness. The unit was led by U.S. Army 1st Lieutenant Lloyd Peddicord as commanding officer, and Navy Ensign John Bell as executive officer. Navy chief petty officers and sailors came from the boat pool at ATB, Solomons, Maryland and Army Raider personnel came from the 3rd and 9th Infantry Divisions. They trained at Little Creek until embarking for the North Africa campaign the following November. Operation TORCH was launched in November 1942 off the Atlantic coast of French Morocco in North Africa. One mission, under Army 1st Lieutenant Willard G. Duckworth, involved the launching of kayaks from the submarine USS Barb (SS-220). This was the first U.S. submarine hosted operation of World War II involving specially trained reconnaissance personnel. Their mission was to infiltrate to a location off the Jette Principal at Safi, Morocco under cover of darkness to safely guide the destroyers USS Cole (DD-155) and USS Bernadou (DD-153) to near-shore gunnery positions.
S&R men also conducted pre-assault operations at Normandy several weeks before D-Day, 6 June 1944, and at the invasion of Southern France later that August. After that the need for Scout and Raider capabilities in Europe ended; no other amphibious operations were envisioned in that theater. Many of the men returned to Fort Pierce to serve as instructors at the Scouts and Raiders School. Army personnel were returned to their parent units, and many navy men were reassigned to sea duty or given the opportunity to join the Pacific units.
S&R teams performed a variety of actions and activities to guide ships and small craft throughout Operation TORCH, often under withering fire. They performed so admirably that all Scout boat officers were awarded the Navy Cross Medal. The Scout and Raider school was relocated to ATB, Fort Pierce, FL in February 1943, where, in the following July, it became an all Navy school.
S&R operations in the Mediterranean and Pacific Theaters also provided the framework for legacy capabilities now accomplished by today’s NSW Special Warfare Combat-Craft Crewmen (SWCC) operators.
Special Mission Naval Demolition Unit
Also in August 1942 at ATB, Little Creek, a specialized naval demolition team was formed with two officers and 17 enlisted men. They were led by Lieutenant Mark Starkweather (senior in command) and Lieutenant James Darroch. All were trained Navy salvage divers brought in from Hawaii. Their crash course included: demolitions, commando tactics, cable cutting, and rubber boat training. Their singular mission during Operation TORCH was to remove the cabled boom blocking the Wadi Sebou River, which spilled into the Atlantic Ocean along the west coast of French Morocco. Removal of this boom would allow USS Dallas (DD-199) to proceed up the river and train her guns on the Port Lyautey airdrome in preparation for attack by Army Rangers that were previously embarked aboard Dallas.
The operation was launched just before H-Hour on 8 November 1942. The men operated at night from an open Higgins boat in very heavy seas and under direct enemy machine-gun fire. Several of the men were badly injured in the rough seas, and the first attempt was aborted. During a second attempt on the night of 9 November, they accomplished their task. Their mission was so demanding and critical to the success of the invasion that every demolition man in the operation was awarded the Navy Cross Medal. This special-mission naval demolition unit was disbanded once the men returned from Africa.
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The Naval Demolition Project
On 6 May 1943, the “Naval Demolition Project” was directed by the Chief of Naval Operations to “to meet a present and urgent requirement.” The CNO’s directive outlined a two-phase project.
The first phase began with a letter to the Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks directing dispatch of eight officers and 30 enlisted men for duty with the Operational Naval Demolition Unit and Naval Demolition Unit Number No. 1, which was to be established at the ATB, Solomons, Maryland. Commander John C. Daniel was selected as Officer in Charge. Six officers and 18 enlisted men reported for training at Solomons on 14 May, and all came from the Seabee training camp at Camp Peary (Williamsburg), Virginia.
Led by Navy Lieutenant Fred Wise, these men were given a four-week course of instruction and sent immediately to participate in Operation HUSKEY, the Allied invasion of Sicily, which occurred during the following July and August.
CDR Daniel submitted a letter report about this new capability on 27 May 1943. His report, which proposed an outline for the second phase, recommended an organization, outlined a detailed core training syllabus, and recommended a list of equipment need to supply an operational combat demolition unit. He further recommended that the training program be detached from Maryland and relocated to ATB, Fort Pierce, Florida to take advantage of good weather for year-round training.
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The Invasion of Southern France
NCDU men were engaged in combat only once more in Europe, and this was during the invasion of Southern France in August 1944. First code-named ANVIL and later DRAGOON, several of the NCDUs from Utah Beach were augmented with new units from Fort Pierce to participate in the last amphibious assault of the war in Europe. Once operations ceased in Europe, all Fort Pierce trained men were sent to the Pacific and assigned to Underwater Demolition Teams.
NCDU men contributed greatly to the war in Europe, and their efforts are often overshadowed by the Pacific UDTs. Indeed, in some historical accountings, it has been written that UDTs performed work at Normandy and Southern France, however, during WWII the UDTs operated only in the Pacific.
Moreover, NCDU men have often been referred to as “frogmen” by some authors and historians; however, in those early days swimming was only a test and a method of physical training. The men wore full combat dress, and were taught to operate stealthily at night and during pre-dawn hours by wading in surf and carrying explosives to obstacles from rubber boats.
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Special Services Unit ONE (SSU-1)
A second and lesser-known group of Scouts and Raiders, code-named Special Services Unit One (SSU-1), was established in the Pacific on July 13, 1943. SSU-1 was a joint and combined international force, with personnel from Australia and the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. They were trained in martial arts, hand to hand combat, map making, rubber-craft operations, jungle survival training, Pidgin English, underwater coral formations, and sea-creatures recognition.
Their operations, actions, and activities began in September 1943 at Finschafen, New Guinea, where they conducted near-shore and in-land reconnaissance operations; often with indigenous personnel. Similar operations were carried out at Gasmata, Arawe, Cape Gloucester, and the eastern and southern coasts of New Britain; all without loss of personnel.
The focus of this organization was much different than their Atlantic counterparts, who conducted pre-assault reconnaissance and guided assault waves ashore. SSU-1 collected intelligence and trained and operated with indigenous personnel in the conduct of guerrilla-warfare missions. They were later designated the 7th Amphibious Scouts and organized under staff intelligence sections; somewhat along the lines of their Atlantic counterparts.
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Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs)
On 22 November 1943, during the Tarawa landing at the Gilbert Islands, a chain of 16 atolls and coral islands in the South Pacific Ocean, a submerged reef caused amphibious landing craft to founder far offshore, resulting in the loss of hundreds of U.S. Marines from enemy fire and drowning. After that experience, Admiral Kelley Turner, Commander of the 5th Amphibious Force, directed that 30 officers and 150 enlisted men be moved to Waimanalo ATB (on the “big island” of Hawaii) to form the nucleus of a reconnaissance and demolition training program. It is here that the UDTs of the Pacific were born.
The first UDT group became UDT-1 and UDT-2, “provisional” UDTs with strengths of about fourteen officers and seventy enlisted men each. They saw their first action on 31 January 1944 in the attacks on Kwajalein and Roy-Namur during Operation FLINTLOCK in the Marshall Islands. Following FLINTLOCK, the UDT men returned to establish a naval combat demolition training and experimental base on a beach near ATB, Kamaol on the island of Maui.
Between December 1944 and August 1945, UDT men saw action across the Pacific in every major amphibious landing, including Eniwetok, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Angaur, Ulithi, Pelilui, Leyte, Lingayen Gulf, Zambales, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Labuan, Brunei Bay, and Borneo. On 4 July 1945 at Balikpapan on Borneo, UDT-11 and UDT-18 spearheaded one of the last and least-recorded offensive actions of the war, where they performed their now classic pre-assault reconnaissance and demolition operations.
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Invasion of Japan
During June 1945, arrangements were being made to send the existing 28 UDTs to ATB Oceanside, California for a month-long period of cold-water training in preparation for the Japan invasion. Training was to begin on 15 August 1945. During this period, a new command organization was authorized, when the collection of teams at Oceanside was designated a UDT Flotilla, with two subordinate UDT Squadrons. Captain (later Admiral) Robert H. Rodgers served in the dual capacity of Commander, Underwater Demolition Flotilla and Commander, Underwater Demolition Teams. Under him were Underwater Demolition Squadrons ONE and TWO, each with a command staff. USS Hollis (APD-66) served as command ship for the Flotilla, and USS Blessman (APD-48) and USS Laning (APD-55) were designated as Squadron flagships. Even today, this remains the largest single Naval Special Warfare task organization gathered under one commander for combat operations.
Training at Oceanside was abruptly curtailed after President Harry S. Truman ordered the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, Japan on 6 August 1945 and at Nagasaki, Japan on 9 August. With a Japanese peace offer on 10 August, 20 of the UDTs in training on the west coast were alerted, and with the Japanese surrender on 14 August, they were ordered to proceed to the forward area for occupation duties.
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Office of Strategic Services Maritime Unit
Undoubtedly the most influential World War II legacy unit that would eventually affect the capabilities of the Underwater Demolition Teams, and subsequently the U.S. Navy SEAL Teams, was a joint-service maritime component of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Many of its capabilities were later adopted by the post-war UDTs, and many of the same capabilities can be found in today’s SEAL Teams.
On January 20, 1943, a Maritime Section was established within the Special Operations Branch of OSS, with responsibility for planning covert infiltration operations from the sea. On June 10, 1943 the Special Operations Branch was reorganized and the Maritime Unit (MU) was established with branch status. Its responsibilities included planning and coordinating the clandestine infiltration of agents, supplying resistance groups, engaging in maritime sabotage, and developing special equipment for operations from the sea.
OSS MU pioneered U.S. capabilities in maritime sabotage through use of special-boat infiltration techniques and tactical combat diving using flexible swim fins and facemasks, closed-circuit diving equipment, submersible vehicles, and limpet mines. These capabilities were adopted by the UDTs in 1947, and became the hallmark of SEALs lasting through the modern day. OSS MU operations in the Mediterranean and China-Burma-India Theaters also provided the framework for legacy capabilities now accomplished by NSW SWCC operators and resident in the NSW Special Boat Teams.
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Global War on Terror
On September 11, 2001, commonly known as 9/11, nineteen terrorists from the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against U.S. targets. Two planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the fourth plane was heroically forced down by its passengers in an open field in Somerset County, PA.
These attacks resulted in 2,996 deaths and triggered the Global War on Terror. Navy SEALs and other Special Operations Forces (SOF) were immediately called upon to play key roles in the War on Terror. Fighting this new kind of enemy required SEALs to both utilize their traditional skills and broaden their operational capabilities for targeted missions.
Today’s SEALs
Today there are 10 active-duty SEAL Teams, each made up of more than 200 men and women (SEALs and support and mission-enabling personnel), and each commanded by an 0-5 commander. Two additional SEAL Teams have been organized within the Naval Reserve Component.
“SEALs have survived from the earliest days because of the hallmarks of success and operating tenets adopted by them through the actions and activities of their legacy brothers in NCDU, Scouts and Raiders, OSS Maritime, and Underwater Demolition Teams. SEALs are and will remain unique among all special operations forces, because it is they who are called upon when tasks need to be carried out clandestinely; where there is a high security risk; or if the task is a particularly difficult or delicate one, where operations involve working in small numbers under isolated, unsupported, and/or hostile conditions, and where the approach to the target is on or under the water.” – CDR SEAL (Ret) Tom Hawkins
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The project went from a Navy project to a Coronado project, with the Mayor assigning his staff to the job, a welcome relief with Barbata based in Hawaii. He brought The Chairman of the Navy SEAL Foundation, Admiral Garry Bonelli, into the picture, and soon the Foundation and the City had agreed to split the cost. With the City managing it, the joint team worked together to pick the site.
The statue is located across the Strand Highway from the home of Basic Underwater/SEAL training, affectionately known as “BUD/S.” In Glorietta Bay Park, he looks out over the Bay toward San Diego, with the Naval Amphibious Base on his right hand. This Base was the location of BUD/S until the 1970s, when it was moved across the Strand to the current location. It still is the home of SWCC, which provides boat support for the SEALs.
The Museum shipped the molds to the Deep In The Heart Foundry in Texas again, which required some repairs. The Foundry also said this would be the last statue that could be cast from the molds, unless another was made before the Coronado statue shipped out. At a cost of about $20,000, this became an issue for the Coronado statue, as once it was in place, making a mold from any of the three would be impossible. Barbata had begun talking to Rick Woolard about a fourth Naked Warrior for Virginia Beach, which would not be possible without a new mold. At his urging, the Museum agreed to fund the mold, just a couple of weeks before the Coronado statue was shipped, making the fourth statue for Virginia Beach possible.
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The Museum shipped the molds to the Deep In The Heart Foundry in Texas again, which required some repairs. The Foundry also said this would be the last statue that could be cast from the molds, unless another was made before the Coronado statue shipped out.
At a cost of about $20,000, this became an issue for the Coronado statue, as once it was in place, making a mold from any of the three would be impossible. Barbata had begun talking to Rick Woolard about a fourth Naked Warrior for Virginia Beach, which would not be possible without a new mold. At his urging, the Museum agreed to fund the mold, just a couple of weeks before the Coronado statue was shipped, making the fourth statue for Virginia Beach possible.
The City of Coronado managed the entire design and construction process, including a renovated walkway, lighting, and landscaping. The City manager went to great lengths to research the origins of the statue and the original model for it, as well as getting official permission for Coronado to use the image. About 300 people attended the dedication, featuring an address by Mayor Tanaka and recognition of his father’s service in the Teams. Admiral Bonelli read the following inscription from the plaque:
THE NAKED WARRIOR
ARTIST: JOHN SEWARD JOHNSON II
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This World War II combat swimmer commemorates the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) and Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) Teams. They have trained and have been in Coronado since 1945.
These “Naked Warriors” swam unarmed onto heavily defended enemy beaches with explosives to clear the way for amphibious landings, hence their motto “First Ashore.” The concrete “Scully” on which this Frogman stands is typical of the underwater obstacles they risked their lives to destroy. Their legacy of “Never Quit,” while executing the most difficult military missions for our country, is still imbued in every Navy SEAL whose uniforms sears the Naval Special Warfare Trident insignia. On the beaches just south of this site, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) Training goes on year-round. The sailors who complete BUD/S go on to advanced training and then are assigned to U.S. Navy SEAL Teams, becoming the elite warriors our country relies upon for complex and no-fail special operations missions worldwide.
DONATED TO THE CITY OF CORONADO BY
THE NATIONAL NAVY UDT-SEAL MUSEUM
THE NAVY SEAL FOUNDATION
DEDICATED NOVEMBER 11, 2016
The foundation under the scully reads, “First Ashore”, the WWII motto of the UDTs in the Pacific Theater. Many a friendly joke has been made over the decades, that the UDTs were always on the beach to welcome the invading Marines.
