Accountability Fitness Quotes

Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory---let the theory go.

Minor magicians take pains to fit this traditional wizardly bill. By contrast, the really powerful magicians take pleasure in looking like accountants.

Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense.

Taking into account the public's regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.

Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband. BEATRICE Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.

A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.

So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had foreseen – an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike. Yet it was fitting: it had the sublime inevitability of a great work of art. Jan had glimpsed the universe in all its immensity, and knew now that it was no place for man. He realized at last how vain, in the ultimate analysis, had been the dream that lured him to the stars. For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.

We are surrounded by advertisements that keep us focused on what we don't have, what we should have, and how we can get it. Everything to take our eyes off the fact that there is a Holy God to whom we'll be accountable.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

The shame, embarrassment, feeling of low self-worth, and scores of "labels" we give ourselves are not fitting. I am beginning to see how I had no control over the situation. He was a big man, I was a little boy.

If you don’t know the men at your back by name, don’t be surprised if they won’t follow you into battle. On the other hand, don’t be surprised if they will, either, because there are countless other factors you must take into account. Leadership is a slippery commodity, not easily manufactured or understood.

He was now beginning to wonder whether the jigsaw was the correct metaphor for relationships between me and women after all. It didn't take account of the sheer stubbornness of human beings, their determination to affix themselves to another even if they didn't fit. They didn't care about jutting off at weird angles, and they didn't care about phone booths and Mary, Queen of Scots. They were motivated not by seamless and sensible matching, but by eyes, mouths, smiles, minds, breasts and chests and bottoms, wit, kindness, charm, romantic history and all sorts of other things that made straight edges impossible to achieve.

Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

Nobody ever,” said the Dowager sorrowfully, “credits me with normal thought processes. When a mysterious man creates a royal scandal on the banks of the Lake of Menteith with the keenest ears in Scotland strolling utterly oblivious—by her own account—in the locality, I begin to wonder. I also wonder when a delicately reared child sends a court into fits with a riddle which I invented myself.

There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.

I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark.

He was Instructor Reno Alberto, a five-foot-six man-mountain of fitness, discipline, and intelligence. He was ruthless, cruel, unrelenting taskmaster.

Using a slogan from ANT, you have 'to follow the actors themselves', that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts best define the new associations that they have been forced to established.

One of the questions I have been asked many times since this story broke is this: Now that the facts are out there, what can we do? My answer, depressing and cynical as it may be, is always the same. Not much. Not now. And certainly not until the American public and its Congressional representatives regain control of the CIA and shred the curtain of secrecy that keeps us from discovering these crimes of state until its too late. Perhaps when the government officials who presided over these outrages are safely in their crypts, and their apologists and cheerleaders are buried woth them, future historians can finally call these men to account for the miseries they caused. Even if that's all that ever happens, it will be fitting and just, because the favorable judgment of history is ultimately what they craved.

Many people feel that mass acceptance and smooth socialization are desirable life paths for a young adult… Many people are often wrong… Don’t bother being nice. Being popular and well liked is not in your best interest. Let me be more clear; if you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the public’s regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.

Christians must show that misery fits the good for heaven, while happiness prepares the bad for hell; that the wicked get all their good things in this life, and the good all their evil; that in this world God punishes the people he loves, and in the next, the ones he hates; that happiness makes us bad here, but not in heaven; that pain makes us good here, but not in hell. No matter how absurd these things may appear to the carnal mind, they must be preached and they must be believed. If they were reasonable, there would be no virtue in believing. Even the publicans and sinners believe reasonable things. To believe without evidence, or in spite of it, is accounted as righteousness to the sincere and humble christian. In short, Christians are expected to denounce all pleasant paths and rustling trees, to curse the grass and flowers, and glorify the dust and weeds. They are expected to malign the wicked people in the green and happy fields, who sit and laugh beside the gurgling springs or climb the hills and wander as they will. They are expected to point out the dangers of freedom, the safety of implicit obedience, and to show the wickedness of philosophy, the goodness of faith, the immorality of science and the purity of ignorance.

Men would be chosen for jobs on account of fitness to do the work, not because they flattered the irrational dogmas of those in power.

I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held in higher regard than others. I want to feel valued, so I say to myself to watch certain shows. I watch certain shows on the television so I can participate in dialogues and conversations and debates with people who want the same things I want. I want to dress a certain way so certain groups of people are forced to be attracted to me. I want to do my hair a certain way with certain styling products and particular combs and methods so that I can fit in with the In-Crowd. I want to spend hours upon hours at the gym, stuffing my body with what scientists are calling 'superfoods', so that I can be loved and envied by everyone around me. I want to become an icon on someone's mantle. I want to work meaningless jobs so that I can fill my wallet and parentally-advised bank accounts with monetary potential. I want to believe what's on the news so that I can feel normal along with the rest of forever. I want to listen to the Top Ten on Q102, and roll my windows down so others can hear it and see that I am listening to it, and enjoying it. I want to go to church every Sunday, and pray every other day. I want to believe that what I do is for the promise of a peaceful afterlife. I want rewards for my 'good' deeds. I want acknowledgment and praise. And I want people to know that I put out that fire. I want people to know that I support the war effort. I want people to know that I volunteer to save lives. I want to be seen and heard and pointed at with love. I want to read my name in the history books during a future full of clones exactly like me. The mirror, I've noticed, is almost always positioned above the sink. Though the sink offers more depth than a mirror, and mirror is only able to reflect, the sink is held in lower regard. Lower still is the toilet, and thought it offers even more depth than the sink, we piss and shit in it. I want these kind of architectural details to be paralleled in my every day life. I want to care more about my reflection, and less about my cleanliness. I want to be seen as someone who lives externally, and never internally, unless I am able to lock the door behind me. I want these things, because if I didn't, I would be dead in the mirrors of those around me. I would be nothing. I would be an example. Sunken, and easily washed away.

It's only after the fact that we trace the lines, join dots between things, skip over anything that doesn't fit. We make stories to account for everything that's happened. It's nice to think the world makes sense. It's nice to think that you make sense. But sometimes things just happen.

Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?

Most people look at their current state of affairs and they say, “This is who I am.” That’s not who you are. That’s who you were. Let’s say for instance that you don’t have enough money in your bank account, or you don’t have the relationship that you want, or your health and fitness aren’t up to par. That’s not who you are; that’s the residual outcome of your past thoughts and actions. So we’re constantly living in this residual, if you will, of the thoughts and actions we’ve taken in the past. When you look at your current state of affairs and define yourself by that, then you doom yourself to have nothing more than the same in future.

Dear Sirs," Flick began before loudly inhaling, "On account of there being no heat down here in account of the being no electricity on account of the brand-new energy rations so thoughtfully and nobly and honorably imposed on the steerage decks by Sovereign Nicolaeus on account of the blackouts - Aster fell prey to a brief fit of hypothermia-induced delirium de spoke against you in her maddery. She's healed up now so you don't have to worry about it happening again.

What all of this suggests is that we need a more complex understanding of identities. If we identify on the basis of race, class, sexuality, or gender alone we cannot make sense of the ways these identifications combine and change over time. The used-to-be-working class now professional woman, the woman of mixed racial parentage who appears white, the divorced mother who is now a lesbian, the former lesbian who is now straight, or the former lesbian who is now a man. Identities are always in motion; they are mobile (Ferguson, 1993). This is particularly the case for those who have been placed in identity categories that do not quite seem to fit; it is also true of many more of us, in varied ways. Just ask our current President, whose own origin story, of which he has spoken and written eloquently, is exceedingly complex. We need, I believe, a conception of identities that embraces this complexity, that takes into account temporality and also specificity.

I have provided a possible explanation for Antiochus's insane foolhardiness when left in command of the Athenian Fleet, because Thucidides's bald account is so unbelievable (unless one assumes that both Antiochus and Alkibiades were mentally defective) that any explanation seems more likely than none. Alkibiades himself is an enigma. Even allowing that no man is all black and all white, few men can ever have been more wildly and magnificently piebald. Like another strange and contradictory character Sir Walter Raleigh, he casts a glamour that comes clean down the centuries, a dazzle of personal magnetism that makes it hard to see the man behind it. I have tried to see. I have tried to fit the pieces into a coherent whole; I don't know whether I have been successful or not; but I do not think that I have anywhere falsified the portrait.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency. Later, I’m going to challenge some of Dalio’s principles, but first I want to explain the weapons he has used to wage a war on groupthink.

Such is the passage, x. 14, where, after giving an account that the sun stood still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, at the command of Joshua, (a tale only fit to amuse children). This tale of the sun standing still upon Motint Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, is one of those fables that detects itself. Such a circumstance could not have happened without being known all over the world. One half would have wondered why the sun did not rise, and the other why it did not set; and the tradition of it would be universal; whereas there is not a nation in the world that knows anything about it.

