Which books have you read in 2017 up to now?
Which books have you read in 2017 up to now?I have "read" very few books this year.I have listened, via Audible, to the following books in 2017 in this order:The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. EllisThe Once and Future King (entire series) by TS WhiteThe History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules VernThe History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise BauerUncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher StoweHeir to the Empire by Timothy ZahnTwelve Years a Slave by Solomon NorthupMoby Dick by Herman MelvilleDark Force Rising by Timothy ZahnThe Last Command by Timothy ZahnThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. HydeFrankenstein by Mary ShelleyThe History of the Renaissance World by Susan Wise BauerThe Time Machine by H.G. WellsThe Godfather by Mario PuzoThe Great Gatsby by F. Scott FitgeraldNever Broken by JewelTreasure Island by Robert Lewis StevensonSPQR by Mary BeardThe Iliad by HomerRobinson Crusoe by Daniel DefoeThe Odyssey by HomerCaesar by Adrian GoldsworthyThe Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer BradleyThe Disaster Diaries by Sam SheridanThe Legends of King Arthur and His Knights by James KnowlesDeviant by Harold SchechterPsycho by Robert BlochAugustus by Adrian GoldsworthyThrawn by Timothy ZahnNPCs by Drew HayesSplit the Party by Drew HayesSilver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew MotionNothing Left to Lose by Dan WellsGoing Rogue by Drew HayesThe Lost City of Z by David GrannIn the Name of Rome by Adrian GoldsworthyThe Exorcist by William Peter BlattyI,Strahd by P.N. ElrondStart With Why by Simon SinekLeaders Eat Last by Simon SinekRoad of the Patriarch by RA SalvatorePromise of the Witch King by RA SalvatoreServant of the Shard by RA SalvatorePax Romona by Adrian GoldsworthyHow Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy (Finished it today, in 2018)I have read the following books in part or in entirety, as part of my MBA elective classes:Project Management - The Managerial Process, by Larson & GrayA guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) by Project Management InstituteProject Management: A systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling, by Harold Kerzner,Project Management: A Managerial Approach, by Jack R. Meredith, Samuel J. Mantel Jr., Scott M. ShaferIdentifying and Managing Project Risk by Tom KendrickProject Manager's Spotlight on Risk Management by Kim Heldman
Pondering creation (metaphors). Do you agree with me?
So very true friend! (1) That there is a great CREATION is obvious. The very fact of the existence of THINGS; the universe, the solar system, the earth and all myriad forms of life upon it, demands a CREATOR! (2) The existence of great, immutable, powerful LAWS (and I speak of the "laws" governing the physical universe; the laws of science and chemistry; laws governing the action of water in its three states; the cleavage and fracturing properties of minerals; gravity, inertia, isostasy, etc., etc.). The existence of these great laws demands a lawgiver! (3) The intricacy of complex design; whether the feathers on the wing of a bird; the eye of a fly; the breathing apparatus of a dolphin; billions of intricately-designed snowflakes; your own muscular, skeletal, digestive and circulatory systems-etc., etc., requires a great DESIGNER! (4) LIFE exists. Life in myriad forms. You and I both know that life only comes from preexisting life! This is called the "law of biogenesis." Life demands a great LIFE GIVER! (5) Life only comes from preexisting life of the same kind! Thus, there is procreation, and the sustaining of life on our planet; the constant recycling of falling trees, rotting vegetation; the bacteria which break it down to become food for the insects which are food for dozens of other creatures, which are in turn food for larger creatures, which are in turn food for man; the cyclical character of our symbiotic environment which, like a gigantic machine was once "wound up," and is gradually running down, requires a sustaining force. Inherent within this proof are the laws governing the "conservation" of energy" and the laws of thermodynamics. It is obvious our universe has a great sustaining force-a GREAT SUSTAINER!
Why did George W. Bush flip flop on global warming in his final year as president?
The failed speech reader, G.W.Bush flipflopped on orders from President Cheney. March, 2001 was shorly after Pres Cheney's swearing in, and he wanted to reassure Big Fossil Fuel he'd do his fanatical best to represent their interests after they paid him so much during the campaign. April, 2008 was during the pres election campaign and Pres Cheney wanted to con some fence-sitting voters into believing he'd actually do something to lessen climate disruption. =-=-=- "You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising budget is big enough." Ed Rollins, Reagan’s campaign manager in 1984. http://www.nndb.com/people/648/000056480... -------- Big Oil is permanently closing many refineries, hoping to drive up oil & gas prices permanently. Big Oil lost profits due to conservation & the recession. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/11/... “…a fraudulent, anti-science campaign funded largely by Big Oil and Big Coal has blocked Congress from passing any clean energy or climate bill” — but “the Navy and Marine Corps just didn’t get the word,” they’re going green. ---Tom Friedman http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinio... “A nation using one-quarter of the world’s oil while controlling only 3 percent of the world’s known reserves cannot drill its way to independence. The estimated 7.5 billion barrels the eastern gulf and Atlantic coast are thought to contain are just about what this country consumes in a year.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/opinion/13mon1.html?adxnnl=1&ref=todayspaper&adxnnlx=1292248915-pp7vC6PxZq1LtRICAasslQ
Why are the rich seen as "job creators"? Why do some feel that the rich need more money?
You know what …19 ,20, 21, 22 these are golden period what you do in those years decides the rest of your life.Choosing Engineering is nowadays being the most traffic area where we find the most student intoHence there has been a lack of jobs specially for electrical engineers in India. in Alternative ways for mechanical engineers are there nowadays in India as where student find making a good future for themselvesAs an engineer; there’s a lot of difference from Student to Entrepreneur . It really do takes a lot to be an Entrepreneur.Don’t try to be a ” A grader” also if business is your real goal because its more real than your freaking academics.Look our academics system is broken; its fifty years old made by the British which was supposed to create factory workers. What we see in nowadays is a pathetic trend to mug the definition.. vomit in the exam ..if you cannot do it you suck and if you can do it you get into a good college good this and good that. Do you want that life? go right ahead ..get a nine to five job its not for everyone.Entrepreneurs are those who don’t fit in with this broken academic system.Another major thing that you gonna face is if are succeeding in business a lot of times that parents are pulling children from behind like no no no first studies but its finally upto you how much guts do you have !!.. You can be a job creator you not a job seeker so why worry about this broken system of education.DO IT! LEARN BY DOING ! Seriously learn by doing.Why make reports and this and that .Make mistakes its totally OK. You are not gonna buried alive for making mistakes now is the time to make mistakes you will learn so much from it.Its so much ten years more you will have than you friends.Don’t repeat the same mistakes . Even you do ,do make it less !
Is Obama totally incompetent?
Yes, he's either incompetent or deliberately destroying America, you decide which Chapter 13 bankruptcies at record levels http://www.rib.uscourts.gov/Docs/Stats/C... worst chronic unemployment since the Great Depression http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/0... he spends almost a $Trillion$ on shovel ready jobs, then says there never was any shovel ready jobs http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-2... then he cannot find anything to cut http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/02/obamas-tough-budget-cuts-in-pictures.html he continues the tradition of signing Middle Class destroying Free Trade deals http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/congress/9369-congress-passes-obamas-qfree-tradeq-package http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-19/u-s-brazil-sign-trade-economic-agreement-as-obama-visits.html says our enemy, is not our enemy http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/19/white-house-stands-by-biden-statement-that-taliban-isnt-us-enemy/ First president to get our AAA credit rating lowered Feels the need to apologize for the USA http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/06/barack-obamas-top-10-apologies-how-the-president-has-humiliated-a-superpower **************************************...
What will happen in the stock market now that the Democrats have taken the House in the 2018 midterm elections?
Um, what about the stock market NOW? It’s below what Trump started with. All kinds of shallow, loud brags when it’s going up, but last I saw, it was going to be heaven, for billionaires and for the working man! Only salaries, on average, haven’t budged. They never have, by the way, because of tax cuts. There’s a reason why working class salaries and wages started dipping after Reagan’s measures started. There’s a reason why the Great Recession happened after three vertiginous tax cuts and two foreign wars paid for in debt, which Donald Trump is walking away from. Of course leaving more cash in the casino brings the stock market level higher. It has kept people employed, in greater numbers. The salaries, however — not the bonuses, which never really flow to the below-the-line staff — are still as stagnant as they were once the Reagan recession ravaged the economy. (Not for the hustlers and the Trumps, but for the average wage- or salaried worker.) Trump is the ’20s Republican all over again. Isolationist, hard-right capitalist, the state can do NOTHING about the economy, screw unions, “entitlements,” and all that “magic of the marketplace” idolatry. What happened in the ‘20s? Well, Republicans beat back their Teddy Roosevelt faction, and went all in for tariffs, a whites-only immigration policy, and unregulated speculation on the stock market. Sound familiar? Go ahead, wallow in it. Won’t last very long. If we do have another financial crisis, which Obama turned back while all the conservative economists were saying, if we throw more dollars at the problem, there will be INFLATION, as though they only read from the Ronald Reagan catechism, and there never was. The second stimulus was made impossible, though the first one had worked well— because the next round would certainly have been felt by the average Tea Partier— and produced no inflation. The second one might have jarred our collective heart back to normal beats, but by insisting on austerity, the Red States and the Congress just prolonged the pain, and then blamed it on Obama.Will the Republican plan work into another Trump term? Well, Hoover was actually pretty popular. He got elected, really, without any foreign help or payoff of mistresses. He ended up his first term the most hated man in America. Really, read history, Republicans. You’re doing it again.
Why did the Nazis respect Switzerland’s neutrality during WWII?
I’ve visited and traveled in Switzerland several times and spoken to the natives. It’s really very simple.Germany really really really wanted to take Switzerland. It had 1/6th of the world’s wealth during WWII (that’s not a typo: one-sixth of the world’s wealth!). Mostly underground in Zurich. Just look at the economic situation of Germany in WWII, and you can see that anyone who says that Germany and Hitler didn’t want Switzerland just doesn’t understand fundamentals.People talk about the Second Amendment in the U.S and how many guns we have. They don’t realize that Switzerland was the model for the U.S. Second Amendment by the American Founding Fathers. Switzerland makes America look like a gun-free country. The government gives almost every citizen a fully-automatic rifle (machine gun; assault rifle) of exceptionally high quality, and gives them free ammunition every year to practice, and encourages them to practice even more! At the end of their military service they get to keep the rifle. Many of the Swiss I spoke with went shooting after work to get rid of stress, unwind, etc. There’s simply no way Germany could have conquered Switzerland short of killing almost every single citizen, and I have no doubt the average Swiss soldier had better training than the average German.No way in hell could Germany get tanks into Switzerland. It’s literally a mountain fortress. If Germany tried to bring tanks through the mountain tunnels . . . well those tunnels would have ceased to exist because the Swiss have them mined. Move tanks and support through those Swiss mountain passes? Suicide! And without tanks Germany couldn’t possibly win against the Swiss.At best, the Germans could have bombed the hell out of Switzerland. Yeah, that would have done a lot of damage at an enormous cost to the Germans. But after that they’d have to occupy it. Simply not possible, given an armed populace determined to resist.I really admire the Swiss. And yes, there was collaboration, and other bad things, but that applies to every country. How many in the U.S. know that the Nazis used IBM computing/tabulating machinery to tabluate the victims of the holocaust? There are corrupt amoral people everywhere, and no one should hold the Swiss government or people responsible for that.
What is the weirdest thing about being a Christian?
The security of long-term thinking.Christianity has been around for just over 2,017 years. It's the fulfillment of Judaism, which is another 4,000 to 6,000 years old (correct me if I'm incorrect!) As you look at Christian and Jewish history, and combine it with other historical you start thinking in terms of decades and centuries. Also we believe anything if God will last, but anything of man will eventually pass away. Old things that have stood the test of time have that going for them.Every great empire has said, in different ways, that the Church needs to “get with the times” -so there are no new criticisms of Christianity. Most of those empires are dead or are no longer empires.With such a long faith heritage, you stop worrying about politics. States and empires rise and decline. And will eventually go out, with a bang or a whimper. America, currently a vastly powerful empire and my own beloved country, probably won't exist in six thousand years, though I hope we push three or four thousand at least. That'd be great. That's ok- those ahead of us will make an even greater nation, or (I hope) several smaller and more manageable countries.This isn't to say we just let history run its course. Ans it's certainly not to say that Christians are categorically unpatriotic. Quite the contrary, many of us here in the USA are very patriotic. I think America is the best country in the world so far. Many immigrants will agree with me. I intend to build strong communities which will strengthen the country because we're all a big network.But you gain the perspective of belonging to a huge community that transcends the nation-state level, and for that very reason can contribute to individual nations in unique ways. I'm Christian and a family man first, American second. Fortunately, we have a setup in this awesome nation whereby those two rarely conflict for the average Joe and Jane (more, that is, than Christianity is countercultural in every place and time, that is, with our stringent morals, etc.) It's trickier for important people like soldiers and politicians to manage, I think.Finally, our goal is Heaven -which, in a phrase, is life with God as it was intended to be, life to the fullest. It's a higher goal that puts everything into this long-term perspective.Hope this was an interesting answer- only my third or so answer. Peace!
Do you think that men and women are truly equal?
How do you define equality? Girls are, for example, favored in the education system in most western countries. And it's quite horrible in some Scandinavian countries; above 70% of medical students and above 65% of law students in Norway are women. No empirical data suggests that women are the cognitive elite, in fact, every longitudinally study done on IQ and cognitive abilities suggest that men are smarter and dumber than women. Moreover, Amnesty and U.N. have formed a consensus that education equals opportunity. Furthermore, the education system changed in the late 1800’s to fit more agreeable people. Women are on average significantly more agreeable.Moreover, women are under-represented in leadership and stem fields, but leadership will change drastically as we have changed the definition of a good leader. It was someone with low neuroticism, high cognitive abilities, and high extroversion. Today, however, it is a person with high agreeableness, open-mindedness, and low neuroticism.In other words, men and women have different issues. Male problems would be violence, suicide, criminality, education, murder, child custody, and, in many western countries, the right of being innocent until proven guilty has been abrogated. Whereas female problems would be reaching the top, sexual assault, under-representation, and rape.If your unilateral goal is to have women above men, then you will succeed in the west in a few years. While to most people, the postmodern feminists’ cognitive dissonance - the dichotomy between and thoughts (ideas) and action - has created the anathema to equality - but the gynocentric eye in the population will never be able to see it. Therefore, the only aphoristic conclusion we can draw is: the ascendancy of women is near and history will remember postmodernism as the feminine hegemony. Deconstructionalism will and are turning everything in the world on its head.We have reached the ineluctable female dominance by doing everything in our power to make women succeed. I wish I can live long enough to see what historians write about our time. (Not a native speaker, sorry for my English.)
Does the media have a left-wing bias?
Newsbusters? You might take a look at the biases of your own sources there, before you trust them to comment on others :) Still, this is a bit more thought than is typically put into a "the media is biased" question, so I'll bite. MSNBC and NPR make no bones about their left-wing bias - they're basically the left's equivalent of FOX and talk radio. As for NBC (as well as ABC and CBS), they're prime-time television news. Prime-time TV doesn't have a liberal or conservative bias; they have an idiocy bias. That Palin story was likely followed up with a fluff piece about a waterskiing squirrel, 15 minutes of someone reading the weather, and perhaps a piece on the Kardashians. Those shows cater to people who aren't really interested in news at all - they just want a brief spot of entertainment, and they tend to like celebrities, cute things, and scary stories. So really, you've got a couple of people who are biased toward the left (and are very up-front about that), a couple who are biased toward the right, and many, many sources that aren't biased toward the left OR the right - but which may be aimed toward people with deeper or shallower interests in news. I've always used the rule of thumb that if you're WATCHING (as opposed to READING) your news, you've already put yourself in the demographic of people with limited attention spans, so you shouldn't expect much out of your sources.