Submitted by Brian Barbata
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A few years later, as a teenager in the Bronx, he had a parallel experience of encountering a new, almost mystical language and recognizing it as an encoding of elemental truth. Through the gateway of hip hop and its wide-ranging influences spanning Caribbean and Latin music, Alexander discovered the saxophone and became besotted with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman. His parents eventually bought him a vintage alto saxophone at a garage sale, and so began his second great love affair with the universe. At the intersection of these two loves, Alexander found his calling. Within a decade, he was working on some of the most complex problems in modern physics by day, performing with some of the most legendary jazz musicians by night, and cross-pollinating the legacies of his great heroes: Einstein, Pythagoras, John Coltrane. He recounts a defining moment:
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In the last few years two books took me FOREVER to get through. The first was Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and the second is Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." What caused this? What do they have in common? Both books explain, in minute detail, simple concepts with immensely far-reaching implications, and both have been... after the slog... the most intellectually rewarding reading of my adult life.
Where to begin... I have a number of theories running around in my head, and occasionally I try to corral them on paper. I organize, sequence and interconnect them in a way that will prevent my reader from meaningfully widening their eyes, in an aside, while winding their finger around one ear... ("Cuckoo!") Good writing about complex topics is very, very difficult, and Kahneman has corraled 30+ years of science, his career and all he has learned into a perfectly arranged sequence that leads the reader into a wilderness... provisioning you in each chapter with the tools you'll need for the next part of the journey.
The second most striking effect on me is the number of times I said, "Yes... YES!!! this is what I've been saying!" In my case it has usually been some sort of "intuitive"(excuse me, Mr. Kahneman... I mean "System 1") recognition of a pattern in my observations about the way we think. In Kahneman's case those intuitions have been converted into theoretical propositions, each meticulously researched in well designed experiments. Clearly, this is at least one difference between me and a Nobel Prize winning researcher.
So why does this stuff matter? In the context of broader discussions of free will, intention, choice and control over the directions our lives take, this book can provide powerful insights that might currently be obscured by these "cognitive illusions" and the inherent limitations of "System 1/System 2" thinking.
Perhaps we're not as "free" in our decisions as we might like to think, if "priming" has such a stunningly reproducible effect. Perhaps we're not so determined, if activities that initially require "System 2" attention, can be turned into second-nature, "technical-expertise intuitions." I.e. learning and training MATTERS in our ability to detect and respond to events that... if untrained... might take advantage of our brain's inherent "blind spots" or weaknesses.
Perhaps childhood religious indoctrination is a very adept recognition of these mental tendencies/flaws, so profoundly (if intuitively/naively) expressed by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, "Give me the boy until 7, I will give you the man." (paraphrased; forgive me)
Kahneman's discoveries and documentation of mental capacity and biases could form the basis of a "Mental Martial Arts" program: an alternative form of indoctrination, in which students are trained to understand their brains' weaknesses, and learn to take stances or engage in practices that eliminate or reduce the errors to which these weaknesses can lead.
This book will rearrange the way you think... about how you think.
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An unrelentingly tedious book that can be summed up as follows. We are irrationally prone to jump to conclusions based on rule-of-thumb shortcuts to actual reasoning, and in reliance on bad evidence, even though we have the capacity to think our way to better conclusions. But we're lazy, so we don't. We don't understand statistics, and if we did, we'd be more cautious in our judgments, and less prone to think highly of our own skill at judging probabilities and outcomes. Life not only is uncertain, we cannot understand it systemically, and luck has just as much to do with what happens to us -- maybe even more -- than we care to admit. When in doubt, rely on an algorithm, because it's more accurate than your best guess or some expert's opinion. Above all, determine the baseline before you come to any decisions.
If you like endless -- and I mean endless -- algebraic word problems and circuitous anecdotes about everything from the author's dead friend Amos to his stint with the Israeli Air Defense Force, if you like slow-paced, rambling explanations that rarely summarize a conclusion, if your idea of a hot date is to talk Bayesian theory with a clinical psychologist or an economist, then this book is for you, who are likely a highly specialized academically-inclined person. Perhaps you are even a blast at parties, I don't know.
But if you're like me and you prefer authors to cut to the chase, make their point, and then leave you with a whopping big appendix if you're interested in the regression analysis of how many freshmen would watch a guy choke to death because they think someone else will come to the rescue, then this book is not for you.
If you want to take the Reader's Digest pass through the book, then Chapter 1 and Section 3 are probably the most accessible and can be read in less than an hour, and still leave you with a fair understanding of the author's thesis.
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I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans....
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@mommapanda5736 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy....
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy...
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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The British Royal Family believed that the dizzy success of the Sussex wedding, watched and celebrated around the world, was the beginning of a new era for the Windsors. Yet, within one tumultuous year, the dream became a nightmare. In the aftermath of the infamous Megxit split and the Oprah Winfrey interview, the Royal Family's fate seems persistently threatened.
The public remains puzzled. Meghan's success has alternatively won praise, bewildered and outraged. Confused by the Sussexes' slick publicity, few understand the real Meghan Markle. What lies ahead for Meghan? And what has happened to the family she married into? Can the Windsors restore their reputation?
With extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews from insiders who have never spoken before, Tom Bower, Britain's leading investigative biographer, unpicks the tangled web of courtroom drama, courtier politics and thwarted childhood dreams to uncover an astonishing story of love, betrayal, secrets and revenge.
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I knew nothing about Meghan Markle until she showed up on Harry's arm. I thought she was adorable, and was very happy for him.
There was a bit of hesitancy on my part to fully embrace her as I watched her latched onto Harry's arm like Super Glue, and during their engagement interview were she only asked, "Is he nice?" when being setup on a blind date. That was a red flag to me as the entire world knows who Harry is - the world knows about Diana - the world knows about the Monarchy.
Revenge was so well documented with facts and sources it was hard to look away. He took us through Meghan's childhood to today. The outright lies coming from Meghan about her upbringing were despicable, and I feel very sorry for her father who didn't have the resources or influence to really stop her.
Tom Bowers also included some very uncomplimentary facts about Charles, Diana, Camilla, and William. This was not a one-sided book. I appreciated that.
The book told a realistic story that we're all watching unfold today, from the bullying to the PR firms in California that took control from the Palace because Meghan had to come out shining. The RF are all at fault and everyone should know how cruel they really are. This was all a grand plan and anyone who reads Spare should also read this book to compare the two stories.
And just in case anyone should wonder if Revenge was a made-up smear campaign... this couple is litigious, and will sue anyone for any perceived slight...there are no lawsuits from these two. None, because they'd be outed for what they truly are.
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I couldn't help myself! As biographical hitmen go, Tom Bower has a reasonable reputation, and this is well presented and very readable. It's pretty scathing of the Sussexes, but other big players, notably Prince Charles, don't come out well either, and even the Queen seems diminished by this account. Most of the narrative is familiar in outline and the named sources are also the usual suspects. Two things struck me with this rehash of the evidence - firstly, part of the reason for the popularity of the Duke and Duchess in America, as compared to here, isn't really a different attitude to race and racism between the two countries. Nothing will convince me that America is any less racially divided than the UK. But I think that, mostly, the energetic grifting, massaging of facts and ruthless manipulation of useful people, which Mehgan Markle has used to grease her rapid social and financial ascent is secretly and not so secretly admired by most Americans, but repels many on this side of the Atlantic. What Brits class as lying can be seen elsewhere as imaginative recasting of 'alternative' facts. The second striking aspect, is just how un-altruistic most charitable work undertaken by celebrities really is. Bower spells out far more than any other commentator that, having chosen activism and altruism as her 'brand', Markle (and latterly Harry), actively sought out, via paid PR agents, opportunities to publicise herself as much as the cause (particularly before she was well known); that she seldom really donated her time, but parleyed for expenses, such as first class flights for herself and friends in circumstances where charities like World Vision, for eg, are supposedly doing their all for starving Africans. The famous not for profit foundations, we learn, have been incorporated in Delaware - a state with no known connection to either Sussex but conveniently where the accounts don't have to be made public and so noone has the slightest clue what 'expenses' are now lining Sussex pockets from the supposedly charitable foundations. They aren't the only ones doing this.