In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering, they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us. I don’t suppose the story was told cynically, because I think they believed it too.

But there is an unbounded pleasure to be had in the possession of a young, newly blossoming soul! It is like a flower, from which the best aroma evaporates when meeting the first ray of the sun; you must pluck it at that minute, breathing it in until you’re satisfied, and then throw it onto the road: perhaps someone will pick it up! I feel this insatiable greed, which swallows everything it meets on its way. I look at the suffering and joy of others only in their relation to me, as though it is food that supports the strength of my soul. I myself am not capable of going mad under the influence of passion. My ambition is stifled by circumstances, but it has manifested itself in another way, for ambition is nothing other than a thirst for power, and my best pleasure is to subject everyone around me to my will, to arouse feelings of love, devotion and fear of me—is this not the first sign and the greatest triumph of power? Being someone’s reason for suffering while not being in any position to claim the right—isn’t this the sweetest nourishment for our pride? And what is happiness? Sated pride. If I considered myself to be better, more powerful than everyone in the world, I would be happy. If everyone loved me, I would find endless sources of love within myself. Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others. An evil idea cannot enter a person’s head without his wanting to bring it into reality: ideas are organic creations, someone once said. Their birth gives them form immediately, and this form is an action. The person in whom most ideas are born is the person who acts most. Hence a genius, riveted to his office desk, must die or lose his mind, just as a man with a powerful build who has a sedentary life and modest behavior will die from an apoplectic fit. Passions are nothing other than the first developments of an idea: they are a characteristic of the heart’s youth, and whoever thinks to worry about them his whole life long is a fool: many calm rivers begin with a noisy waterfall, but not one of them jumps and froths until the very sea. And this calm is often the sign of great, though hidden, strength. The fullness and depth of both feeling and thought will not tolerate violent upsurges. The soul, suffering and taking pleasure, takes strict account of everything and is always convinced that this is how things should be. It knows that without storms, the constant sultriness of the sun would wither it. It is infused with its own life—it fosters and punishes itself, like a child. And it is only in this higher state of self-knowledge that a person can estimate the value of divine justice.

When I first took this job at the factory it was not my intention to work there very long, for I once possessed higher hopes for my life, although the exact nature of these hopes remained rather vague in my youthful mind. While the work was not arduous, and my fellow workers congenial enough, I did not imagine myself standing forever at my designated assembly block, fitting together pieces of metal into other pieces of metal, with a few interruptions throughout that day for breaks that were supposed to refresh our minds from the tedium of our work or for meal breaks to allow us to nourish our bodies. Somehow it never occurred to me that the nearby town where I and the others at the factory lived, travelling to and from our jobs along the same fog-strewn road, held no higher opportunities for me or anyone else, which no doubt accounts for the vagueness, the wispy insubstantiality, of my youthful hopes.

From then on, my computer monitored my vital signs and kept track of exactly how many calories I burned during the course of each day. If I didn’t meet my daily exercise requirements, the system prevented me from logging into my OASIS account. This meant that I couldn’t go to work, continue my quest, or, in effect, live my life. Once the lockout was engaged, you couldn’t disable it for two months. And the software was bound to my OASIS account, so I couldn’t just buy a new computer or go rent a booth in some public OASIS café. If I wanted to log in, I had no choice but to exercise first. This proved to be the only motivation I needed. The lockout software also monitored my dietary intake. Each day I was allowed to select meals from a preset menu of healthy, low-calorie foods. The software would order the food for me online and it would be delivered to my door. Since I never left my apartment, it was easy for the program to keep track of everything I ate. If I ordered additional food on my own, it would increase the amount of exercise I had to do each day, to offset my additional calorie intake. This was some sadistic software. But it worked. The pounds began to melt off, and after a few months, I was in near-perfect health. For the first time in my life I had a flat stomach, and muscles. I also had twice the energy, and I got sick a lot less frequently. When the two months ended and I was finally given the option to disable the fitness lockout, I decided to keep it in place. Now, exercising was a part of my daily ritual.

Sullivan came to feel that human activity and human mind are not things that reside in the individual, but rather are generated in interactions among individuals; personalities are shaped to fit interpersonal niches and are not understandable unless that complex, interactive honing process is taken into account.

But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere.

And how shall we be able to tell whether he is a true zaddik?” The Baal Shem replied. “Ask him to advise you what to do to keep unholy thoughts from disturbing you in your prayers and studies. If he gives you advice, then you will know that he belongs to those who are of no account. For this is the service of men in the world to the very hour of their death; to struggle time after time with the extraneous, and time after time to uplift and fit it into the nature of the Divine Name.

She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots - "religious with undertones of ethnic tension" the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce red rage will run through her at how it has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words, all those bodies.

The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it." The prince paused and all waited, expecting him to go on again and finish the story. "Is that all?" asked Aglaya. "All? Yes," said the prince, emerging from a momentary reverie. "And why did you tell us this?" "Oh, I happened to recall it, that's all! It fitted into the conversation—" "You probably wish to deduce, prince," said Alexandra, "that moments of time cannot be reckoned by money value, and that sometimes five minutes are worth priceless treasures. All this is very praiseworthy; but may I ask about this friend of yours, who told you the terrible experience of his life? He was reprieved, you say; in other words, they did restore to him that 'eternity of days.' What did he do with these riches of time? Did he keep careful account of his minutes?" "Oh no, he didn't! I asked him myself. He said that he had not lived a bit as he had intended, and had wasted many, and many a minute." "Very well, then there's an experiment, and the thing is proved; one cannot live and count each moment; say what you like, but one cannot." "That is true," said the prince, "I have thought so myself. And yet, why shouldn't one do it?" "You think, then, that you could live more wisely than other people?" said Aglaya. "I have had that idea." "And you have it still?" "Yes — I have it still," the prince replied.

She liked numbers and sums. She devised a game in which each number was a family member and the “answer” made a family grouping with a story to it. Naught was a babe in arms. He gave no trouble. Whenever he appeared you just “carried” him. The figure 1 was a pretty baby girl just learning to walk, and easy to handle; 2 was a baby boy who could walk and talk a little. He went into family life (into sums, etc.) with very little trouble. And 3 was an older boy in kindergarten, who had to be watched a little. Then there was 4, a girl of Francie’s age. She was almost as easy to “mind” as 2. The mother was 5, gentle and kind. In large sums, she came along and made everything easy the way a mother should. The father, 6, was harder than the others but very just. But 7 was mean. He was a crotchety old grandfather and not at all accountable for how he came out. The grandmother, 8, was hard too, but easier to understand than 7. Hardest of all was 9. He was company and what a hard time fitting him into family life! When Francie added a sum, she would fix a little story to go with the result. If the answer was 924, it meant that the little boy and girl were being minded by company while the rest of the family went out. When a number such as 1024 appeared, it meant that all the little children were playing together in the yard. The number 62 meant that papa was taking the little boy for a walk; 50 meant that mama had the baby out in the buggy for an airing and 78 meant grandfather and grandmother sitting home by the fire of a winter’s evening. Each single combination of numbers was a new set-up for the family and no two stories were ever the same. Francie took the game with her up into algebra. X was the boy’s sweetheart who came into the family life and complicated it. Y was the boy friend who caused trouble. So arithmetic was a warm and human thing to Francie and occupied many lonely hours of her time.

Consider thinking of architectural decisions as investments and take into account the associated rate of return, it is a useful approach for finding out how pragmatic or fit for purpose every option on the table is.

This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper.

Suicide" Kissshot said disappointedly . Her eyes were downcast , facing the town spread out below her . "A common reason , one accounting for nine-tenths of vampire deaths". ".....". "Incidentally , the remaining tenth succumb to vampire slayers - any other reason fit within the margins of a rounding error". "Suicide ? Why ?". "Do they not speak of dying of boredom ?". Boredom was a killer . Guilt could kill you - but boredom was lethal .

The Jews have a saying worth remembering: "Whoever doesn't teach his son some trade or business, teaches him to be a thief." As soon as ever I can, I will make my children apprehensive of the main end for which they are to live; that so they may as soon as may be, begin to live; and their youth not be nothing but vanity. I will show them, that their main end must be, to, acknowledge the great God, and His glorious Christ; and bring others to acknowledge Him: and that they are never wise nor well, but when they are doing so. I will make them able to answer the grand question of why they live; and what is the end of the actions that fill their lives? I will teach them that their Creator and Redeemer is to be obeyed in everything, and everything is to be done in obedience to Him. I will teach them how even their diversions, and their ornaments, and the tasks of their education, must all be to fit them for the further service of Him to whom I have devoted them; and how in these also, His commandments must be the rule of all they do. I will sometimes therefore surprise them with an inquiry, "Child, what is this for? Give me a good account of why you do it?" How comfortably shall I see them walking in the light, if I may bring them wisely to answer this inquiry. -A Father's Resolutions, www.spurgeon.org/~phil/mather/resolvd...

Many people will try to get a job even if they don't fit the company's stated values, but very few will do so if they know that they're going to be held accountable, day in and day out, for behavior that violates the values.

But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere.

When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible.

The worst of what is called good society is not only that it offers us the companionship of people who are unable to win either our praise or our affection, but that it does not allow of our being that which we naturally are; it compels us, for the sake of harmony, to shrivel up, or even alter our shape altogether. Intellectual conversation, whether grave or humorous, is only fit for intellectual society; it is downright abhorrent to ordinary people, to please whom it is absolutely necessary to be commonplace and dull. This demands an act of severe self-denial; we have to forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to become like other people. No doubt their company may be set down against our loss in this respect; but the more a man is worth, the more he will find that what he gains does not cover what he loses, and that the balance is on the debit side of the account; for the people with whom he deals are generally bankrupt,—that is to say, there is nothing to be got from their society which can compensate either for its boredom, annoyance and disagreeableness, or for the self-denial which it renders necessary. Accordingly, most society is so constituted as to offer a good profit to anyone who will exchange it for solitude. Nor

But in situations where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates, the sociology of the social is no longer able to trace actors’ new associations. At this point, the last thing to do would be to limit in advance the shape, size, heterogeneity, and combination of associations. To the convenient shorthand of the social, one has to substitute the painful and costly longhand of its associations. The duties of the social scientist mutate accordingly: it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known types. You have to grant them back the ability to make up their own theories of what the social is made of. Your task is no longer to impose some order, to limit the range of acceptable entities, to teach actors what they are, or to add some reflexivity to their blind practice. Using a slogan from ANT, you have ‘to follow the actors themselves’, that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish.

It's not you, it's them. It really is. And those boxes, those binaries, those bathroom signs, those rigid roles, they hurt them too, they do, they carve away at their souls and secret desires and self-esteem and believable dreams and possible wardrobes and acceptable careers just like they do ours, just it's harder for them to tell it's happening on account of no one is hassling them in the bathrooms every other day about it. They somehow just fit better in those boxes, so they can't see what fitting has cost them, not like we can.

I suggest a Money Market account with no penalties and full check-writing privileges for your emergency fund. We have a large emergency fund for our household in a mutual-fund company Money Market account. Wherever you get your mutual funds, look at the website to find Money Market accounts that pay interest equal to one-year CDs. I haven’t found bank Money Market accounts to be competitive. The FDIC does not insure the mutual-fund Money Market accounts, but I keep mine there anyway because I’ve never known one to fail. Keep in mind that the interest earned is not the main thing. The main thing is that the money is available to cover emergencies. Your wealth building is not going to happen in this account; that will come later, in other places. This account is more like insurance against rainy days than it is investing.

The Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene, or personal finances. I took mandatory classes about balancing a checkbook, saving, and investing. When I came home from boot camp with my fifteen-hundred-dollar earnings deposited in a mediocre regional bank, a senior enlisted marine drove me to Navy Federal—a respected credit union—and had me open an account. When I caught strep throat and tried to tough it out, my commanding officer noticed and ordered me to the doctor. We

Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942) he [Henryk Goldszmit, pen name: Janusz Korczak] joined them aboard the train bound for Treblinka, because, he said, he knew his presence would calm them—“You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this.” A photograph taken at the Umschlagplatz (Transshipment Square) shows him marching, hatless, in military boots, hand in hand with several children, while 192 other children and ten staff members follow, four abreast, escorted by German soldiers. Korczak and the children boarded red boxcars not much larger than chicken coops, usually stuffed with seventy-five vertical adults, though all the children easily fit. In Joshua Perle’s eyewitness account in The Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, he describes the scene: “A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak.” In 1971, the Russians named a newly discovered asteroid after him, 2163 Korczak, but maybe they should have named it Ro, the planet he dreamed of. The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr, and the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls make possible the world’s salvation. According to Jewish legend, these few, through their good hearts and good deeds, keep the too-wicked world from being destroyed. For their sake alone, all of humanity is spared. The legend tells that they are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and that most of them remain unrecognized throughout their lives, while they choose to perpetuate goodness, even in the midst of inferno.

Mrs. Sitta, seeing the toing and froing of ambulances, asked if bingo would be canceled. “Those of us who are fit shouldn’t have to suffer on account of those who are not,” she brazenly declared. You’d almost wish that at her next bingo game she would have a stroke, break a hip and choke to death on a cookie.

Funnel The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost-new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died. The children honored their separate arts; two became moderately famous, three married and fattened their delicate share of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was a concert pianist. She had a notable career and wore cropped hair and walked like a man, or so I heard when prying a childhood car into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan. One died a pinafore child, she stays her five years forever. And here is one that wrote- I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive words and scratch out my short marginal notes and finger my accounts. back from that great-grandfather I have come to tidy a country graveyard for his sake, to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake. I like best to think of that Bunyan man slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan of culture to do it big. On this same scale he built seven arking houses and they still stand. One, five stories up, straight up like a square box, still dominates its coastal edge of land. It is rented cheap in the summer musted air to sneaker-footed families who pad through its rooms and sometimes finger the yellow keys of an old piano that wheezes bells of mildew. Like a shoe factory amid the spruce trees it squats; flat roof and rows of windows spying through the mist. Where those eight children danced their starfished summers, the thirty-six pines sighing, that bearded man walked giant steps and chanced his gifts in numbers. Back from that great-grandfather I have come to puzzle a bending gravestone for his sake, to question this diminishing and feed a minimum of children their careful slice of suburban cake.

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.

Although, to restless and ardent minds, morning may be the fitting season for exertion and activity, it is not always at that time that hope is strongest or the spirit most sanguine and buoyant. In trying and doubtful positions, youth, custom, a steady contemplation of the difficulties which surround us, and a familiarity with them, imperceptibly diminish our apprehensions and beget comparative indifference, if not a vague and reckless confidence in some relief, the means or nature of which we care not to foresee. But when we come, fresh, upon such things in the morning, with that dark and silent gap between us and yesterday; with every link in the brittle chain of hope, to rivet afresh; our hot enthusiasm subdued, and cool calm reason substituted in its stead; doubt and misgiving revive. As the traveller sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight and mind together, so, the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new height to be attained. Distances stretch out before him which, last night, were scarcely taken into account, and the light which gilds all nature with its cheerful beams, seems but to shine upon the weary obstacles that yet lie strewn between him and the grave.

Throughout his life, he was the opposite of all show business clichés. His marriage endured: by all accounts, he dearly loved his wife. Words most often used by those who knew him were “decent,” “genial,” “gentle,” and “generous.” He was a constant target of panhandlers and always had a roll of money in his pockets for handouts. He was not, apparently, a chummy man. His few real intimates, old friends like Doc Rockwell and Uncle Jim Harkins, had been with him in vaudeville and appeared occasionally on his show. He and Portland avoided crowds, lived simply in a New York apartment, and never owned a car. “I don’t want to own anything,” he once told a reporter, “that won’t fit in my coffin.

Here’s the deal. When you get married, you become a team. The pastor at your wedding wasn’t joking when he said, “And now you are one.” It’s called unity. The old marriage vows say, “Unto thee I pledge all my worldly goods.” In other words, “I’m all in,” so combine the checking accounts. It’s hard to have unity when you separate your bank accounts. When his money is over here, and her money is over there, it’s easy to live in your own little financial world instead of working as a team. When you do your spending together, it’s about “our” money. We have an income and we have expenses and we have goals. So when you’re both in agreement on where the money is going, then you’ve taken a major step to being on the same page in your marriage, and you will create awesome levels of communication. This all boils down to trust. Do you trust your spouse or not? I’ve heard from people who keep separate bank accounts just in case their spouse leaves them. Well, why on earth would you marry someone you can’t trust? And if that’s really the case, then you need marriage counseling, not separate bank accounts! Your spouse isn’t your roommate, and this isn’t a joint business venture. It’s a marriage! You don’t run your household and your life separately. Your job is to love each other well, and that includes having shared financial goals—which is hard to do when you have separate accounts.

Having seen several hundred lease agreements entered into by people I have counseled, my financial calculator confirms that the average interest rate is 14 percent. Shouldn’t you lease or rent things that go down in value? Not necessarily, and the math doesn’t work on a car, for sure. Follow me through this example: If you rent (lease) a car with a value of $22,000 for three years, and when you turn it in at the end of that three-year lease the car is worth $10,000, someone has to cover the $12,000 loss. You’re not stupid, so you know that General Motors, Ford, or any of the other auto giants aren’t going to put together a plan to lose money. Your fleece/lease payment is designed to cover the loss in value ($12,000 spread over 36 months is equal to $333 per month), plus provide profit (the interest you pay). Where did you get a deal in that? You didn’t! On top of that, there is the charge of 10 to 17 cents per mile for going over the allotted miles and the penalties everyone turning in a lease has experienced for “excessive wear and tear,” which takes into account every little nick, dent, carpet tear, smudge, or smell. You end up writing a large check just to walk away after renting your car. The whole idea of the back-end penalties is twofold: to get you to fleece/lease another one so you can painlessly roll the gotchas into the new lease, and to make sure the car company makes money.

Henri said our names were fitting because we were destined to be together in our old age, like our great-great-aunts. Two gray old ladies in the bodies of teenage girls. Someday we’d live in a big house with faded curtains, a dozen or so cats, and a handful of our marbles long ago lost. On all accounts—our destiny, her clairvoyance, and our soon-to-be missing marbles—I believed her.

Human nature inclines us to have recourse to petition for the purpose of obtaining from another, especially from a person of higher rank, what we hope to receive from him. So prayer is recommended to men, that by it they may obtain from God what they hope to secure from Him. But the reason why prayer is necessary for obtaining something from a man is not the same as the reason for its necessity when there is question of obtaining a favor from God. Prayer is addressed to man, first, to lay bare the desire and the need of the petitioner, and secondly, to incline the mind of him to whom the prayer is addressed to grant the petition. These purposes have no place in the prayer that is sent up to God. When we pray we do not intend to manifest our needs or desires to God, for He knows all things. The Psalmist says to God: "Lord, all my desire is before Thee" and in the Gospel we are told: "Your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things." Again, the will of God is not influenced by human words to will what He had previously not willed. For, as we read in Numbers 23:19, "God is not a man, that He should lie, nor as the son of man, that He should be changed"; nor is God moved to repentance, as we are assured in 1 Kings 15:29. Prayer, then, for obtaining something from God, is necessary for man on account of the very one who prays, that he may reflect on his shortcomings and may turn his mind to desiring fervently and piously what he hopes to gain by his petition. In this way he is rendered fit to receive the favor.

The heartwood," Rob murmured, looking at me. "You wanted to marry me in the heart of Major Oak." I beamed at him grateful that he understood. "And Scar," he whispered. I leaned in close. "Are you wearing knives to our wedding?" Nodding, I laughed, telling him, "I was going to get you here one way or another, Hood." He laughed, a bright, merry sound. Standing in the heart of the tree, he reached again for my hand, fingers sliding over mine. Touching his hand, a rope of lightening lashed round my fingers, like it seared us together. Now, and for always. His fingers moved on mine, rubbing over my hand before capturing it tight and turning me to the priest. The priest looked over his shoulder, watching as the sun began to dip. He led us in prayer, he asked me to speak the same words I'd spoken not long past to Gisbourne, but that whole thing felt like a bad dream, like I were waking and it were fading and gone for good. "Lady Scarlet." he asked me with a smile, "known to some as Lady Marian of Huntingdon, will thou have this lord to thy wedded husband, will thou love him and honour him, keep him and obey him, in health and in sickness, as a wife should a husband, forsaking all others on account of him, so long as ye both shall live?" I looked at Robin, tears burning in my eyes. "I will," I promised. "I will, always." Rob's face were beaming back at me, his ocean eyes shimmering bright. The priest smiled. "Robin of Locksley, will thou have this lady to thy wedded wife, will thou love her and honor her, keep her and guard her, in health and in sickness, as a husband should a wife, forsaking all others on account of her, so long as ye both shall live?" the priest asked. "Yes," Rob said. "I will." "You have the rings?" the priest asked Rob. "I do," I told the priest, taking two rings from where Bess had tied them to my dress. I'd sent Godfrey out to buy them at market without Rob knowing. "I knew you weren't planning on this," I told him. Rob just grinned like a fool at me, taking the ring I handed him to put on my finger. Laughs bubbled up inside of me, and I felt like I were smiling so wide something were stuck in my cheeks and holding me open. More shy and proud than I thought I'd be, I said. "I take you as me wedded husband, Robin. And thereto I plight my troth." I pushed the ring onto his finger. He took my half hand in one of his, but the other- holding the ring- went into his pocket. "I may not have known I would marry you today Scar," he said. "But I did know I would marry you." He showed me a ring, a large ruby set in delicate gold. "This," he said to me, "was my mother's. It's the last thing I have of hers, and when I met you and loved you and realized your name was the exact colour of the stone- " He swallowed, and cleared his throat, looking at me with the blue eyes that shot right through me. "This was meant to be Scarlet. I was always meant to love you. To marry you." The priest coughed. "Say the words, my son, and you will marry her." Rob grinned and I laughed, and Rob stepped closer, cradling my hand. "I take you as my wedded wife, Scarlet. And thereto I plight my troth." He slipped the ring on my finger and it fit. "Receive the Holy Spirit," the priest said, and kissed Robin on the cheek. Rob's happy grin turned a touch wolflike as he turned back to me, hauling me against him and angling his mouth over mine. I wrapped my arms around him and my head spun- I couldn't tell if we were spinning, if I were dizzy, if my feet were on the ground anymore at all, but all I knew, all I cared for, were him, his mouth against mine, and letting the moment we became man and wife spin into eternity.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency.

Of course the theologians fought the facts found by the geologists, the scientists, and sought to sustain the sacred Scriptures. They mistook the bones of the mastodon for those of human beings, and by them proudly proved that "there were giants in those days." They accounted for the fossils by saying that God had made them to try our faith, or that the Devil had imitated the works of the Creator. They answered the geologists by saying that the "days" in Genesis were long periods of time, and that after all the flood might have been local. They told the astronomers that the sun and moon were not actually, but only apparently, stopped. And that the appearance was produced by the reflection and refraction of light. They excused the slavery and polygamy, the robbery and murder upheld in the Old Testament by saying that the people were so degraded that Jehovah was compelled to pander to their ignorance and prejudice. In every way the clergy sought to evade the facts, to dodge the truth, to preserve the creed. At first they flatly denied the facts -- then they belittled them -- then they harmonized them -- then they denied that they had denied them. Then they changed the meaning of the "inspired" book to fit the facts. At first they said that if the facts, as claimed, were true, the Bible was false and Christianity itself a superstition. Afterward they said the facts, as claimed, were true and that they established beyond all doubt the inspiration of the Bible and the divine origin of orthodox religion. Anything they could not dodge, they swallowed and anything they could not swallow, they dodged. I gave up the Old Testament on account of its mistakes, its absurdities, its ignorance and its cruelty. I gave up the New because it vouched for the truth of the Old. I gave it up on account of its miracles, its contradictions, because Christ and his disciples believe in the existence of devils -- talked and made bargains with them. expelled them from people and animals. This, of itself, is enough. We know, if we know anything, that devils do not exist -- that Christ never cast them out, and that if he pretended to, he was either ignorant, dishonest or insane.

Reading contemporary accounts brings home the fact that of any battle or campaign there are at least for different versions. One is that of those who fought in it, two is of the generals who commanded it, three is of those who reported on it at the time and made what they could of a mass of confused and often misleading information, and four is the version of those who had a theory about it and reported those facts which happened to fit the version they were trying to portray.

We have to start accounting for the three themes that define women's relationship with that world. The first of these themes is the female body - or, to be precise - its invisibility. Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design - whether medical, technological or architectural - has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren't designed for our bodies. It leads us to dying from drugs that don't work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don't fit very well. There is an irony in how the female body is apparently invisible when it comes to collecting data, because when it comes to the second trend that defines women's lives, the visibility of the female body is key. That tend is male sexual violence against women - how we don't measure it, don't design our world to account for it, and in so doing, allow it to limit women's liberty.

In order to make clear what this fourth stage has in view, and to throw some light on the curious term 'transformation,' we must first take account of those psychic needs of man which were not given a place in the other stages. In other words, we must ascertain what could seem more desirable or lead further than the claim to be a normally adapted, social being. Nothing is more useful or fitting than to be a normal human being; but the very notion of a 'normal human being' suggests a restriction to the average – as does also the concept of adaptation. It is only a man who as things stand, already finds it difficult to come to terms with the everyday world who can see in this restriction a desirable improvement: a man, let us say, whose neurosis unfits him for normal life. To be 'normal' is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful, for all those who have not yet found an adaptation. But for people who have far more ability than the average, for whom it was never hard to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work-for them restriction to the normal signifies the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom, infernal sterility and hopelessness. As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead 'abnormal' lives.

The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man. Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does. And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.

Reading contemporary accounts brings home the fact that of any battle or campaign there are at least for different versions. One is that of those who fought in it, two is of the generals who commanded it, three is of those who reported on it at the time and made what they could of a mass of confused and often misleading information, and four is the version of those who had a theory about it and reported those facts which happened to fit the version they were trying to portray." ~The Crimean War: A reappraisal

What consideration remains to be urged in support of the creation of the Universe by a supreme Being? Its admirable fitness for the production of certain effects, that wonderful consent of all its parts, that universal harmony by whose changeless laws innumerable systems of worlds perform their stated revolutions, and the blood is driven through the veins of the minutest animalcule that sports in the corruption of an insect’s lymph: on this account did the Universe require an intelligent Creator, because it exists producing invariable effects, and inasmuch as it is admirably organized for the production of these effects, so the more did it require a creative intelligence. Thus have we arrived at the substance of your assertion, “That whatever exists, producing certain effects, stands in need of a Creator, and the more conspicuous is its fitness for the production of these effects, the more certain will be our conclusion that it would not have existed from eternity, but must have derived its origin from an intelligent creator.” In what respect then do these arguments apply to the Universe, and not apply to God?

Mr. Colbert, the famous minister of Louis XIV, was a man of probity, of great industry and knowledge of detail, of great experience and acuteness in the examination of public accounts, and of abilities, in short, every way fitted for introducing method and good order into the collection and expenditure of the public revenue. That minister had unfortunately embraced all the prejudices of the mercantile system, in its nature and essence a system of restraint and regulation, and such as could scarce fail to be agreeable to a laborious and plodding man of business, who had been accustomed to regulate the different departments of public offices, and to establish the necessary checks and controls for confining each to its proper sphere. The industry and commerce of a great country he endeavoured to regulate upon the same model as the departments of a public office; and instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice, he bestowed upon certain branches of industry extraordinary privileges, while he laid others under as extraordinary restraints.

It is as if there are two big wolves living inside me; one is white and one is black. The white wolf is good, kind, and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all that is around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. The good wolf, grounded and strong in the understanding of who he is and what he is capable of, fights only when it is right to do so and when he must in order to protect himself or his family, and even then he does it in the right way. He looks out for all the other wolves in his pack and never deviates from his nature. “But there is a black wolf also that lives inside me, and this wolf is very different. He is loud, angry, discontent, jealous, and afraid. The littlest thing will set him off into a fit of rage. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think clearly because his greed for more and his anger and hate are so great. But it is helpless anger, son, for his anger will change nothing. He looks for trouble wherever he goes, so he easily finds it. He trusts no one, so he has no real friends.” The old chief sits in silence for a few minutes, letting the story of the two wolves penetrate his young grandson’s mind. Then he slowly bends down, looks deeply into his grandson’s eyes, and confesses, “Sometimes it’s hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them fight hard to dominate my spirit.” Riveted by his elder’s account of this great internal battle, the boy tugs on his grandfather’s breechcloth and anxiously asks, “Which one of the wolves wins, Grandfather?” And with a knowing smile and a strong, firm voice, the chief says, “They both do, son. You see, if I choose to feed only the white wolf, the black wolf will be waiting around every corner looking to see when I am off balance or too busy to pay attention to one of my responsibilities, and he will attack the white wolf and cause many problems for me and our tribe. He will always be angry and fighting to get the attention he craves. But if I pay a little attention to the black wolf because I understand his nature, if I acknowledge him for the strong force that he is and let him know that I respect him for his character and will use him to help me if we as a tribe are ever in big trouble, he will be happy, the white wolf will be happy, and they both win. We all win.

Secondly, it impels us to live a life as free of trouble and as full of joy as possible, while assisting everyone else to achieve that goal on account of the common nature we share. For there’s never been an advocate of virtue and enemy of pleasure so grim and inflexible who won’t, as he directs you on to toils, vigils and self-denial, urge you at the same time to do your utmost to relieve the poverty and misfortune of others. He’ll regard such solidarity and mutual support as worthy of praise in the name of humanity, since it is essentially humane (and no other virtue is more fitting to human beings than that) to relieve the troubles of others, to wipe away their sorrows and bring them back to an agreeable, that is a pleasurable, life. Why, then, shouldn’t nature prompt us to do the same for ourselves? For either a joyful life, one full of pleasure, is a bad thing: in which case, not only should you not help anyone to it, but you should actively deprive them of it as noxious and harmful. Or else, if you are not only allowed but even obliged to assist others to such a joyful life, then why not first of all do it for yourself? You should be no less generous to yourself than you are to others.24

suggest funding college, or at least the first step of college, with an Educational Savings Account (ESA), funded in a growth-stock mutual fund. The Educational Savings Account, nicknamed the Education IRA, grows tax-free when used for higher education. If you invest $2,000 a year from birth to age eighteen in prepaid tuition, that would purchase about $72,000 in tuition, but through an ESA in mutual funds averaging 12 percent, you would have $126,000 tax-free. The ESA currently allows you to invest $2,000 per year, per child, if your household income is under $220,000 per year. If you start investing early, your child can go to virtually any college if you save $166.67 per month ($2,000/year). For most of you, Baby Step Five is handled if you start an ESA fully funded and your child is under eight. If your children are older, or you have aspirations of expensive schools, graduate school, or PhD programs that you pay for, you will have to save more than the ESA will allow. I would still start with the ESA if the income limits don’t keep you out. Start with the ESA because you can invest it anywhere, in any fund or any mix of funds, and change it at will. It is the most flexible, and you have the most control.

This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable. In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, were short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words—goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joy camp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others—were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further. So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised.

The dilemma facing Bush and the Republicans was clear. If Marshall left, they could not leave the Supreme Court an all-white institution; at the same time, they had to choose a nominee who would stay true to the conservative cause. The list of plausible candidates who fit both qualifications pretty much began and ended with Clarence Thomas. … There was awkwardness about the selection from the start. "The fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this," Bush said. "He is the best qualified at this time." The statement was self-evidently preposterous; Thomas had served as a judge for only a year and, before that, displayed few of the customary signs of professional distinction that are the rule for future justices. For example, he had never argued a single case in any federal appeals court, much less in the Supreme Court; he had never written a book, an article, or even a legal brief of any consequence. Worse, Bush's endorsement raised themes that would haunt not only Thomas's confirmation hearings but also his tenure as a justice. Like the contemporary Republican Party as a whole, Bush and Thomas opposed preferential treatment on account of race—and Bush had chosen Thomas in large part because of his race. The contradiction rankled.

Some persons whom I had interviewed had instantaneous “spontaneous recoveries during prayer, including one case in which other cases of such spontaneous recoveries were not known, but their doctors classified the recoveries as anomalies and refused to admit that a miracle had occurred. One doctor also told me of a dramatic, medically inexplicable healing that occurred after prayer, in which case he was an eyewitness, but the surgeon was content to label it a “spontaneous healing.”[151] This approach to classifying data to fit existing naturalistic paradigms inevitably obscures all potential evidence in conflict with the paradigm.

The founding of a science more or less on the notion of repetition brings in its train yet another delusion of a quantitative kind, the delusion that consists in thinking that the accumulation of a large number of facts can be of use by itself as ‘proof' of a theory; nevertheless, even a little reflection will make it evident that facts of the same kind are always indefinite in multitude, so that they can never all be taken into account, quite apart from the consideration that the same facts usually fit several different theories equally well. It will be said that the establishment of a greater number of facts does at least give more ‘probability' to a theory; but to say so is to admit that no certitude can be arrived at in that way, and that therefore the conclusions promulgated have nothing ‘exact' about them; it is also an admission of the wholly ‘empirical' character of modern science, although, by a strange irony, its partisans are pleased to accuse of ‘empiricism' the knowledge of the ancients, whereas exactly the opposite is the truth: for this ancient knowledge, of the true nature of which they have no idea whatever, started from principles and not from experimental observations, so that it can truly be said that profane science is built up exactly the opposite way round to traditional science.

And it is a very great fault amongst a very great part of Christians, that in their enquiries of religion, even the best of them ordinarily ask but these two questions, "Is it lawful? Is it necessary?" If they find it lawful, they will do it without scruple or restraint; and then they suffer imperfection, or receive the reward of folly: for it may be lawful, and yet not fit to be done; it may be it is not expedient; and he that will do all that he can do lawfully, would, if he durst, do something that is not lawful. And as great an error is on the other hand in the other question. He that too strictly enquires of an action whether it be necessary or no, would do well to ask also whether it be good? whether it be of advantage to the interest of his soul? For if a christian man or woman; that is, a redeemed, blessed, obliged person, a great beneficiary, endeared to God beyond all the comprehensions of a man's imagination, one that is less than the least of all God's mercies, and yet hath received many great ones and hopes for more, if he should do nothing but what is necessary, that is, nothing but what he is compelled to; then he hath the obligations of a son, and the affections of a slave, which is the greatest undecency of the world in the accounts of christianity. If a Christian will do no more than what is necessary, he will quickly be tempted to omit something of that also. . . . He that will do every thing that is lawful, and nothing but what is necessary, will be an enemy when he dares, and a friend when he cannot help it.

This individual, who, either in his own person or in that of some member of his family, seemed to be always in trouble (which in that place meant Newgate), called to announce that his eldest daughter was taken up on suspicion of shoplifting. As he imparted this melancholy circumstance to Wemmick, Mr Jaggers standing magisterially before the fire and taking no share in the proceedings, Mike’s eye happened to twinkle with a tear. ‘What are you about?’ demanded Wemmick, with the utmost indignation. ‘What do you come snivelling here for?’ ‘I did’t go to do it, Mr Wemmick.’ ‘You did,’ said Wemmick. ‘How dare you? You’re not in a fit state to come here, if you can’t come here without spluttering like a bad pen. What do you mean by it?’ ‘A man can’t help his feelings, Mr Wemmick,’ pleaded Mike. ‘His what?’ demanded Wemmick, quite savagely. ‘Say that again!’ ‘Now, look here my man,’ said Mr Jaggers, advancing a step, and pointing to the door. ‘Get out of this office. I’ll have no feelings here. Get out.’ ‘It serves you right,’ said Wemmick. ‘Get out.’ So the unfortunate Mike very humbly withdrew, and Mr Jaggers and Wemmick appeared to have re-established their good understanding, and went to work again with an air of refreshment upon them as if they had just had lunch. Chapter Thirteen From Little Britain, I went, with my cheque in my pocket, to Miss Skiffins’s brother, the accountant; and Miss Skiffins’s brother, the accountant, going straight to Clarriker’s and bringing Clarriker to me, I had the great satisfaction of concluding that arrangement.

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")

This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight. Nature, however, has not left this weakness, which is of so much importance, altogether without a remedy; nor has she abandoned us entirely to the delusions of self-love. Our continual observations upon the conduct of others, insensibly lead us to form to ourselves certain general rules concerning what is fit and proper either to be done or to be avoided. Some of their actions shock all our natural sentiments. We hear every body about us express the like detestation against them. This still further confirms, and even exasperates our natural sense of their deformity. It satisfies us that we view them in the proper light, when we see other people view them in the same light. We resolve never to be guilty of the like, nor ever, upon any account, to render ourselves in this manner the objects of universal disapprobation. We thus naturally lay down to ourselves a general rule, that all such actions are to be avoided, as tending to render us odious, contemptible, or punishable, the objects of all those sentiments for which we have the greatest dread and aversion. Other actions, on the contrary, call forth our approbation, and we hear every body around us express the same favourable opinion concerning them. Every body is eager to honour and reward them. They excite all those sentiments for which we have by nature the strongest desire; the love, the gratitude, the admiration of mankind. We become ambitious of performing the like; and thus naturally lay down to ourselves a rule of another kind, that every opportunity of acting in this manner is carefully to be sought after. It is thus that the general rules of morality are formed. They are ultimately founded upon experience of what, in particular instances, our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety, approve, or disapprove of. We do not originally approve or condemn particular actions; because, upon examination, they appear to be agreeable or inconsistent with a certain general rule. The general rule, on the contrary, is formed, by finding from experience, that all actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner, are approved or disapproved of.

Here, you can read the letter. . . . See if you know what he wants. See if you know what I’m meant to do.” Angela didn’t reach out to take the ill-written pages on their lined paper. She sat with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. There was a silence for a while. “I don’t need to read the letter. I know what he wants,” Angela said eventually. “He wants you to make the decisions. He wants you to take on the responsibility.” Clare was surprised. “Why?” “Because you’re not Chrissie, who wouldn’t know what day it was, and you’re not your mother who would cry her eyes out, and you’re not your father who would get into a temper and you’re not Ben and Jim who are too young to be taken into account. And because you’re bright and got a scholarship, that’s going to fit you and make you ready for any burden from now on.

Our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial, as it is, by no means, fitted to endure. To make this more evident, let us examine those miracles, related in scripture; and not to lose ourselves in too wide a field, let us confine ourselves to such as we find in the Pentateuch, which we shall examine, according to the principles of these pretended Christians, not as the word or testimony of God himself, but as the production of a mere human writer and historian. Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin. Upon reading this book, we find it full of prodigies and miracles. It gives an account of a state of the world and of human nature entirely different from the present: Of our fall from that state: Of the age of man, extended to near a thousand years: Of the destruction of the world by a deluge: Of the arbitrary choice of one people, as the favourites of heaven; and that people the countrymen of the author: Of their deliverance from bondage by prodigies the most astonishing imaginable: I desire any one to lay his hand upon his heart, and after a serious consideration declare, whether he thinks that the falsehood of such a book, supported by such a testimony, would be more extraordinary and miraculous than all the miracles it relates; which is, however, necessary to make it be received, according to the measures of probability

We are here this afternoon to mourn the passing of two good friends, Terrence Dace and Felix Beider. They were homeless. Their ways were not those we most desire for ourselves, but that didn’t make them wrong. We seem determined to save the homeless, to fix them, to change them into something other than what they are. We want them to be like us, but they are not. The homeless do not want our pity, nor do they deserve our scorn. Our judgments about them, for good or for ill, negate their right to live as they please. Both the urge to rescue and the need to condemn fail to take into account the concept of their personal liberty, which they may exercise as they see fit as long as their actions fall within the law. The homeless are not lesser mortals. For Terrence and Felix, their battles were within and their victories hard-won. I think of these two men as soldiers of the poor, part of an army of the disaffiliated. The homeless have established a nation within a nation, but we are not at war. Why should we not coexist in peace when we may be in greater need of salvation than they? This is what the homeless long for: respect, freedom from hunger, shelter from the elements, safety, the companionship of the like-minded. They want to live without fear. They want to enjoy the probity of the open air without the risk of bodily harm. They want to be warm. They want the comfort of a clean bed when they are ill, relief from pain, a hand offered in friendship. Ordinary conversation. Simple needs. Why are their choices so hard for us to accept? What you see before you is their home. This is their dwelling place. This grass, this sunlight, these palms, this mighty ocean, the moon, the stars, the clouds overhead though they sometimes harbor rain. Under this canopy they have staked out a life for themselves. For Terrence and for Felix, this is also the wide bridge over which they passed from life into death. Their graves will be unmarked but that does not mean they are forgotten. The Earth remembers them, even as it gathers them tenderly into its

Once a renowned skirt-chaser, now an exceptionally devoted husband, St. Vincent knew as much about these matters as any man alive. When Cam had asked glumly if a decrease in physical urges was something that naturally occurred as a man approached his thirties, St. Vincent had choked on his drink. “Good God, no,” the viscount had said, coughing slightly as a swallow of brandy seared his throat. They had been in the manager’s office of the club, going over account books in the early hours of the morning. St. Vincent was a handsome man with wheat-colored hair and pale blue eyes. Some claimed he had the most perfect form and features of any man alive. The looks of a saint, the soul of a scoundrel. “If I may ask, what kind of women have you been taking to bed?” “What do you mean, what kind?” Cam had asked warily. “Beautiful or plain?” “Beautiful, I suppose.” “Well, there’s your problem,” St. Vincent said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Plain women are far more enjoyable. There’s no better aphrodisiac than gratitude.” “Yet you married a beautiful woman.” A slow smile had curved St. Vincent’s lips. “Wives are a different case altogether. They require a great deal of effort, but the rewards are substantial. I highly recommend wives. Especially one’s own.” Cam had stared at his employer with annoyance, reflecting that serious conversation with St. Vincent was often hampered by the viscount’s fondness for turning it into an exercise of wit. “If I understand you, my lord,” he said curtly, “your recommendation for a lack of desire is to start seducing unattractive women?” Picking up a silver pen holder, St. Vincent deftly fitted a nib into the end and made a project of dipping it precisely into an ink bottle. “Rohan, I’m doing my best to understand your problem. However, a lack of desire is something I’ve never experienced. I’d have to be on my deathbed before I stopped wanting—no, never mind, I was on my deathbed in the not-too-distant past, and even then I had the devil’s own itch for my wife.” “Congratulations,” Cam muttered, abandoning any hope of prying an earnest answer out of the man. “Let’s attend to the account books. There are more important matters to discuss than sexual habits.” St. Vincent scratched out a figure and set the pen back on its stand. “No, I insist on discussing sexual habits. It’s so much more entertaining than work.

the Bible requires being read "constantly" and "regularly"—"all" of it. To modern readers, accustomed to rather linear, flat narratives that neatly fit into our limited definitions of reality, the Bible can come across to us as a mess. To be sure, one encounters inconsistencies and contradictions, to say nothing of downright bad ideas in the Bible. Scripture has a marvelous way of arguing with itself, correcting itself, one witness giving countertestimony to another. Scripture is a record of a people's determination to hear God truthfully and then to follow God faithfully. The record is in the form of a journey through many centuries. Scripture is the account of the adventure of a journey, not a report on having arrived at a destination. Might I also point out that we ourselves are a mess of inconsistencies, contradictions, and bad ideas? Most of the time it's much easier to see the cultural and historical limitations of the people in the Bible rather than in ourselves. We are still on the journey. It's not a simple song that the Bible wants to teach us to sing. It is a grand symphony that must be heard together with all of its highs and lows, its seemingly dissonant notes that all somehow come together and move in a definite direction.

You mentioned that Palermo, the part of Buenos Aires where you were brought up, had been a violent place full of bohemians and bandits. There they had two names for the knife, ‘the blade’ and ‘the slicer’. The two names described the same object, but ‘the blade’ was the thing itself, and ‘the slicer’ described its function. ‘The blade’ could fit in the hand even of a sickly child shut up in his father’s library, ‘the blade’ could be any of the superannuated daggers and swords belonging to his warrior grandfather or great-grandfather and displayed on the walls of his house, but ‘the slicer’, the knife in the hand slicing back and forth, in and out, existed only in his imagination, in a fascinating world of rapid settlings of accounts and duels over honor, an insult or a woman, in dark street where you never went, where no writer went, except in the literature he wrote. ‘I’ve always felt that in order to be a great writer, one should have the experience of life at sea, which is why Conrad and Melville and, in a way, Stevenson, who ended his days in the South Seas, were better than all of us, Vogelstein. At sea, a writer flees from the minor demons and faces only the definitive ones. A character in Conrad says that he has a horror of ports because, in port, ships rot and men go to the devil. He meant the devils of domesticity and incoherence, the small devils of terra firma. But I think that having experience of “the slicer” would give a writer the same sensation as going to sea, of spectacularly breaking the bounds of his own passivity and of his remoteness from the fundamental matters of the world.’ ‘You mean that if the writer were to stab someone three times, he could allege that he was merely doing so in order to improve his style.’ ‘Something like that. Soaking up experience and atmosphere.’ ‘It’s said that the artist Turner used to have himself lashed to the ship’s mast during storms at sea so that he could make sure he was getting the colours and details of his painted vortices right.’ ‘And it worked. But neither you nor I will ever experience “the slicer”, Vogelstein. We are condemned to “the blade”, to the knife purely as theory. Even if we used “the slicer” against someone, we would still be ourselves, watching, analyzing the scene, and, therefore, inevitably, holding “the blade” in our hand. I don’t think I could kill anyone, apart from my own characters. And I don’t think I would feel comfortable at sea either. There aren’t any libraries at sea. The sea replaces the library.

The story of Adam and Eve, as used by the Eastern church to account for our inherited weakness to withstand temptation as an effect of Adam and Eve's sin, can fruitfully be understood today without a historical Adam and Eve but instead with an evolutionary and social understanding of human beings. In the course of biological and social evolution, any group of creatures capable of any degree of relationship to God that fails to be properly related to God commensurate with their stage of development-any such group will have some network or other of social relations that are not as God intends. People born into a particular social group inherit that social network and act more or less in accord with it, and so inherit the effects of its sin. By being formed and shaped by the inherited social network, each individual is "weakened" in its ability to wrestle with the temptations to which its ontological nature as finite creature is subject. When a fall occurred, when a prepeople or people did not live up to the intentions of God in their common life commensurate to their stage of development, it was probably not at any one specific time; it may have occurred at different times for different groups until failure to be properly related to God was universal in all societies. But by historic times, human development is at a stage that the story of Adam and Eve is a fitting type or model of our situation in relation to God: human beings seeking to provide for themselves apart from God and God's purposes. This ancient understanding of original sin and evil seems to me both illuminating and, with the evolutionary understanding that I have added to it, thoroughly defensible. I can easily apply it to myself and also use it to understand other people, as I have done in presenting Pascal's analysis of our condition. Some theologians are willing to grant that the story of an actual Adam and Eve is not necessary for Christian theology, but they still hold that there had to have been a historical situation of original righteousness or innocence and an actual fall from this state. Otherwise, God, not human beings, would be responsible for our condition, and the goodness of creation would be fatally compromised.' My account does have a temporal dimension. All of us are born without an awareness of God in our lives. God is near us as our creator, generating us each moment of time; but it is as if God is, so to speak, behind us, and we, by looking only in front of us, do not perceive God in our world at all. So we do not take God into account in our lives. This is when distortion in our hearts, minds, and desires begins to occur. Our de facto personality, with our self at the center of all reality, is innocent when we are an infant but ceases to be innocent as it is reinforced by society's way of life, encouraging us to walk away from God and so into evil. We walk away from God by pursuing earthly goods and in

IT is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account of the beginning was losing its authority. Now that changes in things as they are change beginnings to make them fit, beginnings have lost their mythical rigidity. There are, it is true, modern attempts to restore this rigidity. But on the whole there is a correlation between subtlety and variety in our fictions and remoteness and doubtfulness about ends and origins. There is a necessary relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the 'real' history of that world. I propose in this talk to ask some questions about an early and very interesting example of this relation. There was a long-established opinion that the beginning was as described in Genesis, and that the end is to be as obscurely predicted in Revelation. But what if this came to seem doubtful? Supposing reason proved capable of a quite different account of the matter, an account contradicting that of faith? On the argument of these talks so far as they have gone, you would expect two developments: there should be generated fictions of concord between the old and the new explanations; and there should be consequential changes in fictive accounts of the world. And of course I should not be troubling you with all this if I did not think that such developments occurred. The changes to which I refer came with a new wave of Greek influence on Christian philosophy. The provision of accommodations between Greek and Hebrew thought is an old story, and a story of concord-fictions--necessary, as Berdyaev says, because to the Greeks the world was a cosmos, but to the Hebrews a history. But this is too enormous a tract in the history of ideas for me to wander in. I shall make do with my single illustration, and speak of what happened in the thirteenth century when Christian philosophers grappled with the view of the Aristotelians that nothing can come of nothing--ex nihilo nihil fit--so that the world must be thought to be eternal. In the Bible the world is made out of nothing. For the Aristotelians, however, it is eternal, without beginning or end. To examine the Aristotelian arguments impartially one would need to behave as if the Bible might be wrong. And this was done. The thirteenth-century rediscovery of Aristotle led to the invention of double-truth. It takes a good deal of sophistication to do what certain philosophers then did, namely, to pursue with vigour rational enquiries the validity of which one is obliged to deny. And the eternity of the world was, of course, more than a question in a scholarly game. It called into question all that might seem ragged and implausible in the usual accounts of the temporal structure of the world, the relation of time to eternity (certainly untidy and discordant compared with the Neo-Platonic version) and of heaven to hell.

A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still needed more. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel. As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively. Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.

The charity and ally models, on the other hand, are so strongly rooted in the ideas of 'I' and 'the other' that they force people to fit into distinct groups with preordained relationships to one another. According to ally politics, the only way to undermine one's own privilege is to give up one's role as an individual political agent, and follow the lead of those more or differently oppressed. White allies, for instance, are taught explicitly to not seek praise for their ally work--especially from people of color--yet there is often a distinctly self-congraulatory air to the work of allyship, as if the act of their humility is exaggerated to receive the praise they can't ask for. Many white allies do their support work in a way that recentralizes themselves as the only individuals willing to come in and do the hard work of fighting racism for people of color. Where ally politics suggest that in shifting your role from actor to ally you can diminish your culpability, a liberator or anarchist approach presumes that each person retains their own agency, insisting that the only way you can be accountable is by acting for your own desires while learning to understand and respond to the desires of other groups. Unraveling our socialized individualization until we can feel how our survival/liberation is infinitely linked to the survival/liberation of others fosters independence, and enables us to take responsibility for our choices, with no boss or guidance counselor to blame for our decisions. Original Zine: Ain't no PC Gonna Fix it, Baby. 2013. Featured in: A Critique of Ally Politics. Taking Sides.

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Part IV If you are mighty, gain respect through knowledge And through gentleness of speech. Don’t command except as is fitting, He who provokes gets into trouble. Don't be haughty, lest you be humbled, Don’t be mute, lest you be chided. When you answer one who is fuming, Avert your face, control yourself. The flame of the hot-heart sweeps across. He who steps gently, his path is paved. He who frets all day has no happy moment, He who’s gay all day can’t keep house. Don’t oppose a great man’s action. Don’t vex the heart of one who is burdened; If he gets angry at him who foils him, The ka will part from him who loves him. Yet he is the provider along with the god, What he wishes should be done for him. When he turns his face back to you after raging, There will be peace from his ka; As ill will comes from opposition,. So goodwill increases love. Teach the great what is useful to him, Be his aid before the people; If you Set his knowledge impress his lord, Your sustenance will come from his ka As the favorite's belly is filled. So your back will be clothed by it, And his help will be there sustain you. For your superior whom you love And who lives by it, He in turn will give you good support. Thus will love of you endure In the belly of those who love you, He is a ka who loves to listen. If you are a magistrate of standing. Commissioned to satisfy the many, Hew a straight line, When you speak don't lean to one side. Beware lest one complain: “Judges, he distorts the matter!” And your deed turns into a judgment (of you). If you are angered by misdeed. Lean toward a man account of his rightness; Pass it over, don’t recall it, Since he was silent to you the first day If you are great after having been humble, Have gained wealth after having been poor In the past, in a town which you know, Knowing your former condition. Do not put trust in your wealth, Which came to you as gift of god; So that you will not fall behind one like you, To whom the same has happened, Bend your back to your superior, Your overseer from the palace; Then your house will endure in its wealth. Your rewards in their right place. Wretched is he who opposes a superior, One lives as long as he is mild, Baring the arm does not hurt it Do not plunder a neighbor’s house, Do not steal the goods of one near you, Lest he denounce you before you are heard A quarreler is a mindless person, If he is known as an aggressor The hostile man will have trouble in the neighborhood. This maxim is an injunction against illicit sexual intercourse. It is very obscure and has been omitted here. If you probe the character of a friend, Don’t inquire, but approach him, Deal with him alone, So as not to suffer from his manner. Dispute with him after a time, Test his heart in conversation; If what he has seen escapes him, If he does a thing that annoys you, Be yet friendly with him, don’t attack; Be restrained, don’t let fly, Don’t answer with hostility, Neither part from him nor attack him; His time does not fail to come, One does not escape what is fated Be generous as long as you live, What leaves the storehouse does not return; It is the food to be shared which is coveted. One whose belly is empty is an accuser; One deprived becomes an opponent, Don’t have him for a neighbor. Kindness is a man’s memorial For the years after the function.

Violet’s not getting out of our sight,” Arion adds. There’s a moment of just staring…like everyone is trying to silently argue. “No one naked in my car,” Mom states when I just stand in my spot, waiting on them to hurry through the push and pull. You really can tell how thick the air is when too many alphas are in the room at one time, but weirdly it never feels this way when it’s just the four of them. Unless punches are thrown. Then it gets a little heavier than normal. Arion pulls on his clothes, and threads whir in the air as I quickly fashion Emit a lopsided toga that lands on his body. Everyone’s gaze swings to him like it’s weird for him and normal for me to be in a toga. Awesome. Damien muffles a sound, Emit arches an eyebrow at me, and Arion remains rigid, staying close to me but never touching me. All of us squeezing into a car together while most of them hate each other…should be fun. The storm finally stops before we board the elevator, and it’s one of those super awkward elevator moments where no one is looking at anyone or saying anything, and everyone is trying to stay in-the-moment serious. We stop on the floor just under us, after the longest thirty-five seconds ever. The doors open, and two men glance around at Emit and I in our matching togas, even though his is the fitted sheet and riding up in some funny places. He looks like a caveman who accidentally bleached and shrank his wardrobe. I palm my face, embarrassed for him. The next couple of floors are super awkward with the addition of the two new, notably uncomfortable men. Worst seventy-nine seconds ever. Math doesn’t add up? Yeah. I’m upset about those extra nine seconds as well. Poor Emit has to duck out of the unusually small elevator, and the bottom of his ass cheek plays peek-a-boo on one side. Damien finally snorts, and even Mom struggles to keep a straight face. That really pisses her off. “You’re seeing him on an off day,” I tell the two guys, who stare at my red boots for a second. I feel the need to defend Emit a little, especially since I now know he overheard all that gibberish Tiara was saying… I can’t remember all I said, and it’s worrying me now that my mind has gone off on this stupid tangent. I trip over the hem of my toga, and Arion snags me before I hit the floor, righting me and showing his hands to my mother with a quick grin. “Can’t just let her fall,” he says unapologetically. “You’re going to have to learn to deal with that,” she bites out. She has a very good point. I don’t trip very often, but things and people usually knock me around a good bit of my life. The two guys look like they want to run, so I hurry to fix this. “Really, it’s a long story, but I swear Emit—the tallest one in the fitted-sheet-toga—generally wears pants…er…I guess you guys call them trousers over here. Anyway, we had some plane problems,” I carry on, and then realize I have to account for the fact we’re both missing clothing. “Then there was a fire that miraculously only burned our clothes, because Emit put all my flames out by smothering me with his body,” I state like that’s exactly what happened. Why do they look so scared? I’m not telling a scary lie. At this point, I’ve just made it worse, and fortunately Damien takes mercy, clamping his hand over my mouth as he starts steering me toward the door before I can make it…whatever comes after worse but before the worst. “Thank you,” sounds more like “Mmdi ooooo,” against his hand, but he gets the gist, as he grins. Mom makes a frustrated sound. “Another minute, and she’d be bragging about his penis size in quest to save his dignity. Did you really want to hear that?” Damien asks her, forcing me to groan against his hand.

Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units). This is the conclusion we've been chasing. Notice that although black holes are central to the reasoning, the analysis applies to any region of space, whether or not a black hole is actually present. If you max out a region's storage capacity, you'll create a black hole, but as long as you stay under the limit, no black hole will form. I hasten to add that in any practical sense, the information storage limit is of no concern. Compared with today's rudimentary storage devices, the potential storage capacity on the surface of a spatial region is humongous. A stack of five off-the-shelf terabyte hard drives fits comfortable within a sphere of radius 50 centimeters, whose surface is covered by about 10^70 Planck cells. The surface's storage capacity is thus about 10^70 bits, which is about a billion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion terabytes, and so enormously exceeds anything you can buy. No one in Silicon Valley cares much about these theoretical constraints. Yet as a guide to how the universe works, the storage limitations are telling. Think of any region of space, such as the room in which I'm writing or the one in which you're reading. Take a Wheelerian perspective and imagine that whatever happens in the region amounts to information processing-information regarding how things are right now is transformed by the laws of physics into information regarding how they will be in a second or a minute or an hour. Since the physical processes we witness, as well as those by which we're governed, seemingly take place within the region, it's natural to expect that the information those processes carry is also found within the region. But the results just derived suggest an alternative view. For black holes, we found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Susskind and 'tHooft stressed that the lesson should be general: since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three-dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggested, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes. If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much like a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here, and that distant reality there, would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two-I'll call them Holographic Parallel Universes-would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and my shadow.

In the light of the evidence it is hard to believe that most crusaders were motivated by crude materialism. Given their knowledge and expectations and the economic climate in which they lived, the disposal of assets to invest in the fairly remote possibility of settlement in the East would have been a stupid gamble. It makes much more sense to suppose, in so far as one can generalize about them, that they were moved by an idealism which must have inspired not only them but their families. Parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children had to face a long absence and must have worried about them: in 1098 Countess Ida of Boulogne made an endowment to the abbey of St Bertin 'for the safety of her sons, Godfrey and Baldwin, who have gone to Jerusalem'.83 And they and more distant relatives — cousins, uncles and nephews - were prepared to endow them out of the patrimonial lands. I have already stressed that no one can treat the phenomenal growth of monasticism in this period without taking into account not only those who entered the communities to be professed, but also the lay men and women who were prepared to endow new religious houses with lands and rents. The same is true of the crusading movement. Behind many crusaders stood a large body of men and women who were prepared to sacrifice interest to help them go. It is hard to avoid concluding that they were fired by the opportunity presented to a relative not only of making a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem but also of fighting in a holy cause. For almost a century great lords, castellans and knights had been subjected to abuse by the Church. Wilting under the torrent of invective and responding to the attempts of churchmen to reform their way of life in terms they could understand, they had become perceptibly more pious. Now they were presented by a pope who knew them intimately with the chance of performing a meritorious act which exactly fitted their upbringing and devotional needs and they seized it eagerly. But they responded, of course, in their own way. They were not theologians and were bound to react in ways consonant with their own ideas of right and wrong, ideas that did not always respond to those of senior churchmen. The emphasis that Urban had put on charity - love of Christian brothers under the heel of Islam, love of Christ whose land was subject to the Muslim yoke - could not but arouse in their minds analogies with their own kin and their own lords' patrimonies, and remind them of their obligations to avenge injuries to their relatives and lords. And that put the crusade on the level of a vendetta. Their leaders, writing to Urban in September 1098, informed him that 'The Turks, who inflicted much dishonour on Our Lord Jesus Christ, have been taken and killed and we Jerusalemites have avenged the injury to the supreme God Jesus Christ.