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There are immediate benefits of exercising—which can occur after a single session of activity—that you may not hear about from health and fitness sources and that pertain to your mental state. Even a little exercise at the right time can help you think better, stay focused, sharpen your thoughts, and reduce your anxiety—key elements of sustained productivity—in the hours that follow the physical activity.
Two Awesome Hours
Josh Davis
Another way of looking at our life is to confess that we swim continuously in force fields of energy, our Greek ancestors called Moira, . . . or Fate. This is the energy of finite creation, with all its limits, boundaries, confines. You are born a certain person, with a genetic code, a set of parents, a cultural context, a zeitgeist, and in significant proportion are defined and delimited by these realities. At the same time, you swim in a force field they called proorismos, or Destiny, which is an expanding field of possible outcomes. Destiny encompasses whatever is capable of becoming. ~ What Matters Most, p. 190
The Best of James Hollis
Logan Jones
Putin himself is hardly uninvolved. Evidence suggests that he also pillages the state, on an even grander scale. Some of Russia’s wealthiest men are Putin’s personal friends, including Gennady Timchenko, the head of the Gunvor oil trading company, who is believed to be worth $15.3 billion; Yuri Kovalchuk, an owner of the Rossiya Bank ($1.4 billion); and the Rotenberg brothers, Arkady and Boris, whose combined wealth is estimated at $5.6 billion. All of these men made fortunes on the assets of the state. Gazfund, the largest nongovernment pension fund, Gazprombank, Russia’s second–most important bank, and Gazprom-media were all removed from state-run Gazprom and put under the control of the Rossiya Bank. Gunvor, little known in 2000, has since become the world’s third-largest oil trader, and the Rotenberg brothers, besides owning intermediary firms that sold pipes to Gazprom, received approximately $7 billion in contracts for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.23 According to Boris Nemtsov, the former first deputy prime minister who was murdered in Moscow on February 27, 2015, and Vladimir Milov, the former deputy minister of energy, “There is reason to assume that all of these Timchenkos, Kovalchuks, Rotenbergs—are nothing more than nominal owners of big property and that the real beneficiary is Putin himself.”24 Stanislav Belkovsky, a Russian political analyst who once worked as a speechwriter for Berezovsky, told the German newspaper Die Welt in 2007 that Putin’s secret assets were worth $40 billion, which would make him the richest man in Europe. Citing senior figures in the president’s own administration as his sources, Belkovsky said that Putin was the beneficial owner of 75 percent of Gunvor, 37 percent of Surgutneftegaz (a principal supplier of oil for Gunvor), and 4.5 percent of Gazprom. This ownership structure was concealed behind a “non-transparent network of offshore companies,” with the final points in Zug, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein. When asked whether he could prove his claims, Belkovsky said that Putin’s wealth is no secret among the elites. “And you should note that Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] has never sued me.”25 Belkovsky’s estimates of Putin’s private wealth track closely with those of Western intelligence.
The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
David Satter
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