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I think the book consists of approximately 80 or so sources, some named, some obviously preferring anonymity. That brings me to another reason why I think the claims made against them should be taken seriously – that they’re entitled, narcissistic bullies. How many other celebrities do you hear of having as high of a staff turnover rate as Meghan has? Repeatedly, staffs working for her have handed in their resignation papers after the six months is up – and not just in the U.K., but back in L.A., too. Perhaps if there had only been a few complaints by staffers, I’d believe her. If most remained loyal to her as her assistants, and spoke well of the job, I’d probably dismiss the few in favor of the many.
But it’s the opposite in this case. Very few – if any – staff members have actually spoken out to say how kind and genuine Meghan is, and how working for her was such a pleasurable experience. Yet there’s no shortage of comments of how difficult she is to work for (and these comments originated long before she was ever subjected to Britain’s “racist Royals and press”).
Most of the U.K. has already seen through Harry and Meghan’s constant act of whining and supposed victimization, hence their popularity rates currently hovering at around the 9-10% mark (in contrast to Kate Middleton, who is around 78%). I can’t understand why so many Americans still defend her, or the both of them, for that matter. You don’t have to know someone personally to see what kind of person they are. When certain incidents come to light, certain personality traits, contradictions and hypocrisies, which appear to be irrefutable – I believe it’s safe to say that one can accurately judge that person’s character, and whether or not they’d personally like such a person (providing the majority of the reports being issued on the celebrity were accurate).
I truly wanted Meghan to do well, just like I did with Kate. I found them both to be gorgeous, fashionable, and relatable. Fresh faces for a bit of an outdated institution. It’s actually quite exhausting to dislike people. I had every reason to believe that she and Kate would be some kind of fashion dream team BFFs in an otherwise bland monarchy.
It seems it’s really only Americans left that seem to believe the U.K. public prefers Kate to Meghan because Kate is some “ideal white English princess.’ No, it couldn’t be that Kate is adored by the public unlike Meghan because she doesn’t seek the limelight, carries out her charitable work (part of a working Royal’s duties, by the way!) in obscurity, and rarely complains. Meanwhile, Meghan is merely detested because of her mostly invisible “blackness”, which she has attempted to claim that people write her off because she’s “assertive”, likening it to the sickening stereotype of the “angry black woman.” She actually did a podcast on this a few weeks ago which I literally laughed out loud at when I saw the topic – really? That's been your "experience", your "truth", Meghan?
Can people honestly say they believe Meghan, when she says she’s faced with the same kind of racism as dark-skinned black women are?! Oh, her tantrums over not being able to accept free designer goods from fashion houses such as Chanel, Dior, Celine while serving in her official royal capacity, and having to walk behind Kate instead of BESIDE her – those aren’t merely complaints made by an entitled brat who thought marrying a prince would buy her adoration and everything she ever wanted. Nope. They’re legitimate claims of targeted racism. Never mind that Kate never accepted any gifts, or that the order in which they walk has been a matter of royal protocol for centuries. Meghan is the new face after all, and the British public want to meet the latest member of the royal family (at least, in her mind - and likely hers alone).
Harry complains about being the “spare heir” and even has a book by the name being released in January. Maybe he was a bit unhappy with life before Meghan came along, feeling lost as to his purpose within it, especially when so much attention was being given to his older brother. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until Meghan and he were together that he decided it would be a fantastic idea to slander his entire family in front of the entire world. That’s the kind of stuff any classy family should keep private – so I can only imagine what a horrific nightmare all of this egotistical whining has created for Harry’s family, who have, until now, mastered the art of keeping things private.
What’s so strange about their complaints in regard to succession is the fact that neither of them seem interested whatsoever in performing the responsibilities assigned to senior royals. I think the book mentions that while one of the lesser-known cousins of William and Harry performed around thirty acts of community service in just over a month, Meghan had performed a mere four. And even then, many asked if Meghan’s heart was in the right place – as well as Harry’s – as in, would they even be performing this charity work if there weren’t cameras there to pick up on every big smile, every hug, every “good deed” performed and every “important issue” addressed by this self-proclaimed “selfless” couple?
It was truly sickening to hear about their trip to South Africa, where Meghan was supposed to be addressing impoverished, oppressed women. Women who have actually been oppressed to the point where they’re homeless, terminally or chronically ill, starving, abused, etc. – ending up this way after some major trauma was inflicted upon them by the men of their country. Yet Meghan used the backdrop of this poor African village (styled and outfitted in a $20,000+ designer dress, no less) to apparently link the problems within her own life to those of the population she was addressing.
Your royal servants speak out when you treat them like dogs, and Kate Middleton was apparently “mean” to you and didn’t show you around like you expected her to (even though she had just gone through an incredible difficult pregnancy and was known to have been bedridden during that time). Hardly the same thing as being beaten, raped, or killed for speaking out against your oppressor. It's absurd.
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What’s disappointing is that one thing the book does make clear in Meghan's favor is that Meghan truly is an ambitious individual. With her aspirations and her focus on important issues, perhaps if she hadn’t been so self-centered, she truly could have made a difference. But when you’re constantly crying out indignantly at how you’ve been treated, unfortunately, all of those important issues just become background noise. Instead of inspiring more people and perhaps influencing actual change, she would rather use her ambition and drive in a negative way, to manipulate those in her life (especially upsetting are the ones that truly cared for her that gave her everything – such as her father – whom she discarded like yesterday’s trash).
It's all too hilarious when people who want to paint themselves as staunch “defenders” of Meghan and Harry cry out: “Just leave them alone and let them be happy! Let them live their lives in peace and quiet!” Well, that’s the problem. Most of us who really can’t stand these two idiots would be absolutely thrilled if they just took a permanent exit from the public eye; decided to live their lives off-camera. There’s clear evidence, however, that they have multiple publicists (you know, the people whose very job is to ensure that they stay in the public eye – through mentions in media outlets, “leaked” photos, scheduled interviews, etc.). Upon knowing this information, it becomes a little more difficult to feel sympathy for their constant “invasions of privacy.”
Many stars with much more fame than Meghan or Harry who have actually tired of the constant hounding by paparazzi have moved to states – or even countries – where there isn’t an obsession with fame and celebrities. They’re actually able to live their lives in relative peace, only seeking press when they have a new movie, album, or some other project coming out – then coming back to the United States (Los Angeles) to promote the project.
In a nutshell: if Meghan and Harry were truly “victims” wanting to be left alone to enjoy their still relatively new marriage, and raise their children as a “normal couple”, they could have opted for literally ANYWHERE but Los Angeles upon leaving London. What people don’t seem to grasp is this: Meghan and Harry do NOT hate the media or being in the limelight. They actively go out of their way for media recognition. The real issue is that they can’t stand any criticism by the press. They seem to think the press should only report them in the best light possible, and that’s just not how it works.
I really think this book will change a lot of people’s minds - if they choose to read it. I highly recommend that everyone does. Only the most deluded “fans” of theirs can read this book in its entirety and then walk away from it, continuing to insist that they deserve the world's sympathy. Sorry, but I’ll reserve that for true victims.
