Unnatural Ability
Unnatural Ability

Author: Milton C. Toby

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0813197457

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In a mere twelve months, between May 2020 and May 2021, horse racing's most recognizable face—Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert—had five horses that failed postrace drug tests. Among those was the 2021 Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit. While the incident was a major scandal in the Thoroughbred racing world, it was only the latest in a series of drug-related infractions among elite athletes. Stories about systemic rule-breaking and "doping culture"—both human and equine—have put world-class athletes and their trainers under intense scrutiny. Each newly discovered instance of abuse forces fans to question the participants' integrity, and in the case of horse racing, their humanity. In Unnatural Ability: The History of Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Thoroughbred Racing, Milton C. Toby addresses the historical and contemporary context of the Thoroughbred industry's most pressing issue. While early attempts at boosting racehorses' performance were admittedly crude, widespread legal access to narcotics and stimulants has changed the landscape of horse racing, along with athletic governing bodies' ability to regulate it. With the sport at a critical turning point in terms of doping restrictions and sports betting, Toby delivers a comprehensive account of the practice of using performance-enhancing drugs to influence the outcome of Thoroughbred races since the late nineteenth century. Paying special attention to Thoroughbred racing's purse structure and its reliance on wagering to supplement a horse's winnings, Toby discusses how horse doping poses a unique challenge for gambling sports and what the industry and its players must do to survive the pressure to get ahead.

Unmasking the Powers
Unmasking the Powers

Author: Walter Wink

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 1993-03-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 150645383X

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Angels, Spirits, principalities, powers, gods, Satanthese, along with all other spiritual realities, are the unmentionables of our culture. The dominant materialistic worldview has absolutely no place for them. But materialism itself is terminally ill, and, let us hope, in process of replacement by a worldview capable of honoring the lasting values of modern science without succumbing to reductionism. Therefore, we find ourselves returning to the ancient traditions, searching for wisdom wherever it may be found. We do not capitulate to the past and its superstitions, but bring all the gifts our race has acquired along the way as aids in recovering the lost language of our souls. In Naming the Powers I developed the thesis that the New Testament's principalities and powers is a generic category referring to the determining forces of physical, psychic, and social existence. In the present volume we will be focusing on just seven of the Powers mentioned in Scripture. Their selection out of all the others dealt with in Naming the Powers is partly arbitrary: they happen to be ones about which I felt I had something to say. But they are also representative, and open the way to comprehending the rest. They are: Satan, demons, angels of churches, angels of nations, gods, elements, and angels of nature.

Reconsidering the Privileged Powers of Banks
Reconsidering the Privileged Powers of Banks

Author: Kozo Torasan Mayumi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-26

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9819960584

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This book explores the privileged powers commercial banks hold, namely, their ability to create money out of nothing and then have that money grow in tune with a positive interest rate. Said powers defy, in an unnatural sense, the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The necessity of understanding the dual natures of money, wealth, and real capital, or, put differently, the reality that these three entities are simultaneously individual affluence and collective biophysical debt, is emphasized. The book culminates by proposing completely new foundations of money, wealth, and real capital for any society on a pathway of responsible development.

Deconstructing the Albino Other
Deconstructing the Albino Other

Author: Niya Pickett Miller

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1793630887

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Deconstructing the Albino Other: A Critique of Albinism Identity in Media discusses how American popular culture and communication about albinism, including movie characters and memes, have worked to create and maintain a negative trope of albinism that situates people with albinism (PWA) as a monolithic other. Niya Pickett Miller demonstrates that consequently, PWA must construct their own identities of albinism, highlighting the salient aspects of themselves as they see fit with no valid representation to look to for guidance. Thus, Pickett Miller argues, self-defining for PWA is a key rhetorical action taken to rearticulate albinism identity. Rather than focusing on scientific and medical lenses of analysis, this book positions albinism as a social construct through which a broader understanding of otherness can be achieved, using the negative influence of pop culture’s otherization of PWA as a case study with broader implications, including how medical conditions can be visually troped to isolate the other outside of society’s realm of normalcy. Scholars of media studies, race studies, sociology, rhetoric, and the medical humanities will find this book particularly useful.

The Assassin's Destiny
The Assassin's Destiny

Author: K L Jones

Publisher: Kirsten Jones

Published: 2019-08-28

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13:

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There are two facts in life. Birth and death. Everything else is just chance. Or is it destiny? As Mistral enters the second year of her apprenticeship to master Sight she begins to question whether it is what she truly wants. All that holds her to an unwanted future is the presence of her Mage, but when figures from his dark and violent past draw him away Mistral quickly becomes uncontrollable.

Reading and Learning Disabilities
Reading and Learning Disabilities

Author: Joyce N. French

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9780824047900

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First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Soul Manifest: Survival Game
Soul Manifest: Survival Game

Author: Michael D'Amico

Publisher: Michael D'Amico

Published: 2022-04-30

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13:

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In a post apocalyptic future, a team-based survival game involving contestants with superhuman abilities decides the fate of the world. In the year 2030, the world underwent a catastrophe known as "The Rift", which destroyed most of the planet and left the rest of it strangely transformed into how it looked during the 1400s. Well, except for one city called Paradise, which remained entirely unaffected by the event. The sudden destruction of the planet and loss of modern technology set the people of the world into a mad frenzy. Now, 30 years later, the city of Paradise stands as an isolated, self-sufficient, technological marvel amongst the rest of the now barren, chaotic world. This story follows a man named Dice who has spent six years searching the entire habitable world for his lost daughter, Ana. Having come up short for years, Dice settles down and falls to despair that he may never see his daughter again. That is, until a letter from the city of Paradise invites him through its gates and his life is changed forever.

In the Realm of the Diamond Queen
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen

Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1400843472

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In this highly original and much-anticipated ethnography, Anna Tsing challenges not only anthropologists and feminists but all those who study culture to reconsider some of their dearest assumptions. By choosing to locate her study among Meratus Dayaks, a marginal and marginalized group in the deep rainforest of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Tsing deliberately sets into motion the familiar and stubborn urban fantasies of self and other. Unusual encounters with her remarkably creative and unconventional Meratus friends and teachers, however, provide the opportunity to rethink notions of tradition, community, culture, power, and gender--and the doing of anthropology. Tsing's masterful weaving of ethnography and theory, as well as her humor and lucidity, allow for an extraordinary reading experience for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the complexities of culture. Engaging Meratus in wider conversations involving Indonesian bureaucrats, family planners, experts in international development, Javanese soldiers, American and French feminists, Asian-Americans, right-to-life advocates, and Western intellectuals, Tsing looks not for consensus and coherence in Meratus culture but rather allows individual Meratus men and women to return our gaze. Bearing the fruit from the lively contemporary conversations between anthropology and cultural studies, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen will prove to be a model for thinking and writing about gender, power, and the politics of identity.

Theology After Neo-Pragmatism
Theology After Neo-Pragmatism

Author: Adonis Vidu

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2009-02-16

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1606084712

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This book develops the thesis that Evangelical theology not only cannot afford to avoid engaging with the philosophy of neo-pragmatism, but it can also benefit from the proposals of some of its leading exponents, especially Donald Davidson. Three different themes run throughout the book: meaning epistemic justification, and ontology. How can theologians be confident of the meanings ascribed to religious beliefs in the wake of the dissolution of the very concept of meaning and of the analytic-synthetic distinction? Is there any rational fraction between our beliefs, religious or mundane, and some extra-linguistic reality? Is God something more than simply a symbolic construct associated with a certain manner of speaking? The surprising thought of Donald Davidson offers resources for Evangelical theology seeking hopeful answers to these troubling questions. Davidson's rejection of the so-called 'third dogma' of empiricism, namely the dualism of scheme of content, should be welcomed by those defending theological 'rationality' and refuting relativism and incommensurability. Furthermore, his truth-conditional semantics can serve as a check against revisionist accounts of religious beliefs that flaunt the first-person point of view of the religious believer herself. These Davidsonian contributions to an Evangelical theology are, however, balanced by inherent inadequacies which require a theological supplement, which is also a creative proposal calling for: the continued significance of experience in theology beyond the myth of the Given; an understanding of the role of Scripture as both epistemic as well as dispositional; and finally an understanding of the nature of truth as located in the mind of God. Theology After Neo-Pragmatism is both an introduction to an influential philosophical trend, and a critical and constructive theological proposal which is at once scriptural and historicist, pragmatic and realist.