He is wearing a rugby shirt with numbers and a little man on a horse on his chest. Kent has told Elsa that this sort of shirt costs more than a thousand kronor, and Granny always used to say that those sorts of shirts were a good thing, because the h...
It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the m...
...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existenc...
The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufact...
Why would the US try to win a war? War is an assembly line of death that is highly profitable for politicians and weapons manufacturers. An ongoing war is a conveyer belt of cash. Once your war is won, the assembly line has stopped and the big money ...
Julius Johnson, the big manufacturer. He is being hounded by a mad woman who is trying to blow up his factories. She wants to destroy order to make people aware of chaos, and in that way to hasten the rebirth [...] The poor soul has the wrong end of ...
Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that...
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they ...
The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even ’s and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propa...
Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof,...
Destiny was a machine built over time, each choice that you made in life adding another gear, another conveyor belt, another assemblyman. Where you ended up was the product that was spit out at the end—and there was no going back for a redo. You co...
She’s beautiful to look at, she’s new, she’s clean, and perfectly cut. But then you get up and look closely and see that she’s not real. She’s a fake. She doesn't glimmer like a natural diamond or hold the beauty and unbreakable strength of...
…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome fil...
I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie ...
The literature on ritualistic abuse suggests that ritualistic sexual practices with young children are a characteristic of particularly abusive groups, and that such practices typically occur alongside a diverse range of other abusive practices, such...
In the lean approach, companies are taught that prices are set by the market and that one way to improve profit margin is to reduce costs. This thinking flies in the face of "cost plus" thinking, where we look first at our own costs and set prices ba...
The starting point for ‘discounts’ may be the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), an arbitrarily high price that no one will ever pay. By crossing out the high MSRP, retailers are handing shoppers a psychological victory that will mak...
I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience... War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does no...
If a good system of agriculture, unrivaled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the general practice of...
There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a h...
Forms of Love: A man once decided that all perfection and beauty was in the tree. It gave fruit, shelter, materials for manufacturers. It did this, too, without apparently making demands. It was there for ‘good’ purposes. So he taught people that...