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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@elfedowen6452 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./
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I find the narrative they are using to back up their claims very upsetting. Brexit had nothing to do with racism. It was to halt the EU from making descisions for us that were not in our best interest. We needed to regain control of our island. Megan through her misunderstanding of the monarchy told lies on Oprah. Its clear that Harry has bigger issues than anyone realised. His distaste for his own country and its people is something we didn't know, but he has now made this clear. He is happy to see the UK described as racist, but yet it was he who dressed up as a nazi, as Hitler that we the public were outraged by. We cannot change our colonial past, but to use this in the documentary as a reason for rejecting the pair of them is a low blow. We were so excited when Megan was going to be our princess. A true princess fairytale being played out before our eyes, but then she told lies, has never backed up anything or been made to that they laid claim to. We don't like liars. This is what soured us. We also like them hate our media, but we adored our Queen. That mocking courtesy, something that is part of our culture is abhorrent. What type of man sells out his own family for money. I now feel we never knew who Harry really was. The fact both are keen activists would have been amazing for the Royal Family. A fresh approach to raising awareness. Its sad this didn't materialise as it would have been wonderful seeing them both in the royal family as uncensored activists. Harry he protected before Megan was a lie. The world has a long way to go to stamp out racism. It exists, no one denies it doesnt, but those two do not define who and what the uk is.
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I was about 5 when Chernobyl happened, and my family lived near the Baltic Sea, not that far from the explosion zone, relatively speaking. I can't really remember what exactly I understood about what had happened. I remember our family friend's little niece came from Belarus to stay for the summer. I have strange knowledge of the dangers of radiation and mutations and acid rains and death by "belokroviye" (leukemia). I knew a lot of people with enlarged thyroids and I also somehow still know that I need iodine not to get sick. Strange things I have in my subconscious. Sometimes I wonder what I learned from life and what - from Roadside Picnic (a novel prophetic in many ways). This is what Alexievich writes about - you live through Chernobyl, and Chernobyl becomes a part of you in many ways.
It took me 30 years to finally be ready to find out what really happened. A lot of information is out there, but none of it presents the scope of the tragedy quite as well as Alexievich's work does. Told in personal stories, this collection of monologues leaves no stone unturned. Of course there are tales of horror and guilt and crime. But, mainly, I think Alexievich is right to conclude that what is at fault in this tragedy is Russian mentality - a peculiar beast of heroism, fatalism, idealism, carelessness, lack of self-preservation and unexplained hope that whoever is in power will know best. The same mentality that leads people to elect one dictator after another, through centuries, with the same catastrophic results.
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The Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich spent three years interviewing people who had been involved in Chernobyl: villagers from the surrounding area, "liquidators" (members of the cleanup squad), widows and children, nuclear scientists, politicians, even people who, incredibly, had moved to Chernobyl after the accident. She presents their words almost without comment. Sometimes she adds a [Laughs]; sometimes [Stops]; sometimes [Starts crying]; sometimes [Breaks down completely]. I am not sure I have ever read anything quite as horrifying. It is like a very well written post-apocalyptic novel in many voices, and it's all true. Here are some extracts.
From the translator's preface:
The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book show, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding area, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control.
From the Historical Notes:
During the Second World War, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children.
From a liquidator's account:
We had good jokes too. Here's one. An American robot is on the roof of the reactor for five minutes, then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, then it breaks down. The Russian robot's been up on the roof for two hours! Then someone shouts over the loudspeaker: "Private Ivanov! Two hours more, and you can take a cigarette break!"
From a nuclear physicist's account:
There's a moment in Ales Adamovich's book, when he's talking to Andrei Sakharov. "Do you know," says Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb, "how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?"
From a politician's account:
I was First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party. I said absolutely not. "What will people think if I take my daughter with her baby out of here? Their children have to stay." Those people who tried to leave, to save their own skins, I'd call them into the regional committee. "Are you a Communist or not?" It was a test for people. If I'm a criminal, then why was I killing my own grandchild?" [Goes on for some time but it is impossible to understand what he is saying]
From a teacher's account:
Our family tried not to economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping it would be made of good meat. Then we found that it was the expensive salami that they mixed the contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it.
From a widow's account:
When we buried him, I covered his face with two handkerchiefs. If someone asked me to, I lifted them up. One woman fainted. And she used to be in love with him, I was jealous of her once. "Let me look at him one last time." "All right."
From a father's account:
My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything.
From the author's afterword:
These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unseen. I felt like I was recording the future.
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"Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air."
While cheerful carols played, holiday lights sparkled, and countless dollars were being spent on mostly unnecessary gadgets and superfluous luxuries, I read this account of one of the worst disasters ever to afflict our planet. I sunk further into the funk that threatened the existence of my Christmas tree and that brought my own holiday shopping to a screeching halt. It seemed absurd to parade around with bags in hand while the voices of the survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion echoed incessantly within my head.
Svetlana Alexievich, Ukrainian journalist and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, has compiled a most remarkable narrative of the catastrophe from the people who witnessed the horror firsthand. Moms, dads, wives, husbands, children, scientists, liquidators, politicians, and even refugees to the area were interviewed and asked to speak candidly. The stories are full of sorrow, shock, bewilderment, anger, and occasionally stoical humor. All were straightforward and unembellished. I sensed that each carried the weight of genuine feeling.
I can’t write anything more meaningful than what the sufferers themselves have already said. Please listen to their voices:
"I killed her. I. She. Saved. My little girl saved me, she took the whole radioactive shock into herself, she was like the lightning rod for it. She was so small."
"The future is destroying me, not the past."
"You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about. You want to be like everyone else, and now you can’t."
"I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it."
"I suddenly started wondering about what’s better—to remember or to forget?"
"If we’d beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we’d understood Chernobyl. But we don’t know how to capture any meaning from it. We’re not capable of it. We can’t place it in our human experience or our human time-frame."
"We’re all—peddlers of the apocalypse. Big and small. I have these images in my mind, these pictures."
"There are ten million Belarussians, and two million of us live on poisoned land. It’s a huge devil’s laboratory."
"This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war."
"Chernobyl is the catastrophe of the Russian mind-set… it wasn’t just the reactor that exploded, but an entire system of values."
"The kids draw Chernobyl. The trees in the pictures grow upside-down. The water in the rivers is red or yellow. They’ll draw it and then cry."
"… everyone was raised to think that the peaceful Soviet atom was as safe as peat or coal. We were people chained by fear and prejudices. We had the superstition of our faith."
"I used to write poems. I was in love with a girl. In fifth grade. In seventh grade I found out about death."
It’s not difficult to be shocked by the statistics of the disaster. You can look those up anywhere and your jaw will drop. But to understand what ordinary people like me and you went through is absolutely heart-rending. Reading their words, commiserating with their feelings of misery and fear, and knowing that the suffering for many of these people still continues – that is what makes this so impactful. Naturally, I began to think “What if…” But that’s just too painful to ponder any further right now. When I’m feeling braver, I will watch the miniseries I’ve heard so much about. I suspect it will be more frightening than any Stephen King adaptation could ever be.
"What should I tell you? Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth."
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"Sometime in the future, we will understand Chernobyl as a philosophy. Two states divided by barbed wire: one, the zone itself; the other, everywhere else. People have hung white towels on the rotting stakes around the zone, as if they were crucifixes. It's a custom here. People go there as if to a graveyard. A post-technological world. Time has gone backwards. What is buried there is not only their home but a whole epoch. An epoch of faith. In science! In an ideal of social justice! A great empire came apart at the seems, collapsed. First Afghanistan, then Chernobyl. When the empire disintegrated, we were on our own. I hesitate to say it, but...we love Chernobyl. We have come to love it. It is the meaning of our lives, which we have found again, the meaning of our suffering. Like the war. The world heard about us Belarusians after Chernobyl. It was our introduction to Europe"
— Chairwoman, Woman's committee of Children of Chernobyl.
My own memories of April 26 1986 and the Chernobyl catastrophe I remember my parents being glued to the TV on that day. I was nine-years-old at the time, and even though I didn't fully understand what was going on, I knew it was bad; really bad.
Over time, my knowledge of the disaster remained sketchy, picking up bits of information here and there, but it felt to me like the whole event was brushed under the carpet, for the rest of the world to forget, no outside eyes getting on to what really happened in the clean up operation.
Until now, and reading Alexievich's book, the only image that was strong in my mind is of the abandoned bumper cars from the visiting fair, rotting away in a mechanical graveyard.
That's now all changed.
Whatever her genre, Svetlana Alexievich is an original, a true voice, a voice that is hers and hers alone, but it's through the voice of others, the ones the rest of the world never got to here, opening up on their thoughts, living smack bang in the middle of the worse possible nightmare. Exploring pain and loss on an unprecedented scale, the forgotten speak out, making for one of the most upsetting, harrowing and heart-felt books I will ever get to read. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it's no more than a pinprick to the naked eye, this is writing of immense suffering, of death, the soul of mankind rocked to it's core. But it is also filled with a gigantic love, an all powerful love that no amount of radiation could ever destroy, as these people show what big hearts us humans carry around with us. Some of the accounts within, I just couldn't quite believe, that had me seeing red. Surely this is some sort of joke?, how the hell could these things be aloud to happen?, this was 1986, not 1896, the bodies in control (or should that be no control what so ever) should hang their heads in shame!. The amount of deaths and deformities that should never have been allowed to happen makes me sick to the stomach. Some were unavoidable. Most weren't.
A true history of its people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of souls. Punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humour. The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own is so unique and so appropriate. Only the voice of the witnesses can do the events justice, and in Chernobyl Prayer, after some shocking facts about the explosion and its immediate aftermath, it's the testimony of those living close by, that grab you around the neck, before dragging you off into their world.
Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so, but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book, and Svetlana Alexievich fully deserved the Nobel Prize for her work: it's that important. A non-fiction masterpiece.
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@mommapanda5736 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans....
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@mommapanda5736 Up until Thursday (May 16), the least popular celebrity of all was Meghan Markle, preceded by Amber Heard. Growing backlash on social media has since influenced new results. As per The Mirror, which tracked the Ranker website that features crowdsourced rankings, yesterday, users voted the Duchess of Sussex as the most disliked celebrity of 2024. Not at all surprised at this revelation, we can only go by the astronomical number of votes..,,,,
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@kansasrose2909 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow......
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy....
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@mommapanda5736 Up until Thursday (May 16), the least popular celebrity of all was Meghan Markle, preceded by Amber Heard. Growing backlash on social media has since influenced new results. As per The Mirror, which tracked the Ranker website that features crowdsourced rankings, yesterday, users voted the Duchess of Sussex as the most disliked celebrity of 2024. Not at all surprised at this revelation, we can only go by the astronomical number of votes..,,,,
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@mommapanda5736 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.............
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I remember when it was announced that Harry & Meghan were getting married. How great I thought, that a smart, talented, divorced woman (of mixed race) was marrying the affable, much loved Prince. Seemed like his happy ending. She'd be a great asset to the Family. Then it all went to crap. Why?
Well as this book points out, Meghan wasn't so much in it for the Prince, but for the fame & money. She'd schemed & hustled & used people her whole life to get herself to the point where she targeted, researched & carefully played dimwitted, affable Harry. Meghan didn't research what The Royal Family does well enough though. She thought it' would be all tiaras & fancy balls. She didn't realize its shaking hands of average people at Hospital openings, schools, libraries etc. That's NOT what she signed on for! So it all went to Heck in a Handbasket & she took her Prince & went home to LA.
If you are a Meghan fan, don't read this book unless you want to see that your idol has feet of clay. For those of us, who wondered why, "it all went so bad" it's a good read. Get it at the bookstore...
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Much of the information at various times has been reported in the newspapers. The author tells it all and much more about this couple whom from what is written, comes across as a pair of opportunistic grifters and carpetbaggers. No matter what one feels about the Royal Family at large, this self-serving woman, Meghan Markle, is portrayed as a woman, a former B-rated actress, only interested in herself, who is determined to destroy the Royal Family, as she apparently has done to her own family and many others whom she discarded when she has had no further use for them. Her father, whom she has tried to portray as non- caring "low-life", is in fact shown to be a very decent man who gave her everything. Harry is seen to be a simple man of limited intelligence whom she has corrupted.
In her own way, Meghan is shown to be a modern day version of Wallace Simpson.
It is clear from the book that once she can get nothing more from Harry, and his royal connection, she will discard him like an old shoe and he will sadly go crawling back to his family in England,. He has no skills and only limited intelligence.
The book is quite well written and the author has put together a lot of information.
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@mommapanda5736 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.
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@johannagaskin2467 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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@malindaheadlee2470 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans./////////////////////////
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@kansasrose2909 I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//////////////
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans.//
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@kansasrose2909 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.
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@mommapanda5736 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I am 96 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments..
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
As for Harry and Meghan... they would be welcomed at pre= school openings
and senior care homes, but the veterans deserve better.
Bless your heart and may God Bless our veterans...............
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@kansasrose2909 Meghan's coffee brand faces a 60-day violation notice in California for potential health risks.
Megan is currently facing scrutiny over her association with a coffee brand, Cleaver Blends, accused of endangering customers' health by containing elevated levels of lead. Despite her promotion of the brand as a woman-led and mission-driven wellness company, Cleaver Blends has received a 60-day violation notice from the California district attorney. The notice alleges a failure to warn consumers about the presence of lead in its products.
According to the notice, Cleaver Blends received multiple deliveries of oat milk powder from a supplier in Xinjiang, China, known for suspected human rights abuses. The oat milk powder, used in Cleaver Blends' products, was found to contain lead, a toxic metal with serious health implications, violating California's Proposition 65, which mandates clear warnings about exposure to harmful chemicals.
The notice further accuses Cleaver Blends of inadequate testing and quality control, misleading consumers with claims of ethical sourcing and transparency. The demand from the California district attorney includes ceasing product sales in the state and paying a potential civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation.
This development is a significant setback for Megan, who invested in Cleaver Blends and promoted it as part of her venture into the US after distancing herself and Prince Harry from the royal family. The notice exposes Cleaver Blends to potential legal action if it fails to comply within 60 days, signaling challenges for the brand and impacting Megan's image, especially given her advocacy for women's rights and social justice.
Megan's involvement in Cleaver Blends has led to accusations of hypocrisy and greed, as she endorsed a brand allegedly connected to human rights abuses. Critics argue that her actions contradict her stance on social justice issues, raising questions about the sincerity of her commitments. Additionally, Megan faces accusations of exploiting her royal status for lucrative deals while distancing herself from the British public and the monarchy.
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I couldn't help myself! As biographical hitmen go, Tom Bower has a reasonable reputation, and this is well presented and very readable. It's pretty scathing of the Sussexes, but other big players, notably Prince Charles, don't come out well either, and even the Queen seems diminished by this account. Most of the narrative is familiar in outline and the named sources are also the usual suspects. Two things struck me with this rehash of the evidence - firstly, part of the reason for the popularity of the Duke and Duchess in America, as compared to here, isn't really a different attitude to race and racism between the two countries. Nothing will convince me that America is any less racially divided than the UK. But I think that, mostly, the energetic grifting, massaging of facts and ruthless manipulation of useful people, which Mehgan Markle has used to grease her rapid social and financial ascent is secretly and not so secretly admired by most Americans, but repels many on this side of the Atlantic. What Brits class as lying can be seen elsewhere as imaginative recasting of 'alternative' facts. The second striking aspect, is just how un-altruistic most charitable work undertaken by celebrities really is. Bower spells out far more than any other commentator that, having chosen activism and altruism as her 'brand', Markle (and latterly Harry), actively sought out, via paid PR agents, opportunities to publicise herself as much as the cause (particularly before she was well known); that she seldom really donated her time, but parleyed for expenses, such as first class flights for herself and friends in circumstances where charities like World Vision, for eg, are supposedly doing their all for starving Africans. The famous not for profit foundations, we learn, have been incorporated in Delaware - a state with no known connection to either Sussex but conveniently where the accounts don't have to be made public and so noone has the slightest clue what 'expenses' are now lining Sussex pockets from the supposedly charitable foundations. They aren't the only ones doing this.
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I never thought I would find myself interested in a book on aviation. His wife's book, Gift from the Sea, made me wonder about what type of man Charles was.
It was really one of the most compelling adventure books I've ever read. I kept thinking, "Why is this so interesting? I already know he crossed the Atlantic!!!" It is really about so much more than flying, although I did find learning about airplanes and aeronatics really interesting----the early 1920s was so long ago, and knowledge was so limited compared to today. It's really a story about one man and really going against the odds to do something courageous. He was only 25 when he completed the flight, and had been flying for about 4 years.
I think the best section of the book for me was his fight to stay awake---he was awake for about 63 hours by the time he landed in Paris. The flight took 33 1/2 hours, but for the entire day and night preceding the flight, he was awake, being too nervous and anxious to fall asleep.
He describes the account of having his mind, body, and spirit separating from each other in a very real way. His mind ended up having no control of the urge his body had to sleep, and he explains how his spirit would take over just in time, each time he reached a point that would have led to death. He would fall asleep with his eyes open, and experience every sensation of being asleep, and then awakened again, for many, many hours of his flight. It's amazing that the book is around 500 pages long, to describe the planning and flight of just one flight, but I never got bored. I really believe that God was with him as he made the flight---and while he doesn't actually say "God" I believe that he really felt a divine presence with him.
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As a young boy, I was fascinated with flight, airplanes, and aviators. At the highest level of my pantheon was Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. A native of my state and a pioneer of flight, he shared my values of being soft-spoken, reticent, and modest about his accomplishments. I read, re-read, and eventually inherited my grandmother's copy of "We", his confused and idealized life story, and loved every word.
Once I learned more about him, the second family in Germany and the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic statements soured me on Lindbergh worship. I didn't actively despise him, but I put him aside for several years.
Recently, I read "The Spirit of St. Louis", and I've gained a new respect for the man and the author. Written before his anti-Semitic views got him in trouble, before his flirtation with Germany, and before his marriage and abduction of his son, "Spirit" reflects his pure love of flight, his conviction that air travel would be the future of America, and his boundless optimism. He has a light and nearly poetic touch with his words, taking far more care and keeping full creative control of this book. This is the definitive portrait of Lindbergh before he soiled himself through philandering, fame, and vitriol.
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I had first heard about this book while reading "The Aviator's Wife." Finally picked this up out of curiosity. This book was written by Charles Lindbergh, and is his story about how he came up with the plan to fly to Paris, all the planning it took, and finally the flight. The beginning was really interesting to me. He was a complete nobody (just a mail pilot) and there were several other pilots trying to fly to Paris at the same time as he was. It really was a race (especially for the prize money at the end for whoever could do it.) And he wasn't the first to take off for it either. Several other pilots tried and either crashed on takeoff, got lost, were never found, etc.
The flying over the ocean part was a little boring (as I'm sure it was for Lindbergh too). He did a lot of flashbacks to his past during those hours, so it was almost like an autobiography.
The part that gets me is all the sleep he didn't get! He hardly slept the night before the flight because of the press and nerves, he about fell asleep while flying, and then all the wrapping stuff up once he got to Paris! He was awake 63 hours!!! He flew for 34+ of those. I get sleepy just thinking about it.
Anyway, his underdog story is pretty amazing. I loved that he stuck to his guns, and got what he wanted in his plane instead of letting people boss him around. He was certain he wanted to do it solo (everyone else thought he was crazy and were flying with 2 pilots), and all the planning of weight calculations - only taking everything that was purely essential. He left a lot of thinks behind so he could have extra fuel. So many little fun things like that I learned. I could have had the Reader's Digest version of the actual flight. It was a looooong book, and the flying/sleepy parts just added to my sleepy/boredom feelings. But I'm glad I read it. Learned a lot.
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I read many autobiographies and biographies as a kid and this one has endured in my mind as one I still vividly remember. I was in high school at the time and I picked this book out of the book cart in American History class because it was the thickest book on the cart. I didn't pick it out for me though, but for my friend who was in the hospital and I was getting his work for him. After jokingly presenting it to him at the hospital, I told him I would take it and give him my book on the island sky people.
I slowly read the book, concentrating on each part of the story of Charles Lindbergh's decision to fly nonstop transatlantic as nobody had done before. The story of choosing an airfield, selecting a plane, the details to work out, route and destination. Then through all the preparations and the long detailed description of the flight. I was interested in his story and happy that it turned out I had read the book.
Later in life I lived in St. Louis, and I can say more than anything about those jets at Lambert Airport, boy, are they loud. I was enamoured with the airport and the spirit of flight that exists in St. Louis, and was thrilled to be a part of it in the end. The stories of flight development have always made interesting topics from aircraft, test pilots, astronauts to space flight. And too, there is the excitement of air shows, as I experienced in downtown St. Louis one morning. The Spirit of St. Louis is an early part of the greatness that has existed in this country in flight.
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Frankly, I didn't understand many of the technical terms that the author included, but you don't have to in order to realize the magnitude of the disaster whuch took place. I know that some reviewers complained about the author's spacing of the chapters with those about the disaster and ones about the personal trip taken by the author. This didn't bother me too much although his immaturity did show in his attitude about the use of his camera. He reminded me of a small boy with his first Brownie, but I do give him credit for not just sitting at home muttering, "Isn't that too bad." He wanted to know, and to help others to understand, so he went to see for himself.
Chernobyl and Fukushima show what can happen with poor designs, the possibility of weather-related catastrophes, and human errors. The truth is that all the money that is spent cannot guarantee 100% safety. Nuclear energy certainly does have its benefits, but it also represents the possibility of the unthinkable. As Robert Oppenheimer once quoted, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
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Andrew Leatherbarrow’s Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster is an excellent starting point for readers new to the history of nuclear power. When I’m at home, I am just barely outside the fallout range for Arkansas Nuclear One (ANO). While I’m at work, I’m in the reactor’s back yard. As a result, I figured there was no better time to learn a thing or two about nuclear energy. I was not disappointed.
Chernobyl 01:23:40 is the product of a spontaneous trip Leatherbarrow took to visit the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and Pripyat. In this book, he details his experience in Chernobyl, explains nuclear energy in easy to grasp terms, and discusses the incidents leading up to and after the disaster. For those that know little to nothing about nuclear energy, this book is a must-read.
Despite our close proximity to ANO, I cannot recall learning about nuclear energy. As children, our teachers explained what to do in case of an incident at the plant and nothing else. As expected, due to lack of education about reactors and their failsafes, I grew up with an unnecessary fear of ANO. For this reason, I am grateful for Leatherbarrow’s book. What happened at Chernobyl is the product of failure to follow protocol; it is also the result of improper training. Because there are so many safety precautions, the chance of incident is actually fairly small. (Also, ANO is not an RBMK-1000 reactor like Chernobyl.)
In addition to this fear, I have a vested interest in Chernobyl. It’s haunting photos, like all ghost towns, leave me in awe. There is no doubt in my mind that Leatherbarrow spent a long time conducting research. Using various sources, he has crafted a detailed narrative of what happened at Chernobyl. His book also gives voice to some of the reactor’s victims.
Nuclear energy is dangerous. I will not deny that. However, it is also our cleanest resource. While Chernobyl 01:23:40 is only a glimpse into the world of nuclear power, it is a truly eye-opening account brimming with facts.
