Gore Vidal Pages - Gore Vidal's address, "Monotheism and its Discontents" "(The Great Unmentionable) Monotheism and its Discontents," The Lowell Lecture, Harvard University, April 20, 1992: It is very easy to discuss what has gone wrong with us. It is not so easy to discuss what should be done to correct what has gone wrong. It is impossible in our public discourse to discuss why so much has gone wrong and, indeed, has been wrong with us since the very beginning of the country, and even before that when our white tribes were living elsewhere. Unfortunately, there are two subjects that we are never permitted to discuss with any seriousness: race and religion, and how our attitudes toward the first are rooted in the second. Thanks to this sternly--correctly? A political analyst wrote at the time of the New Hampshire primary that the two irrelevant candidates for President this year, Jerry Brown and Pat Buchanan, should leave the field to the heavyweights --like Bush and Clinton.
The word "radical" derives from the Latin word for root. Copyright © by Gore Vidal. Hootsuite. Guy writes to JetStar after sitting next to "an infant hippo" man during flight. Ask the doctor: Why do I see floating shapes in my eyes? Updated: 00:23 GMT, 27 December 2011 For the past nine weeks, I have suffered ‘floaters’ in my eyes, which my doctor said is caused by a detached vitreous humour.
When in the dark, I experience flashing lights at the side of my vision. The first specialist I saw said it would settle down given time, but the second said it wouldn’t get better. Is there anything I can do to help the situation? R. Taylor, St Helens. Around 75 per cent of people develop a loss of vision over the age of 65, and for some reason it is more common in women This is a common problem and I fully understand your anxiety — but please be assured that your sight is not in danger, as a loss of vision is very unlikely to happen. Around 75 per cent of people develop this over the age of 65, and for some reason it is more common in women. As your doctor probably explained, the condition is caused when the vitreous humour — the jelly-like substance that makes up four-fifths of the eye — pulls away from the back of the eyeball. Snowden's Dad SCHOOLS Obama, Pelosi, and Holder in Open Letter. Activist Post Re: Civil Disobedience, Edward J.
Snowden, and the Constitution Dear Mr. President: You are acutely aware that the history of liberty is a history of civil disobedience to unjust laws or practices. Civil disobedience is not the first, but the last option. Thoreau’s moral philosophy found expression during the Nuremburg trials in which “following orders” was rejected as a defense. A dark chapter in America’s World War II history would not have been written if the then United States Attorney General had resigned rather than participate in racist concentration camps imprisoning 120,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens. Civil disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act and Jim Crow laws provoked the end of slavery and the modern civil rights revolution.
We submit that Edward J. The right to be left alone from government snooping–the most cherished right among civilized people—is the cornerstone of liberty. Writing in Brinegar v. On June 27, 2013, Mr. Ms. Calendar. 10 Skills You Need To Succeed Working On The Web. Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Danny Groner, manager of blogger partnerships and outreach for Skillfeed.
Get in touch with Danny on Twitter. Freelancers wanting to cut costs and maintain full editorial control will frequently and aggressively invest in honing their own skills. More often than not, these new skills will turn out to be extensions of their prior knowledge. But to really expand your business and broaden your horizons, you should look beyond the present moment or assignment, and envision your future.
What skills would be wise to take on now as an investment down the line? Read Also: Freelancers: 10 Emerging Fields To Tap Into 1. awesome viral videos Youtube, Netflix, and other video platforms have taken the Internet by storm, making up for roughly half of all web traffic on any given day. Everyone and every company is trying to crack what makes a video go viral. Recommended Reading: 5 Common Characteristics Of A Viral Web Video 2. basic HTML skills 3. photographs 4.
21 Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing 2.0. Your-new-health-care-system_51e70f9e059be_w1742.jpg. Semantics, Context and Personalisation. The semantic web is driven by contextual, personalized services. If you’re feeling a quickening every time you look at the web. If you sense new opportunities but can’t quite put your finger on what they are. If there is a feeling that things are changing but you’re not yet 100% how then you’re not the only one.
