Aliens Famous Quotes

Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time. “Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims. When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Hahaha! (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

Dr. Sacks treats each of his subjects—the amnesic fifty-year-old man who believes himself to be a young sailor in the Navy, the “disembodied” woman whose limbs have become alien to her, and of course the famous man who mistook his wife for a hat—with a deep respect for the unique individual living beneath the disorder. These tales inspire awe and empathy, allowing the reader to enter the uncanny worlds of those with autism, Alzheimer's, Tourette's syndrome, and other unfathomable neurological conditions. “One of the great clinical writers of the 20th century” (The New York Times), Dr. Sacks brings to vivid life some of the most fundamental questions about identity and the human mind.

Ramona wasn't at home anywhere. She felt like a spy in life and the ending of every great book and each orgasm, and the sight of every homeless shopping bag lady infected her with a titanic yearning for the world to make an unscheduled stop.

Virginia Woolf wrote famously, “About December 1910 human nature changed.” Well, one doubts it. What did change, and has been changing all through the closing decades of the 19th century, is that the intelligentsia became increasingly alienated from the bourgeois world from which it sprung, and wished to become something Higher. It wished to make novels difficult and technical – think of Woolf or Joyce – to keep them out of the hands of the uneducated and to elevate the intelligentsia to a new clerisy, a new aristocracy of the spirit. Similarly in painting, music, and philosophy. It wished to make everything difficult and technical, and it succeeded. [Economists Lawrence] Klein, [Paul] Samuelson, and [Jan] Tinbergen were middle-period modernists. The vices of modernism come from the master vice of Pride, the vice so characteristic of an actual or wannabe aristocracy. It is prideful overreaching to think that social engineering can work, that a smart lad at a blackboard can outwit the wisdom of the world or the ages, that a piece of machinery like statistical significance can tell you how big or small a number is.

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

The yellowy things on the tray were probably eggs, but they looked like they came pre-scrambled from alien chickens.

Hermes Trismegistus is the most famous Gnostic. He was the founder of the pre-Christian lineage of Greek Gnosticism.

So naturally, I caught myself making up personalities for him - you know, the way you do with pets and cute boys and famous people. What’s that called? Anthropomorphism. You do it so that you feel like you can relate personally to whatever it is – your dog, or God or whatever. You do that so you can care about things, and so that life at least appears to make sense. And maybe you do it so you can feel like something cares about you. The dangerous thing about doing that, Paul told me one time, is what you end up caring about isn’t necessarily what’s really there – just what you’ve decided is there. Which may be very far from the truth. So you could very easily end up depending on a lie. Or a dream.

Under liberalism, went a famous quip, everyone is free to starve. Even worse, by encouraging people to view themselves as isolated individuals, liberalism separates them from their fellow class members and prevents them from uniting against the system that oppresses them. Liberalism thereby perpetuates inequality, condemning the masses to poverty and the elite to alienation.

By the time Eisenhower gave his famous Military-Industrial Complex speech, we knew alien experiments on sleeping victims were increasing annually.  Six months before Kennedy was assassinated, we knew the alien goal was to genetically alter the human race for their own purposes and that one of the side effects would be to increase the number of people born with autism by five hundred to a thousand times.

The now pregnant Isis returns to her home in the underworld and gives birth, in due time, to Horus, rightful son of the long-lost king, alienated as he matures from his now corrupted kingdom (something we all experience during our maturation). His primary attribute is the eye—the famous Egyptian single eye—while his avatar is the falcon, a bird that takes precise aim at its prey, strikes the target with deadly accuracy, and possesses an acuity of vision unparalleled in the kingdom of living things.

A quote has an even more powerful effect if we presume not just a particular author behind it, but God, nature, the unconscious, labor, or difference. These are strong fetishes, each conjuring the powerful submedial in a particular way. Yet all of them must nonetheless be exchanged in a certain rhythm according to the laws of the medial economy. In order to create such fetishes, one does not have to use brilliant quotes by famous authors but can use anonymous quotes that stem from the author- less realm of the everyday, lowly, foreign, vulgar, aggressive, or stupid. Precisely such quotes produce the effect of medial sincerity, that is, the revelation of a deeply submerged, hidden, medial plane on the familiar medial surface. It then appears as if this surface had been blasted open from the inside and that the respective quotes had sprung forth from the submedial interior—like aliens. All of this, of course, refers to the economy of the quote as a gift that can be offered, accepted, and reciprocated.

If I've learned one thing in my years of studying the social impacts of disease, it's that we live in a world where we're connected, for better or worse, to the people in our human community by the microbes that we share between us. And in times of contagious disease crisis, if we fail to recognize our shared connection, we are most certainly doomed, because our fates hang together, yoked by tiny particles that threaten us all. Scores of historical figures-both famous and infamous-have taught me as much. By learning the stories of those who lived before us, by educating ourselves about the worlds they inhabited and the viruses and bacteria that lived in, with, and through them, we can learn how to emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than ever before and well prepared for the next new disease we will inevitably face. If we don't learn from their examples, however, I foresee a world adrift, damned by alienation from its own history, a victim of self-annihilation cued, rather than caused, by the novel coronavirus.

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.

Hölderlin's sense of loss and destitution was not simply due to a personal predilection for suffering, but was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that arose from powerful currents seething under the Enlightenment—an increasing alienation from nature and a growing sense of disenchantment in the face of a triumphant rationality and waning traditions and values. Hölderlin was not alone in perceiving these changes and experiencing them deeply. Hegel, for example, famously wrote of alienated consciousness, and Schiller described modern human beings as "stunted plants, that show only a feeble vestige of their nature." Hölderlin, for his part, reacted to these currents with an almost overwhelming longing for lost wholeness.

Speaking before a joint session of Congress, President Johnson said: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” It’s remarkable to note that, more than fifty years ago, an American president was already aware of, and acknowledging, human-created climate change. Johnson had been briefed on the dangers of CO 2 increases by the famous climate scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle, among others. So, not only was Johnson aware of the issue, but he was already concerned enough to raise it before Congress. That single sentence in his address gives the lie to the claims of so many climate-change deniers that global warming is some kind of recent hoax.

The Fermi Paradox?” “Yes. It’s named after Enrico Fermi, the famous physicist who helped build the first fission reactor, the first fission weapon, and many other seminal contributions to physics that are far beyond my limited understanding of the field. It is said that after discussing alien visitation during a walk with a few colleagues, he sat down to lunch with them and suddenly asked, ‘Where are they?’ One of the other diners responded, ‘Who, Doctor Fermi? Where are who?’ He replied, ‘The extraterrestrials. Where are they? They should be here by now.’ He then proceeded to do some calculations showing that, given the age of the galaxy and the number of stars in it, the Earth should have been visited many times over. And as I understand the time line of such things, it was a good point.

The Hungryalist or the hungry generation movement was a literary movement in Bengali that was launched in 1961, by a group of young Bengali poets. It was spearheaded by the famous Hungryalist quartet — Malay Roychoudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy. They had coined Hungryalism from the word ‘Hungry’ used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poetic line “in the sowre hungry tyme”. The central theme of the movement was Oswald Spengler’s idea of History, that an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside. These writers felt that Bengali culture had reached its zenith and was now living on alien food. . . . The movement was joined by other young poets like Utpal Kumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Falguni Roy, Tridib Mitra and many more. Their poetry spoke the displaced people and also contained huge resentment towards the government as well as profanity. … On September 2, 1964, arrest warrants were issued against 11 of the Hungry poets. The charges included obscenity in literature and subversive conspiracy against the state. The court case went on for years, which drew attention worldwide. Poets like Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg visited Malay Roychoudhury. The Hungryalist movement also influenced Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Telugu & Urdu literature.

For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past. The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in the famous story “The Library of Babel,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.§ Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality. And what shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire makes us act and when we act what we do will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies—and to the strengthening or deterioration of our relationship to God, others, and the cosmic world. The habits and disciplines5 we use to shape our desire form the basis for a spirituality, regardless of whether these have an explicit religious dimension to them or even whether they are consciously expressed at all. Spirituality concerns what we do with desire. It takes its root in the eros inside of us and it is all about how we shape and discipline that eros. John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic, begins his famous treatment of the soul’s journey with the words: “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings.”6 For him, it is urgent longings, eros, that are the starting point of the spiritual life and, in his view, spirituality, essentially defined, is how we handle that eros.

For it is a fact that man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers. For such a fellow, forget any chance of romance or professional success; those are the provenance of men in step with their times. Instead, for this fellow the options will be to bray like a mule or find what solace he can from overlooked volumes discovered in overlooked bookshops. And when his roommate stumbles home at two in the morning, he has little choice but to listen in silent mystification as he is recounted the latest dramas from the city’s salons. But events can unfold in such a manner that overnight the man out of step finds himself in the right place at the right time. The fashions and attitudes that had seemed to alien to him are suddenly swept aside and supplanted by fashions and attitudes in perfect sympathy with his deepest sentiments. Then, like a lone sailor adrift for years on alien seas, he wakes one night to discover familiar constellations overhead. And when this occurs--this extraordinary realignment of the stars--the man so long out of step with his times experiences a supreme lucidity. Suddenly all that has passed comes into focus as a necessary course of events, and all that promises to unfold has the clearest rhyme and reason.

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.

Chardin is famous for his synthesis of mystical religion, evolution, and ET belief. In The Jesuits, Martin wrote, “This man’s influence on Jesuit thinking and on Catholic theologians as well as on the thought processes of Christians in general has been and still is colossal.”[541]

third-century AD Christian, Lactantius, that the “Riddle of Epicurus,” a famous argument against the existence of an all-powerful, benevolent, and providential God (or gods), was preserved: God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak—and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful—which is equally foreign to god’s nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?[430] This challenge, broadly known as the problem of evil, inspired two thousand years of apologetics.

Africa had free markets and a thriving entrepreneurial culture and tradition centuries before these became the animating ideas of the United States or Western Europe. Timbuktu, the legendary city in northern Mali, was a famous trading post and marketplace as far back as the twelfth century, as vital to the commerce of North and West Africa as ports on the Mediterranean were to Europe and the Levant. In Africa Unchained, George Ayittey offers myriad examples of industrial activity in precolonial Africa, from the indigo-dye cloth trade of fourteenth-century Kano, Nigeria, to the flourishing glass industry of precolonial Benin to the palm oil businesses of southern Nigeria to the Kente cotton trade of the Asante of Ghana in the 1800s: “Profit was never an alien concept to Africa. Throughout its history there have been numerous entrepreneurs. The aim of traders and numerous brokers or middlemen was profit and wealth.”2 The tragedy is what happened next. These skills and traditions were destroyed, damaged, eroded or forced underground, first during centuries of slave wars and colonialism and, later, through decades of corrupt postindependence rule, usually in service to foreign ideologies of socialism or communism. No postcolonial leader in Africa who fought for independence has ever adequately explained why liberation from colonial rule necessarily meant following the ideas and philosophies of Karl Marx, a gray-bearded nineteenth-century German academic who worked out of the British Library and never set foot in Africa. At the same time, neither should we have ever allowed ourselves to become beholden to paternalistic aid organizations that were sending their representatives to build our wells and plant our food for us. Nor, for that matter, should we have relied on the bureaucrats of the Western world telling us how to be proper capitalists or—as is happening now—to Party officials in Beijing telling us what they want in exchange for this or that project. It was this outside influence—starting with colonialism but later from our own terrible and corrupt policies and leaderships—that the stereotype of the lazy, helpless, unimaginative and dependent African developed. The point is that we Africans have to take charge of our own destiny, and to do this we can call on our own unique culture and traditions of innovation, free enterprise and free trade. We are a continent of entrepreneurs.

A famous human named Rolling Stones said that.

I am a champion, and my damsel is in distress. Failure is not an option.” “But death is,” she mumbled under her breath. “Fear not, mate. I will prevail.” Famous last words.

At Tolimundarni, on the fringe of the war zone itself, they’d been thrown off the train by military police who weren’t falling for Y’sul’s pre-emptively outrage-fuelled arguments regarding the summit-like priority and blatant extreme officiality of an expedition - nay, a quest! - he was undertaking with these - yes, these, two - famous, well-connected, honoured alien guests of immeasurably high intrinsic pan-systemic cross-species reputation, concerning a matter of the utmost import the exact details of which he was sadly not at liberty to divulge even to such patently important and obviously discreet members of the armed forces as themselves, but who would, nevertheless, he was sure, entirely understand the significance of their mission and thus their clear right to be accorded unhindered passage due to simple good taste and a fine appreciation of natural justice and would in no way be swayed by the fact that their cooperation would be repaid in levels of subsequent kudos almost beyond crediting…

Adepts and saints have such a deep and ecstatic connection to the Divine that they are not aware of any physical suffering while being martyred. There are Gnostics who believe in the Resurrection. Rudolf Steiner, the famous Christian Gnostic, taught that the blood of the Christos had to enter the Earth. As the Christos is the consort of Sophia and Sophia is the Earth, the mixture of the blood of the Christos with the body of Sophia, is the ritual called in the Greek Hierogamia (Sacred Marriage). Plainly speaking, the crucifixion then becomes a symbolic sexual relationship between the Christos and Sophia.

The animalcentric approach is not easy to apply to every animal: some are more like us than others. The problem of sharing the experiences of organisms that rely on different senses was expressed most famously by the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" A bat perceives its world in pulses of reflected sound, something that we creatures of vision have a hard time imagining. Still, Nagel's answer to his own question-that we will never know-may have been overly pessimistic. Some blind persons manage to avoid collisions with objects by means of a crude form of echolocation. Perhaps even more alien would be the experience of an animal such as the star-nosed mole. With its twenty-two pink, writhing tentacles around its nostrils, it is able to feel microscopic textures on small objects in the mud with the keenest sense of touch of any animal on earth. Humans can barely imagine this creature's Umwelt. Ohviously, the closer a species is to us, the easier it is to do so. This is why anthropomorphism is not only tempting in the case of apes, but also hard to reject on the grounds that we cannot know how they perceive the world. Their sensory systems are essentially the same as ours.

An amazing thing happened to me today. We were in Loreto, where Franco Terilli was praying to his patron, one of the popes. In Loreto there is a famous cathedral (rather like Lourdes) in the middle of which stands the house in which Jesus was born, transported here from Nazareth. While we were in the cathedral, I felt it was wrong that I can't pray in a Catholic cathedral; not that I cannot, but that I don't want to. It is, after all, alien to me. Then later, quite by chance, we went into a little seaside town called Porto Nuovo, and into its small, tenth century cathedral. And what should I see on the altar but the Vladimir Mother of God Apparently some Russian painter had, at some time, given the church this copy of the Mother of God of Vladimir, evidently painted by him. I couldn't believe it: suddenly to see an Orthodox ikon in a Catholic country, when I had just been thinking about not being able to pray at Loreto. It was wonderful.

of course they don't see the alienation. they don't see the decadence and degeneracy. they do not see how the meaninglessness of European life leads to not only depression, but drug addiction. Drug addiction of both illegal and also legal drugs... antidepressants and such medications. they don't see the alienation of the people within generations and from each other. they don't see how it is almost impossible now for young men and young women to come together and form strong, stable romantic and emotional bonds that will lead to flourishing families. They don't see that. They don't see it at all.

Surely man has free will, and there are famous stories of humans persisting in and strengthening their faith all alone. Saint Patrick was a slave left alone in a field with sheep in pagan Ireland as a boy, and he prayed without ceasing until he could escape—eventually returning as a bishop and a missionary. So we shouldn’t deny people individual agency by saying their environment determined their outcome. Yet we know that environment helps determine our outcomes. That’s why parents work hard to find the right school and community in which to raise their children. If people thought environment didn’t help determine outcomes, they wouldn’t expend so much time and money to obtain a great environment—family, school, neighborhood—for their children. They’d just say, 'Hey, kid, make good decisions.

use four-dimensional Riemannian geometry for his famed theory of relativity. Within seven decades, Theodr Kaluza at the University of Königsberg, Germany, would use five-dimensional Riemannian geometry to integrate both gravity and light. Light is now viewed as a vibration in the fifth dimension. Oskar Klein made several improvements, including the calculation of the size of the fifth dimension—the Planck length, which is 10-33 centimeters, much too small to detect experimentally. One hundred thirty years after Riemann’s famous lecture, physicists would extend the Kaluza-Klein constructs to develop ten-

In 1974, San Francisco newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose goals included “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” After being kept in a closet for a while, she came to identify with her new peer group. Before long, she was enthusiastically helping them generate income, at one point brandishing a machine gun during a bank robbery. When left alone, with an opportunity to escape, she didn’t take it. She later described the experience: “I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks. And then it suddenly, you know, slowly began to dawn that they just weren’t there anymore. I could actually think my own thoughts.” Hearst didn’t just accept her captors’ “subjective” beliefs, such as ideology; she bought into their views about how the physical world works. One of her captors “didn’t want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brain waves could be read or that, you know, they’d get a psychic in to find me. And I was even afraid of that.” Hearst’s condition of coerced credulity is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a kidnapping in Sweden. But the term “syndrome” may be misleading in its suggestion of abnormality. Hearst’s response to her circumstances was probably an example of human nature functioning properly; we seem to be “designed” by natural selection to be brainwashed. Some people find this prospect a shocking affront to human autonomy, but they tend not to be evolutionary psychologists. In Darwinian terms, it makes sense that our species could contain genes encouraging blind credulity in at least some situations. If you are surrounded by a small group of people on whom your survival depends, rejecting the beliefs that are most important to them will not help you live long enough to get your genes into the next generation. Confinement with a small group of people may sound so rare that natural selection would have little chance to take account of it, but it is in a sense the natural human condition. Humans evolved in small groups—twenty, forty, sixty people—from which emigration was often not a viable option. Survival depended on social support: sharing food, sticking together during fights, and so on. To alienate your peers by stubbornly contesting their heartfelt beliefs would have lowered your chances of genetic proliferation. Maybe that explains why you don’t have to lock somebody in a closet to get a bit of the Stockholm syndrome. Religious cults just offer aimless teenagers a free bus ride to a free meal, and after the recruits have been surrounded by believers for a few days, they tend to warm up to the beliefs. And there doesn’t have to be some powerful authority figure pushing the beliefs. In one famous social psychology experiment, subjects opined that two lines of manifestly different lengths were the same length, once a few of their “peers” (who were in fact confederates) voiced that opinion.

The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.

Building a Blockbuster How to write compelling content that sells The term “blockbuster” has unsettling military origins, but is now used to mean a film that has blown the box office away. It usually has high production costs and budget, but (hopefully) earns it all back and more with ticket sales. Blockbusters are usually BIG movies, large in scope, scale, and budget. They tell a big story, and reach a big audience. They’re also usually “high concept,” meaning that they can be described in a single sentence. (The most famous high concept pitch was for the movie Alien which they pitched as, “Jaws in space.”)

You might think the alien worlds in the original Star Trek look fake. You might think the blinky lights on those old sets are silly. You might not love those oh-so-tight 1960s velour uniforms. But nobody thinks Spock’s pointed ears look bad. The ears are legit. It’s one of those classic Hollywood tricks that should be hugely impressive but somehow isn’t praised enough. Whether the stoic Vulcan is played by Leonard Nimoy, Zachary Quinto, or Ethan Peck, the applause for the most famous fake alien ears is mostly absent. And that’s because the ears work. Praising Spock’s ears would be like praising James Bond’s tailor; you expect Spock to look that way. The believability of Spock’s ears allowed the characters—and by extension the earliest Star Trek—to prevent the entire series from becoming, as Leonard Nimoy had worried in 1964, “a bad sci-fi joke.

Fanon could never bring himself to endorse the surrealist fantasy of madness as—in Rimbaud’s famous expression—the “disordering of all the senses.” Mental illness, he argued, was not freedom’s extreme edge but rather a “pathology of freedom.” This pulverizing alienation from the self, Fanon believed, presented an almost insurmountable obstacle to normal relations with others. The enforced solitude of the mad, prisoners of their delirium, held no romance for Fanon. That Fanon repudiated the Lacanian defense of madness—that he emphasized the vulnerability, suffering, and loss of freedom experienced by the mentally ill, rather than the “visionary” nature of their perception, or the ecstasy of hallucination—is a reminder of the value that he always placed on self-determination.

The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as he had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious and uneasy curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that has no knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full force of its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance, distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklonny Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the breathing of that great and beautiful body. Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every foreigner who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it. "Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables eglises, Moscou la sainte. La voila done enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il etait temps," * said he, and dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and summoned Lelorgne d'Ideville, the interpreter. * "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow! Here it is then at last, that famous city. It was high time." "A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her honor," thought he (he had said so to Tuchkov at Smolensk). From that point of view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable, had at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at the city and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance of possessing it agitated and awed him.

One final possibility should be mentioned from the perspective of military activity on the Utah ranch. Recent allegations have surfaced that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) engaged in several deception and disinformation operations in the 1970s, the 1980s and (presumably) in the 1990s. Many of these operations involved the simulation of “UFOs,” the manufacture of bogus evidence indicative of “extraterrestrial visitation” designed to conceal classified military technology or simply to lead investigators astray. In 2005, retired AFOSI special agent Richard Doty broke his silence to publicly acknowledge being involved in several of these “alien visitation” operations, the most famous being the disinformation campaign to persuade Albuquerque physicist Paul Bennewitz that an alien base existed in Dulce, New Mexico. The operation is described in detail in Greg Bishop’s book Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth.

It's difficult to analyze the motivations of a traitor. Some berry their country for money, some for revenge. Some do so in order to satisfy a feeling of true alienation from their country's values. Some betray when they have no choice. Often these reasons will blur; treachery is hardly a one-size-fits-all proposition. Indeed, one of the most famous traitors in Tear history sold his country for the most basic motive of all: because he didn't know why he shouldn't.

A bit of theory as we settle down to lunch: the waiter’s treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

Thus Plato offers one version of a philosophical poverty, by which wisdom alienates one from conventional ideals and makes one indifferent to worldly concerns. The Cynics philosophized in the same general rubric, though obviously details differ significantly. One notable difference between the two is the value placed upon learning and science. Unlike his Platonic counterpart, the Cynic rejects arithmetic, geometry, dialectic, and the rest as superfluous distractions from the "one big" requirement of self-knowledge. So in the famous anecdote, when Plato and his followers have defined man as the "featherless biped," Diogenes rushes into the Academy with a plucked chicken, crying, "Here is Plato's human being!" For the Cynic, logical exercises, definitionmaking, and the like are not preparatory to the vision of some Good or intuition of eternity. All such talk is a form of pride, a strategy to overawe others, and contributes less to the good life than does a healthy skepticism. Yet, like Plato, the Cynics also travel along the Eleatic Way of Truth and shun what they ridicule as the Way of Seeming. For what can be said truly? In short, the Cynics are profoundly skeptical about the possibility of almost all knowledge.

The famous French biologist Jacques Monod once wrote that “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the Universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance”. It’s a melancholy thought. I can think of only one thing sadder: if the only species possessing consciousness, the only species that can light up the universe with acts of love and humor and compassion, were to extinguish itself through acts of stupidity or ignorance. The various “Solutions” discussed in chapter 4 don’t, I believe, solve the Fermi paradox; but they do describe a range of possible futures for our descendants. We can choose which future we want. If we survive, we have a Galaxy to explore and make our own. If we destroy ourselves, if we ruin Earth before we’re ready to leave our home planet . . . well, it could be a long, long time before a creature from another species looks up at its planet’s night sky and asks: “Where is everybody?

At some point it’s irresponsible not to connect what a man says with what he does... “Who Goes Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson’s famous Harper’s piece from 1941, sprang to the collective mind... None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

Ron Gilbert, took inspiration from Sierra games like King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry but, more than just the game, what Maniac Mansion (and Ron) gave LucasArts was the underlying engine created for the game, SCUMM‡. This would form the backbone of future hits for the company such as Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Maniac Mansion sequel Day of the Tentacle, two Indiana Jones games (one based on The Last Crusade, the other an original adventure called The Fate of Atlantis), Sam & Max Hit the Road and, most famously, The Secret of Monkey Island. Humour permeates all these games successfully in a way it rarely has before or since. Monkey Island’s ‘insult’ sword-fight is perhaps the best-known example, but there are many more. The jokes even operate between games;

In The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias' Family, Rembrandt leaves dirt on the shadowed soles of Raphael's feet as he flies off, illuminated in glory. Passing by the painting, one sees the dramatic action, the melodramatic emotions, and the re-created narrative events of the Bible. Slowed down a bit, the viewer sees light across a large muscular calf, a strong and sharply shaped ankle, and then dirty feet. The angel who tells us he only pretended to eat - this to explain away all traces of his apparent earthliness as a fallen creaturely being - is here on the canvas with dirty feet, carrying soil, the created, to the creator. Van Gogh had rightly said there are mysteries in these paintings. They are mysteries of device and design, not of messianic significance. They require a docent and not a priest, a creative critic to guide the view of specific images, not a guardian of mysteries and master of their enigmatic authority. Dirty feet on the soles of an archangel famous for his annunciations give the viewer a point of view on the inescapably human nature of the narrated God. Raphael may no eat. He may believe he creates an illusion to satisfy the religious desire for mythological consistency, but even archangels deceive themselves as well as others. Humans sometimes do the same in inventing the transcendence they need or think they want - creating a regime from which the priestly classes rule, even theorizing the alienation of the divine. Deceit is an essential device of cultural adaptation. It constructs needed beliefs that at high and low levels of thought or action complement their existence with modes of self-defense, which protect them from not only needed analysis but also the importance of failure.

In July 1947, one of the most famous UFO events in history took place.  An object crashed into the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.  The Roswell Army Air Field said that they had recovered a “flying disk”.  This made headlines in newspapers around the world.  Then the next day, the army changed its story and said it wasn’t a flying disk but a weather balloon. Many years later, witnesses said that there was an alien craft that had crashed.  Some witnesses said that there were alien bodies that had been taken away. Many books have been written about the Roswell incident.  The military still says that there was no craft and the only thing that was there was a weather balloon.  There is no way now of knowing what really happened.

At the request of Rep. Steven Schiff (R-N.M.), Congress’s investigative branch has launched a study to determine whether the government covered up a story alleging that the bodies of alien space voyagers were removed from a crashed flying saucer found near Roswell, N.M., in 1947. After the purported crash of the spacecraft, the bodies of the extraterrestrial visitors were said by a local undertaker and other conspiracy theorists to have been autopsied and secretly flown to an Air Force base in Ohio. Even though the ‘Roswell Incident’ has been

For it is a fact that man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers. For such a fellow, forget any chance of romance or professional success; those are the provenance of men in step with their times. Instead, for this fellow the options will be to bray like a mule or find what solace he can from overlooked volumes discovered in overlooked bookshops. And when his roommate stumbles home at two in the morning, he has little choice but to listen in silent mystification as he is recounted the latest dramas from the city’s salons. But events can unfold in such a manner that overnight the man out of step finds himself in the right place at the right time. The fashions and attitudes that had seemed so alien to him are suddenly swept aside and supplanted by fashions and attitudes in perfect sympathy with his deepest sentiments. Then, like a lone sailor adrift for years on alien seas, he wakes one night to discover familiar constellations overhead. And when this occurs - this extraordinary realignment of the stars - the man so long out of step with his times experiences a supreme lucidity. Suddenly all that has passed comes into focus as a necessary course of events, and all that promises to unfold has the clearest rhyme and reason.

after us … or maybe they’d put their safeties back on, and we’d get to watch a bunch of smiling Titans following like drones? They could get on tiny motorcycles then follow the RV. That’d be funny, wouldn’t it? They’d look like those famous fat twins on their bikes. Alien comedy at its best.” Now Andreus looked angry. He’d been wearing a damp rag on his head since they’d left the RV in one of the few places with overhead cover a few miles back. Piper kept wanting to make babushka jokes, but she couldn’t quite manage. The man

...it is reasonable to maintain that the spectacle of human nature extended to its uttermost limits has much to teach us about ourselves and is therefore, after its fashion, a 'sign for those who understand'. According to a famous hadith of the Prophet, Adam was created 'in the image of God'; and we are Adam's progeny , 'the tribe of Adam', as the Quran has it. There is something in man, precisely because the One-without-associate, the Independent, the Self-sufficient is in some mysterious way reflected in his nature, which demands such freedom from constraint as only an absolute ruler has. But because man is not God this opportunity to extend himself limitlessly leads to destruction; in the desire for great power and in its exercise there are certainly elements of greed and arrogance, but there may also be an element of nobility striving for a supreme mode of self-expression. These men we have been considering revealed human nature, stripped to the bone, in all its grandeur, its instability and its ferocity; and those who find such men totality alien know very little about themselves.

The Marx-Freud parallelism between the two remains utterly sterile and insignificant as long as it is expressed in terms that make them introjections and projections of each other without ceasing to be utterly alien to each other, as in the famous equation money = shit.