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Angie Willard - per RFS
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26 aprile 1986 ore 01:23:40
La data che ha cambiato per sempre il corso della storia.
Per cercare di spiegarvi la gravità delle conseguenze di quello che è successo quella notte, vi basti pensare che il volume e l’intensità delle particelle radioattive disperse nell’atmosfera equivalgano a dieci bombe di Hiroshima, ben cinquanta tonnellate di combustibile nucleare vaporizzato nell’atmosfera, trascinate via in una nube tossica che si sarebbe diffusa in buona parte dell’Europa.
Andrew Leatherbarrow, lo scrittore di questo libro, intraprende un viaggio nei luoghi del disastro; quello che si percepisce immediatamente è la passione di questo giovane ragazzo nel narrare il proprio iter, dalle sue parole traspare tutta la curiosità e lo stupore per quanto lo circonda. Ho apprezzato particolarmente l’idea di inserire delle foto, affinché fossimo ancora più coinvolti e ci rendessimo ancora più conto della situazione con questo forte impatto visivo.
Il personale dello stabilimento di Chernobyl fu eroico quella notte, nel vero senso della parola. Nessuno fuggì, rimasero tutti ai loro posti pronti a sacrificare se stessi per scongiurare un’altra esplosione. Si sono rimboccati le maniche per sistemare quel disastro e impedire la diffusione della radioattività in tutto il mondo, sono stati disposti a fare qualunque cosa fosse necessaria, alcuni ben consapevoli di quanto stavano affrontando, altri invece non immaginavano a cosa stavano andando incontro. Migliaia di uomini e donne hanno rinunciato alla propria vita e alla propria salute per tutti noi, ma il loro gesto eroico non ha trovato un riscontro successivo, infatti purtroppo, il governo li ha sostanzialmente dimenticati. E se i pompieri, il personale della fabbrica o i liquidatori non fossero stati così altruisti nella loro battaglia per contenere gli effetti del disastro? Cosa ne sarebbe stato di tutti noi?
L’incidente di quella fatidica notte ha avuto ripercussioni globali significative e durature.
Agli effetti del disastro di Chernobyl viene dedicata un’attenzione senza precedenti da parte di studiosi provenienti da tutto il mondo, tuttavia è impossibile quantificare con precisione il numero effettivo di vittime causate da questo incidente e il reale impatto su tutti noi, in quanto l’area di contaminazione è troppo vasta e problemi di salute derivanti dall’esposizione sono difficili da attribuire direttamente alle radiazioni. Molti disturbi si sono manifestati soltanto a distanza di anni o decenni, basti considerare che i casi di malformazioni, deformità congenite e leucemia nei bambini sono notevolmente aumentati nell’arco di cinque anni dall’incidente, così come un significativo incremento, nelle aree colpite, di tutti i tipi di cancro, mentre la mortalità infantile e perinatale, ritardo dello sviluppo mentale, malattie neuropsicologiche, cecità e malattie dell’apparato respiratorio, cardiovascolare, gastrointestinale, urogenitale ed endocrino sono arrivate a sfiorare cifre inenarrabili.
Libro assolutamente consigliato, non mancano descrizioni tecniche e particolareggiate, ma chi si appresta a una lettura del genere ne è ben consapevole, i toni vengono alleggeriti dal racconto del viaggio intrapreso da Andrew, che lo ha portato alla scoperta dei luoghi direttamente colpiti dal disastro.
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Libro sicuramente interessante. L’ho scelto perché volevo conoscere meglio l’argomento di Chernobyl, visto che il disastro è successo nel mio anno di nascita!
L’autore usa termini semplici per spiegare quanto accaduto nell’aprile 1986 a Chernobyl anche a chi non ha conoscenze specifiche in chimica e fisica. Nonostante però la semplicità, qualcosa non mi è stato chiaro, forse sono io che non ho familiarità alcuna con il nucleare.
L’autore, che se non ho capito male in realtà è un fotografo, alterna gli avvenimenti storici al racconto della sua esperienza personale, quando nel 2001 fa un breve viaggio nella zona, colpito e particolarmente interessato dalla storia di Chernobyl. Carina questa sorta di flashback, però la sua sosta finale a Kiev durante il viaggio secondo me non c’entrava molto. Forse, se avesse scritto in maniera diversa, avrebbe avuto più senso.
Mi son piaciute le foto che ha incluso, però sono state troppo poche, mi sarebbe piaciuto vederne qualcuna in più.
Sicuramente ha i suoi lati positivi, ma mi ha lasciato qualche dubbio.. 3 stelle.
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@kansasrose2909 “The Car” is a story of the rise and fall of the modern automobile.
It covers the early days of motor car development in Europe, the rise of Ford and General Motors in America, the ascent of Germany with the production of the Volkswagen Beetle, the introduction of luxury and sporty British cars including the Rolls Royce and Aston Martins, and the Japanese invasion in the 1970 with the famous Toyota Production System (TPS) used by Toyota and Datsun (Nissan).
It also tracks the various phases that automobiles faced from competing with horses to the rise of industrialism, the post-World War II boom, the oil crisis of the 1970s. and the start of global warming predictions beginning in 1981, the rise of diesel engines in Europe, the decline of young people wanting cars since the 1990s, the rise of electric vehicles including Tesla and the eventual entry of autonomous vehicles.
I felt that the book was a incomplete attempt to cover the history of cars. While it detailed some key highlights, there was a tremendous amount of detail missing from the book that should have been included. For example, there was no mention of the Korean, Indian, Chinese, Spanish, Czech, Swedish, and Russian manufacturers. Moreover, it did little to cover the contributions made by Ferrari and Pininfarina. How can you have a book about cars and not mention Ferrari?
Little was done to cover the alliances among the major firms, the consolidation of firms, global supply chains, motor racing and how this continues to draw audiences and promote vehicles.
And nothing was done to cover the overall economic value – beyond employment of the auto industry – and for those who support it.
For me the most interesting take-aways were some bits of trivia, including:
1. Detroit – it’s a French word for “Straits”. I should have known that!
2. Cadillac – Anotoine de la Mothe Cadillac was a French explorer who established Fort Ponchartrain de Detroit – where modern day Detroit is centred – in 1701. (Page 36.)
3. German autobahns – the German government promotes them as of the “Seven things you must do while in Germany” (Page 81.)
4. Toyota Hilux trucks – are almost indestructible (Top Gear staged many attempts to destroy one). It is also one of the most successful “Technicals” vehicle for warfare. (Page 224.)
5. The Chevy Corvair and its rear, swing-axel need to have vastly different tire pressures on the front (15-18 psi) vs. back (26-30 psi). (Page 234.)
6. Tesla – Elon Musk was an investor not the originator of this brand (Page 257.)
Overall I felt this was a very incomplete effort that covered what the author was interested in rather than a well-researched and thought out history.
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Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves.
At the same time, scientists tell us we are 'simply' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. 'Human equivalent' computers are being designed that, we are told, will do our thinking for us. Humans are being simplified out of existence.
It is time, says Bryan Appleyard, to resist, and to reclaim the full depth of human experience. We are, he argues, naturally complex creatures, we are only ever at home in complexity. Through art and literature we see ourselves in ways that machines never can. He makes an impassioned plea for the voices of art to be heard before those of the technocrats. Part memoir, part reportage, part cultural analysis, THE BRAIN IS WIDER THAN THE SKY is a dire warning about what we may become and a lyrical evocation of what humans can be. For the brain is indeed wider than the sky.
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@kansasrose2909 I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.....
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I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.
Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.
Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.
There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)
The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.
So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.
I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide , a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.....
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