It appears that the web we know is undergoing a massive transition that’s becoming ever faster. If this is what you’re experiencing, don’t worry. In a way this is exactly what semantic search does. To achieve this it doesn’t take much. The trend is taking shape and form across the entire industry. 1. 2. 3. 4. Everything that happens then, from Google’s acquisition of Waze for $1.2 billion to Yahoo paying an equally enormous crazy amount for Tumblr to Apple bidding to acquire Primesense, the company behind Micrososft’s Kinect technology, is driven by the semantic web and the need to finally provide context-sensitive, personalized products and services. Sell More Books by Optimizing Your Book's Metadata by Joanna Penn. Today’s guest post is excerpted from How to Market a Book by Joanna Penn (@thecreativepenn). I’m grateful to Joanna for sharing her expertise here; if you’re not familiar with her blog, I encourage you to visit and subscribe—click here to visit The Creative Penn.
You can never sell as many books as Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and the other retailers can sell for you. Why? Because they have a vast sea of readers who specifically go to their sites to buy books. Every day, readers are spending millions of dollars looking for, and buying, their next read in those stores. Sure, you can build a massive following on your website or through your speaking platform, but it will never equal the volume of readers that these book distributors have access to every day. The trick is ensuring your book can be seen by those avid book readers. The very best book to read on the algorithms and how you can understand them is: Let’s Get Visible by David Gaughran. What is a keyword? Lawyer marketing with Twitter has arrived. Lawyers using Twitter for marketing? Yes, it’s true. This micro blogging tool with posts or ‘tweets’ limited to 140 characters, which I was afraid to admit in public that I used, is generating some discussion among legal marketing professionals.
First, Twitter broke into a legal marketing listserv discussion last week. ‘What is it? Does anyone see any value to using it?’ Then today, legal Internet marketing expert, Steve Matthews, comes out with an excellent intro to Twitter for lawyer marketing, including 7 steps for test driving Twitter. Don’t expect Twitter to take the legal industry by storm yet, but take note of what Steve says you ought to now.
…Politicians in the current US election are levering it, news outlets like CNN & Canada’s CBC are offering headlines that can be mixed into your reading stream, and companies like Southwest airlines are using it to interact with customers & take feedback. You can benefit from Twitter in three ways, that I see today. LinkedIn Is For Creeps, So What Can You Gain From Using It? 12 Critical Things You Should Never Tolerate. There is so much in life that we just tolerate.
Some of it we have to deal with (taxes, bad weather, traffic). But there’s a good portion of stuff that we tolerate even when we don’t have to. We step around things, overlook irritations, and mindlessly accept energy drains. Perhaps we’ve become so immune to these tolerations that we don’t recognize the negative impact they have on us. Sometimes just recognizing the things we are tolerating in life gives us a renewed sense of hope and energy. However, when you address some of your bigger tolerations, you can completely change the course of your life and open doors to a world of happiness and inner peace that you didn’t know existed. Think about the poorest of the poor, living in squalor and despair without the hope of a better future. In the same way, we must search for these portals that will allow us to move to the next level of powerful living.
Do you want to walk through the portal to a happier life? 1. 2. 3. Are you overweight? 4. 5. Essential Tools Every Writer Should Know and Have. May 30, 2013 by William Frierson Businesswoman with notebook thinking about what to write. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock. Being a writer is a difficult job, especially when you rely on your skills for a living. You must be able to convey your ideas and make sure to relate to them in a manner that readers can understand. At the same time, you also have to ensure that what you write is believable and based on facts and information. Otherwise, you will lose your credibility and no one would want to read your work.
Fortunately, there are a lot of tools which writers can use. Plagiarism software With the wide-range of information available on the Internet, it’s no wonder how some people can lift a sentence or two on their papers and make those ideas as their own. Visual Thesaurus Google doesn’t want you to keep repeating the same word all throughout your article. Dragon Naturally Speaking Typing, especially when you’ve been doing it all day, can be exhausting. Scribe Xmarks Dim Dim Skype Wridea.
Infographic: 5 Key Book Publishing Paths. UPDATE: I have produced an updated version of this infographic, which is significantly different from this one. One of the biggest questions for authors today is: Should I traditionally publish or self-publish? It’s an important question—one that tends to result in heated debate—but it’s becoming an increasingly confusing and complicated question to answer because: There are now many varieties of traditional publishing and self-publishing—with evolving models and varying contracts.You won’t find a universal, agreed-upon definition of what it means to “traditionally publish” or “self-publish.”
I spend a lot of time at writers conferences trying to clarify the pros and cons among the different publishing paths and the growing number of services available to authors. With that in mind, I’ve developed an infographic (click to download as PDF) to describe what I see as the key 5 publishing paths, their value to authors, the potential pitfalls, and examples of each. Related. The Real Costs of Self-Publishing a Book | Mediashift. At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?” Because the book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, it’s going through a quick transition. As a result of this shift, authors no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers to publish high-quality books and are instead moving toward self-publishing.
Launching a book is like launching a startup. Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited, then formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it. Below, I break down the costs of how much professional services will cost you for a high-quality book. (For the purposes of calculation we’ll assume you have a manuscript that is 70,000 words.) 1. Once you’ve written your book, a developmental editor is important. 2. 3. Costs: Low end: $150 High end: $3,500 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 8. Should You Self-Publish? 15 Questions by Orna Ross. Today’s guest post is by Orna Ross ( @OrnaRoss ), director of the Alliance of Independent Authors . Self-publishing is not for every writer. In order to succeed, you need to have or develop specific traits, along with certain ways of approaching the publication of a book.
Consider the following questions. Many writers wait for permission from an agent or publisher to say they are fit for publication—or for a PR campaign to explain why somebody should buy their book. Not independent authors. Risk is the core activity of self-publishing. If there’s one quality that all successful independent authors have in common, this is it. Independent authors who do best have an entrepreneurial mindset. Successful self-publishers, by definition, are those who have kept on keeping on, adapting where necessary, and following their hearts. Successful self-publishers don’t tend to be the kind of writers who say, “I don’t care about money,” unless they have a benefactor or obliging day job.
Stephen Hawking: Increased Space Travel Crucial For Human Survival. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has an interesting outlook on how humans will be able to survive throughout this millenium and beyond. In a speech at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the 71-year-old scientist said that increased space exploration is crucial for the sake of humankind’s future. “We must continue to go into space for humanity. If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way,” he said. “We won’t survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet.” It sounds kind of strange to think that in order to save humanity, we basically have to get ready to jet and find other new places to live in the solar system or galaxy. What’s discouraging to him is that NASA’s planetary science budget was cut by $300 million this year.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, Hawking has not let this disease slow him down, and he continues to decode the universe and speak around the world about the value of science, research, and exploration. Truth Telling Is Offensive. Truth Telling Is Offensive Posted on Apr 6, 2013 Paul Craig Roberts was an assistant secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan. Like many Americans, he has been wounded by the government he helped create, and he’s tired of being called offensive and depressing for talking about it. “In America truth is offensive,” he writes in his latest column at CounterPunch. “If you tell the truth, you are offensive.”
Roberts lists the names of others who offend establishment notions of decency by telling the unadorned truth. “If you tell readers what is really going on,” he writes, just as these figures do, “they want to know why you can’t be positive. “In America and everywhere in the Western world or the entire world, telling the truth is unpopular,” he continues.
Julian Assange is another example cited by Roberts. Assange was swiftly demonized by governments worldwide and by a jealous and resentful corporate media. “Where is the good to rise up against the evil?” —Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly. Amazon is Now Beta Testing an Automated Cover Generator for Kindle eBooks. The cover image for an ebook is important to its success, but it's also a rather difficult skill to master. Not everyone has the artistic skills to design a good cover, but in the not too distant future that will no longer be a problem. There's been no announcement from Amazon, but I have just learned that they are working on a new tool that will help self-pub authors make book covers cheaply, cleanly, and well. A reader sent me this screen shot earlier today: He took the screenshot while using KDP, and as you can see from the title bar Amazon is offering a "Kindle Cover Creator".
The service is still in beta, and I have not seen it myself. But I have been told that the covers shown above were automatically generated by Amazon. I'm told they can be edited by the author and that the text can be moved and the background image can be edited. These are some pretty decent covers. They're also free, which is a plus. The screenshot at right shows a part of a KDP menu. Has anyone tried it? Hugh Howey: Self-publishing is the future — and great for writers. Makerbot Replicator 2X - 3D printers. The Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense.