Showing results by narrator "Jim Johnston" in All Categories

“The Roman Church...[says] that the heretics they persecute are the church of wolves. But this is absurd, for the wolves have always pursued and killed the sheep, and today it would have to be the other way around for the sheep to be so mad as to bite, pursue, and kill the wolves, and for the wolves to be so patient as to let the sheep devour them!” – Excerpt from the alleged writings of the Cathars. Carcassonne today is the capital of the Aude department in the Occitanie region of southwestern France, about 58 miles from Toulouse. It lies by the “eastward bend” of the glittering cobalt waters of the River Aude, which serves as a barrier between the two towns of the city: the Cité and the Ville Basse. It is the old Cité that attracts most of Carcassonne's visitors (3 million of them each year), for it houses the historic fortress that looks like it came straight out of a fairy tale and supposedly became the muse behind the captivating castles featured in Walt Disney's acclaimed 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty. But this breathtaking town is so much more than just the perfect spot for wedding shoots and social media narcissism, for it is a place that oozes medieval history.

By listening to this audiobook, you will learn what speed reading is, how to break bad reading habits, techniques on how to successfully speed read, tips on reading effectively, and maintaining good reading comprehension.

Most commonly known as the antagonists of the pantheon of gods led by Zeus, the Titans embody "unrest" and "transience" for the modern listener, but for reasons less than the obvious. History, after all, is the story of the winners, and the world of the ancient Greeks was a world of a very real, highly querulous pantheon that it behooved ancient writers to glorify in their works.

From the 17th century to the 21st century, humans went from being almost universally agrarian with sailing vessels, muskets, and astrolabes being the most cutting-edge technology on the planet, to an era where the world is almost universally industrial or post-industrial with airplanes, cars, spaceships, computers, widespread electricity, and the ability to produce much more food than was ever possible before the Industrial Revolution.

In 2001, the critically acclaimed film A Beautiful Mind introduced millions to John Nash, Jr., one of America's most important 20th century mathematicians, nearly 50 years after he had won a Nobel Prize. Naturally, most viewers of the movie will remember a prodigy suffering from paranoid schizophrenia while overlooking how the man's innovative studies and works had a major influence on everything from economics to biology, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and political philosophy.

Hackers have always been a closed, secretive circle, wary of infiltrators and keeping their secrets completely hidden from the public eye until now! This book blows the lid open on the dark side of the hacking world, bringing all of the shadowy secrets, tools of the trade, malicious methods, and high-stakes multi-millionaire lifestyles of hackers out into the open! Each chapter gives you unprecedented access to the cunning tricks, psychological manipulation, and malware that hackers could be using against you right now!

For France, Egypt offered an overland route to India and a chance to beat Britain at its own game via economic strangulation. Admiral Horatio Nelson, however, could only speculate at French intentions. Whatever the destination of the French fleet, he sought a battle of annihilation. Only by those means could Britain secure the Mediterranean and neutralize the threat of a French army operating overseas. His understanding was icily accurate.

The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is over 70 years old and counting but has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. With so much time and history, the Middle East peace process has become laden with unique, politically sensitive. Menachem Begin: The Life and Legacy of the Irgun Leader Who Became Israel’s Prime Minister looks at how Begin rose the ranks through militias and governments to become one of the Jewish State’s most consequential leaders.

Attention residential contractors. Ever wonder how to get as many leads and sales as possible from your website? This book is for you. This is the ultimate guide on how residential contractors can make more money with their business by using a smart online presence. You'll find out secrets like how to build an effective lead-generating website, get listed on search engines to start driving leads to your website, and more!

In addition to blockchain technology, this book also explains the Internet of Things, smart contracts, the Ledger of Things, as well as the application of these technologies. After delving into the conceptual analysis of how these technologies work, this audiobook provides guided, practical instruction on working with blockchain and cryptocurrencies, such as creating and executing a smart contract and opening an Ethereum wallet, with steps that are designed to help listeners get started investing in cryptocurrencies.

This book contains proven 10-step guidelines on how to build trust in yourself and trust others. The title says it all. How do we make other people trust us? This question has been bothering leaders and managers throughout the centuries. This book aims to answer this question. "Trust is one of the pillars of a strong relationship." When people choose whom to trust, they do not use logic or rational thinking. We do not trust someone based solely on his or her track record. Our mind collects a combination of verbal and non-verbal cues to guess if a person we just met is trustworthy.

So you want to learn how to read minds, huh? Well, understandably so! Mind-reading is an intriguing art form with a much larger scope than that with which it's credited. It smoothly finds its uses in relationships and dating, sales, business, leadership, public speaking, and many other everyday avenues of life. Even when you're not performing it to interact with another person, its foundational qualities easily give you a competitive edge in all of the above aspects of life.

The birth of Europe as people know it today was hardly an easy and effortless process. The Old World was reshaped by centuries of continuous wars, raids, and the falls and rises of empires. The most turbulent of these events happened at the beginning of the Middle Ages, from the third through seventh centuries CE. This was the time when the old slave society gave way to the feudal system that marked the latter Middle Ages, and it was also a period of battles between the Roman Empire and various barbarian peoples.

Welcome to ChatGPT Blueprint: The Failproof Prompts that make You Work Smarter; Not Harder. A system where the Advanced algorithms and breakthroughs in technology are explored, providing developers a platform to work smarter, not harder. From the new and ever improving applications of ChatGPT into your daily life, to the hidden mechanics of machine learning applications and prompts specificity that fuels learnt behaviours, to intelligent conversations with AI.

It seems obvious to say that we live in very self-conscious world, one where the ubiquity of social media provides a constant pressure to advertise and perform for friends and peers. Because we are living in one of the most connected eras in our history, our mental makeup is surely influenced by all of it.

The American Revolution is replete with seminal moments that every American learns in school, from the "shot heard 'round the world" to the Declaration of Independence, but the events that led up to the fighting at Lexington and Concord were borne out of 10 years of division between the British and their American colonies over everything from colonial representation in governments to taxation, the nature of searches, and the quartering of British regulars in private houses.

The word “mafia,” Sicilian in origin, is synonymous with Italy, but Italy is home to several different mafias, with three being particularly notorious. While the Cosa Nostra of western Sicily is the most infamous, other powerful groups include the ferocious ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria and the Camorra, the third-largest mafia, which is active in Naples and the Campania region.

For more than two generations, television has been a part of most people’s lives, and few could remember a time when it wasn’t there as a familiar, reliable source of information and entertainment...Weird Television: A Collection of Interrupted Broadcasts, Paranormal Apparitions, and Other Mysteries on TV includes strange stories that will make this familiar medium seem a bit less familiar and far more interesting. You will learn about some of the world’s strangest TV stories like never before.

The Spanish Civil War: The History and Legacy of the Controversial Conflict That Established Francisco Franco’s Dictatorship in Spain examines one of the 20th century’s most important wars and how it affected the world. You will learn about the Spanish Civil War like never before.

One of the great ironies of the Enlightenment was that various societies produced the notion of the inalienable rights of man, bequeathed by God, alongside the long-established and deeply entrenched institution of slavery. As fate would have it, the refusal of Northern states to strictly apply the new fugitive slave law would be explicitly cited in several of the Southern states’ articles of secession in late 1860 and early 1861. In that regard, the Fugitive Slave Act ended up being one of the main tipping points that finally split the nation in two.