Quotes from Douglas E. Richards

Battle not with monsters, Lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, The abyss gazes back into you." —Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

But since finding my grandfather's journal, I've done a little research on the period. Anyway, Hitler believed that the bigger the lie, the more audacious, the more likely it was to be believed. Because who'd imagine someone would have the nerve to spread such a colossal lie? And the more such a lie was repeated, the more likely it would be accepted as truth.

As Yogi Berra once said: "It's tough to make predictions. Especially about the future." The experts in 1880 couldn't imagine a technology, a solution, that

The US was fully capable of catching up from behind. In Reed's view, free societies, whose people were raised with a can-do attitude and whose culture embraced individualistic, maverick approaches, could outpace scientists raised in tightly controlled totalitarian societies every time.

We go from liking something . . . to wanting it . . . to needing it. At the same time our drive to go after it is heightened considerably. "In nature, rewards take time and effort.

He flipped the large pancake to its other side with a tan plastic spatula.

could cite endless studies, but let me finish by quoting Nicholas Carr. His book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, came out back in 2011.

But addicts aren't numbing their taste buds. They're numbing their pleasure centers. So without the source of their addiction, they're more prone to negative emotions like stress, anxiety, and depression

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness.

levels that occurred deep within forests.

So God wishes to experience. He wants to transform potential into this experience. Haisch uses the example of a game. Playing it is far more satisfying than just reading the rules.

the new incoming phone has to be

Time flies like an arrow . . . but fruit flies like a banana." —Unknown (often attributed to Groucho Marx)

Intuition is just your subconscious putting together subtle clues and coming to a conclusion that your conscious mind hasn't quite reached. Since

fertility and intelligence, dysgenics, and the Idiocracy effect.

So I hired consultants to block all communication off the island, from landlines, cells, or computers. Cells can't get voice, text, e-mail, or Internet.

Confirmation Bias, which had been demonstrated time and again in numerous experiments. Once we formed an opinion or took a position, be it in politics, the worthiness of a television show, or global warming, we tended to filter new data, seizing on anything that agreed with our position and dismissing or ignoring anything contrary, no matter how valid. We would cling to our positions, even in the face of what should be incontrovertible evidence against them.

don't you think? Not that this isn't a common bias. But women can be psychopaths,

friends who could write novel after novel as effortlessly as a politician could lie,

And Internet is incoming only," continued Knight. "Brain Trust scientists, and others on this island, can enter terms into a Google search bar, but that's the only way they can interact with the outside world. The results of their searches can be opened and downloaded, but it's one-way traffic only." He smiled. "None of this was easy to do, but it is quite foolproof.

come to believe we're in a computer simulation anyway. None of this is real. We're all inside a game, and the winner is the one who gets the most points. Who amasses the most wealth and power. Even if they have to cheat.

This is classic data mining. You draw a conclusion and then mine the data retrospectively to find support for it.

Unidentified Flying Object to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP,