“
Why on earth would you buy a car like this if you can't drive a stick? There are dozens of cars--new cars--that have automatic transmission. It'd be a million times easier."
Adrian shrugged. "I like the color. It matches my living room.
”
”
Richelle Mead (The Golden Lily (Bloodlines, #2))
“
Let him treat you like a lady and open the car door for you. If he doesn't automatically open the door for you, stand by the darn thing and don't get into the vehicle until he realises he needs to get hid behind out of the driver's seat and come round and open the car door for you. That's his job!
”
”
Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)
“
Becky," he said. "Get in the car."
"Becca," she corrected automatically. Her voice was breathy, her hands still clenched in fists.
"For god's sake-" His eyes slid left. "Just get in the car.
”
”
Brigid Kemmerer (Storm (Elemental, #1))
“
I'm not going to roll the window down," I told him. "This car doesn't have automatic windows. I'd have to pull over and go around and lower it manually. Besides, it's cold outside, and unlike you, I don't have a fur coat."
He lifted his lip in a mock snarl and put his nose on the dashboard with a thump.
"You're smearing the windshield," I told him.
He looked at me and deliberately ran his nose across his side of the glass.
I rolled my eyes. "Oh, that was mature. The last time I saw someone do something that grown-up was when my little sister was twelve.
”
”
Patricia Briggs (Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, #5))
“
Remember when you were a little kid and you'd fall asleep in the car? And someone would carry you out and put you into bed, so that when you woke up in the morning, you knew automatically you were home again? That's what I think it's like to die.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Change of Heart)
“
Vampires do breathe, by the way, but their chests don't move like humans'. Have you ever lain in the arms of your sweetheart and tried to match your breathing to his, or hers? You do it automatically. Your brain only gets involved if your body is having trouble. Fortunately there was nothing about this situation that was like being in the arms of a sweetheart except that I was leaning against someone's naked chest. I could no more have breathed with him than I could have ignited gasoline and shot exhaust out my butt because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car.
”
”
Robin McKinley (Sunshine)
“
I see how it is,” I snapped. “You were all in favor of me breaking the tattoo and thinking on my own—but that’s only okay if it’s convenient for you, huh? Just like your ‘loving from afar’ only works if you don’t have an opportunity to get your hands all over me. And your lips. And . . . stuff.”
Adrian rarely got mad, and I wouldn’t quite say he was now. But he was definitely exasperated. “Are you seriously in this much self-denial, Sydney? Like do you actually believe yourself when you say you don’t feel anything? Especially after what’s been happening between us?”
“Nothing’s happening between us,” I said automatically. “Physical attraction isn’t the same as love. You of all people should know that.”
“Ouch,” he said. His expression hadn’t changed, but I saw hurt in his eyes. I’d wounded him. “Is that what bothers you? My past? That maybe I’m an expert in an area you aren’t?”
“One I’m sure you’d just love to educate me in. One more girl to add to your list of conquests.”
He was speechless for a few moments and then held up one finger. “First, I don’t have a list.” Another finger, “Second, if I did have a list, I could find someone a hell of lot less frustrating to add to it.” For the third finger, he leaned toward me. “And finally, I know that you know you’re no conquest, so don’t act like you seriously think that. You and I have been through too much together. We’re too close, too connected. I wasn’t that crazy on spirit when I said you’re my flame in the dark. We chase away the shadows around each other. Our backgrounds don’t matter. What we have is bigger than that. I love you, and beneath all that logic, calculation, and superstition, I know you love me too. Running away and fleeing all your problems isn’t going to change that. You’re just going to end up scared and confused.”
“I already feel that way,” I said quietly.
Adrian moved back and leaned into his seat, looking tired. “Well, that’s the most accurate thing you’ve said so far.”
I grabbed the basket and jerked open the car door. Without another word, I stormed off, refusing to look back in case he saw the tears that had inexplicably appeared in my eyes. Only, I wasn’t sure exactly which part of our conversation I was most upset about.
”
”
Richelle Mead (The Indigo Spell (Bloodlines, #3))
“
The thing about somebody else's car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.
”
”
Mick Herron (Joe Country (Slough House, #6))
“
Gunfire doesn’t startle real Texans, particularly those from rural towns. Miranda’s children mastered pistols, shotguns, and rifles like magicians master top hats, rabbits, and playing cards. Texas bravado aside, however, fully automatic gunfire wasn’t kosher. Not even close. Mirandites cowered at the ominous sounds of hoodlums firing M-16s and AK-47s from train cars barreling through the town’s arteries on largely secluded tracks.
”
”
Chad Boudreaux (Homecoming Queen)
“
So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment.
”
”
Ray Bradbury
“
Let go!” I insisted. He ignored me. I staggered along sideways across the wet sidewalk until we reached the Volvo. Then he finally freed me – I stumbled against the passenger door.
“You are so pushy!” I grumbled
“It’s open,” was all he responded. He got in the driver’s side.
“I am perfectly capable of driving myself home!” I stood by the car, fuming. It was raining harder now, and I’d never put my hood up, so my hair was dripping down my back.
He lowered the automatic window and leaned toward me across the seat. “Get in, Bella.”
I didn’t answer. I was mentally calculating my chances of reaching the truck before he could catch me. I had to admit it, they weren’t good.
“I’ll just drag you back,” he threatened, guessing my plan.
”
”
Stephenie Meyer (Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1))
“
People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.
”
”
Richard Russo (Empire Falls)
“
Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed. This means that for those of us over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind. This means that we will think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, react in identical ways, behave in the same manner, believe the same dogmas, and perceive reality the same ways. About 95 percent of who we are by midlife1 is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic—driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we’re stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.
”
”
Joe Dispenza (Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One)
“
The decision-making part of the brain of an individual who has been using crystal meth is very interesting. When Carly and Andy were in their apartment, they ran out of drugs. They sold every single thing they had except two things: a couch and a blow torch. They had to make a decision because something had to be sold to buy more drugs. A normal person would automatically think, Sell the blow torch. But Andy and Carly sat on the couch, looking at the couch and looking at the blow torch, and the choice brought intense confusion. The couch? The blow torch? I mean, we may not need the blow torch today, but what about tomorrow? If we sell the couch, we can still sit wherever we want. But the blow torch? A blow torch is a very specific item. If you’re doing a project and you need a blow torch, you can’t substitute something else for it. You would have to have a blow torch, right? In the end, they sold the couch.
”
”
Dina Kucera (Everything I Never Wanted to Be: A Memoir of Alcoholism and Addiction, Faith and Family, Hope and Humor)
“
There are two decisions you need to make after you have accepted Jesus into your life. One: You need to make the decision to get over your past. You will not grow unless you make a conscious decision to get over your past. Two: Once you have made that decision, you need to trust God to help you get over your past...
You didn’t just automatically become a Christian, did you? You weren’t made a Christian by just going to church. Just like you are not made a car by sitting in a garage all day! You have to make a decision.
”
”
Corallie Buchanan (Watch Out! Godly Women on the Loose)
“
You didn’t just automatically become a Christian, did you? You weren’t made a Christian by just going to church. Just like you are not made a car by sitting in a garage all day! You have to make a decision.
”
”
Corallie Buchanan (Watch Out! Godly Women on the Loose)
“
Agent Jones switched to the big screen and a grainy video of MoMo sitting at his enormous desk, a swivel-hipped Elvis clock ticking behind his bewigged head. 'Death to the capitalist pigs! Death to your cinnamon bun-smelling malls! Death to your power walking and automatic car windows and I'm With Stupid T-shirts! The Republic of ChaCha will never bend to your side-of-fries -drive -through-please-oh-would-you-like-ketchup-with-that corruption! MoMo B. ChaCha defies you and all you stand for, and one day, you will crumble into the sea and we will pick up the pieces and make them into sand art.
”
”
Libba Bray (Beauty Queens)
“
Someone has already taken out a Minolta cellular phone and called for a car, and then, when I'm not really listening, watching instead someone who looks remarkably like Marcus Halberstam paying a check, someone asks, simply, not in relation to anything, "Why? " and though I'm very proud that I have cold blood and that I can keep my nerve and do what I'm supposed to do, I catch something, then realize it: Why? and automatically answering, out of the blue, for no reason, just opening my mouth, words coming out, summarizing for the idiots: "Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I'm twenty-seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Pat rick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh..." and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)
“
About halfway back to the fraternity house, they suddenly became aware of bright lights behind them. The two turned automatically. To their horror, a car had raced up over the curb and was heading directly at them!
”
”
Carolyn Keene (Nancy's Mysterious Letter (Nancy Drew, #8))
“
And in the UK, cameras mounted on vehicles that look like souped-up Google StreetView cars now drive around automatically cross-checking our likenesses with a database of wanted people.
”
”
Hannah Fry (Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine)
“
Acheron scoffed. "Nick won't be learning in my Porsche. It's a standard. I think it'd be best to teach him in an automatic. Let him get used to the feel of the car and traffic rules before we complicate it with a gearshift. Last thing King ADD needs is one more distraction."
"Hey!" Nick protested. "I'm not that- hey, did you see that?" He pointed to the wall as a joke.
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon
“
Hey, Zee,” I said. “I take it that you can fix it, but it’ll be miserable, and you’d rather haul it to the dump and start from scratch.”
“Piece of junk,” groused Zee. “What’s not rusted to pieces is bent. If you took all the good parts and put them in a pile, you could carry them out in your pocket.” There was a little pause. “Even if you only had a small pocket.”
I patted the car. “Don’t you listen to him,” I whispered to it. “You’ll be out of here and back on the road in no time.”
Zee propelled himself all the way under the car so his head stuck out by my feet. “Don’t you promise something you can’t deliver,” he snarled.
I raised my eyebrows, and said in dulcet tones, “Are you telling me you can’t fix it? I’m sorry. I distinctly remember you saying that there is nothing you can’t fix. I must have been mistaken, and it was someone else wearing your mouth.”
He gave a growl that would have done Sam credit, and pushed himself back under again, muttering,“Deine Mutter war ein Cola-Automat!”
“Her mama might have been a pop machine,” I said, responding to one of the remarks I understood even at full Zee-speed. “Your mama . . .” sounds the same in a number of languages.
“But she was a beauty in her day.” I grinned at Gabriel. “We women have to stick together.
”
”
Patricia Briggs (Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, #5))
“
Then... Could I drive your car to where there would be?"
"I think you're about four or five years off being old enough, aren't you?"
"But the car's an automatic - and there's nothing I could hit, round here, except the trees. And the trees aren't going to make any sudden movements. Please?" (p. 23)
”
”
Katherine Rundell (Impossible Creatures (Impossible Creatures, #1))
“
The arteries of the city gradually begin to be crossed by cars with drivers who are searching for something, half asleep. Their automatic gestures reveal the monotony in which they bath like in a warm muddy puddle, like a drop of water in the fractured asphalt, sometimes dreaming of being a drop of ocean.
”
”
Natașa Alina Culea (Arlechinul)
“
When the fuel is dried up in a vehicle, it stops driving automatically.
You are a vehicle in the spiritual and the physical world, so you need some oil for alacrity, in order to get to your destination.
The greater the quantity of your oil, the more you cover the distance, and the more you cover the distance, the closer you get to your success.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson
“
The human body is a funny machine. When you want to move something - say, your arm - the brain actually sends two signals at the same time: "More power!" and "Less power!" The operating system that runs the body automatically holds some power back to avoid overexerting and tearing itself apart. Not all machines have that built - in safety feature. You can point a car at a wall, slam the accelerator to the floor, and the car will crush itself against the wall until the engine is destroyed or runs out of gas.
Martial arts use every scrap of strength the body has at its disposal. In martial arts training, you punch and shout at the same time. Your "Shout louder!" command helps to override the "Less power!" command. With practice, you can throttle the amount of power your body holds back. In essence, you're learning to channel
the body's power to destroy itself.
”
”
Hiroshi Sakurazaka (All You Need Is Kill)
“
The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.
”
”
Alfred Noyes (The Unknown God)
“
Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach.
”
”
Sara Baume (A Line Made By Walking)
“
Automatic is what I can manage. Isn't there enough to pay attention to OUTSIDE the car? All I want inside a car is music. When a favorite old song comes on the radio, I can never hear it past the first few notes. The song, evocative, will take me to the place and time where I first came to hear it. I'll be taken over for the length of the song, and returned when it stops, having missed it, only knowing it was there because now it ISN'T there. The same thing happens when I think about you. Although the trajectory is different--it is not the past, a past we haven't shared, but the future I am taken to by how quickly you have left.
I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand beside a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!
”
”
Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories)
“
a perfect description of the “automatic cultural man”—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate men are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of man’s slavery to his social system. But in Kierkegaard’s time it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. For Kierkegaard “philistinism” was triviality, man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him: in today’s world the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security:
Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs… . Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial…
”
”
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
“
Good riddance, you might imagine. But the worries about operator-less elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars. In fact, I learned something surprising when I was invited to speak to the Otis Elevator Company in Connecticut in 2006. The technology for automatic elevators had existed since 1900, but people were too uncomfortable to ride in one without an operator. It took the 1945 strike and a huge industry PR push to change people’s minds,
”
”
Garry Kasparov (Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins)
“
Sebastian Thrun, previously the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and now the head of Google’s autonomous car lab, feels the benefits will be significant. “There are nearly 50 million auto accidents worldwide each year, with over 1.2 million needless deaths. AI applications such as automatic breaking or lane guidance will keep drivers from injuring themselves when falling asleep at the wheel. This is where artificial intelligence can help save lives every day.
”
”
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
“
Our conscious memory is full of gaps, of course, which is actually a good thing. Our brains filter out the ordinary and expected, which is utterly necessary to allow us to function. When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash.
”
”
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
“
One note of caution: Do not use words describing your emotional reactions in the Automatic Thought column. Just write the thoughts that created the emotion. For example, suppose you notice your car has a flat tire. Don’t write “I feel crappy” because you can’t disprove that with a rational response. The fact is, you do feel crappy. Instead, write down the thoughts that automatically flashed through your mind the moment you saw the tire; for example, “I’m so stupid—I should have gotten a new tire this last month,” or “Oh, hell! This is just my rotten luck!” Then you can substitute rational responses such as “It might have been better to get a new tire, but I’m not stupid and no one can predict the future with certainty.” This process won’t put air in the tire, but at least you won’t have to change it with a deflated
”
”
David D. Burns (Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques)
“
With repetition, a lot of mental functioning becomes automatic and effortless, as when you drive a car to work. Novel situations, however, usually require conscious thought and “workaround” solutions, which are slower to develop, more difficult to execute, and more prone to error.
”
”
Atul Gawande (Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science)
“
Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.
”
”
Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)
“
When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash. As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates—essentially memory—of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking “Is this new?” and “Is this something I need to attend to?
”
”
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
“
The fighting had begun. You could make out groups of masked men roaming around with assault rifles and automatic weapons. Windows had been broken, here and there cars were on fire, but the images, shot in the pelting rain, were of such poor quality it was impossible to get a clear idea of who was doing what.
”
”
Michel Houellebecq (Submission)
“
When he went out it was freezing, and a pale winter sun was rising over Paris.
No thought of escape had as yet crossed Monsieur Monde's mind.
'Morning, Joseph.'
'Morning, monsieur.'
As a matter of fact, it started like an attack of flu. In the car he felt a shiver. He was very susceptible to head colds. Some winters they would hang on for weeks, and his pockets would be stuffed with wet handkerchiefs, which mortified him. Moreover, that morning he ached all over, perhaps from having slept in an awkward position, or was it a touch of indigestion due to last night's supper?
'I'm getting flu,' he thought.
Then, just as they were crossing the Grands Boulevards, instead of automatically checking the time on the electric clock as he usually did, he raised his eyes and noticed the pink chimney pots outlined against a pale blue sky where a tiny white cloud was floating.
It reminded him of the sea. The harmony of blue and pink suddenly brought a breath of Mediterranean air to his mind, and he envied people who, at that time of year, lived in the South and wore white flannels.
”
”
Georges Simenon (Monsieur Monde Vanishes)
“
With green envy, she watched Henry’s effortless mastery of the automobile. Cars are his servants, she thought. “Power steering? Automatic transmission?” she said. “You bet,” he said. “Well, what if everything shuts off and you don’t have any gears to shift. You’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t you?” “But everything won’t shut off.” “How do you know?” “That’s what faith is. Come here.
”
”
Harper Lee (Go Set a Watchman)
“
A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son, badly injured, is rushed to the hospital. In the operating room, the surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He is my son.” How cant his be?
If you’re immediate reaction is puzzlement, that’s because automatic mental associations caused you to think “male” on reading “surgeon”. The association surgeon = male is part of a stereotype.
”
”
Anthony G. Greenwald (Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People)
“
Even when people die in a hurricane, a car accident or a war, we tend to view it as a technical failure that could and should have been prevented. If the government had only adopted a better policy; if the municipality had
done its job properly; and if the military commander had taken a wiser decision, death would have been avoided. Death has become an almost automatic reason for lawsuits and investigations. ‘How could they have died? Somebody somewhere must have screwed up.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
These days, there are so few pure country people left on the concession roads that we may be in need of a new category of membership, much as sons and daughters of veterans are now allowed to join the Legion. A few simple questions could be asked, a small fee paid and (assuming that the answers are correct) you could be granted the status of an "almost local." Here are some of the questions you might be asked: Do you have just one suit for weddings and funerals? Do you save plastic buckets? Do you leave your car doors unlocked at all times? Do you have an inside dog and an outside dog? Has your outside dog never been to town? When you pass a neighbour in the car, do you wave from the elbow or do you merely raise one finger from the steering wheel? Do you have trouble keeping the car or truck going in a straight line because you are looking at crops or livestock? Do you sometimes find yourself sitting in the car in the middle of a dirt road chatting with a neighbour out the window while other cars take the ditch to get around you? Can you tell whose tractor is going by without looking out the window? Can people recognize you from three hundred yards away by the way you walk or the tilt of your hat? If somebody honks their horn at you, do you automatically smile and wave? Do most of your conversations open with some observation about the weather? Is your most important news source the store in the village? Have you had surgery in the local hospital? If you hear about a death or a fire in the community, does the woman in your house immediately start making sandwiches or a cake? Do you sometimes find yourself referring to a farm in the neighbourhood by the name of someone who owned it more than twenty-five years ago? If you answered yes to all of the above questions, consider it official: you are a local.
”
”
Dan Needles (True Confessions from the Ninth Concession)
“
In a recent speech Walter Reuther told of a visit to the new automatically operated Ford plant in Cleveland. Pointing to the robots, his host asked him, “How are you going to collect union dues from those guys?” The C.I.O. president … returned an equally pertinent question: “And how are you going to get them to buy cars?
”
”
Walter Reuther
“
He’s probably one of those “love the one you’re with” guys -- meaning he automatically goes after whatever woman happens to be around when he’s feeling horny."
"Just another reason why I’ll never get married," I say, getting out of the car.
“Oh, Carrie.” He sighs. “I feel sorry for you, then. I worry that you’ll never find true love.
”
”
Candace Bushnell (Summer and the City (The Carrie Diaries, #2))
“
cognitive filter in our brain that sticks to the first image we get. That’s a cognitive distortion often called the first impression bias. As soon as we have created our first impression we set it in stone and start filtering out everything that proves our impression was right. All of the evidence against our first impression is automatically discarded. Our brains do this to save energy. Since our brains use up a ton of energy, they have a lot of shortcuts to avoid using processing power whenever it’s not necessary. When you see a car, your brain doesn’t look back at that car to second-guess whether you were right or not. If it looks like a car, it is a car. We can make misjudgments because of this. Did
”
”
Brian Keephimattracted (F*CK Him! - Nice Girls Always Finish Single)
“
I suspect, Austin, that the Americans you’ve met in the banking world aren’t the high-school drop-outs from Nebraska whose best friend got shot by a smiley Iraqi teenager holding bug of apples. A teenager whose dad shredded by a gunner on a passing Humvee last week while he fixed the TV aerial. A gunner whose best friend took a dum dum bullet through the neck from a sniper on the roof only yesterday. A sniper whose sister was in a car that stalled at an intersection as a military attaché’ convoy drove up, prompting the bodyguards to pepper the vehicle with automatic fire, knowing they’d save the convoy from a suicide bomber if they were right , but that the Iraqi law wouldn’t apply to them if they were wrong. Ultimately , wars escalate by eating their own shit...
”
”
David Mitchell
“
O my Carmen, my little Carmen! Something, something those something nights, And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen – And, O my charmin’, our dreadful fights. And the something town where so gaily, arm in Arm, we went, and our final row, And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen, The gun I am holding now. (Drew his .32 automatic, I guess, and put a bullet through his moll’s eye.) Fourteen
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
“
Our leisure time is occupied increasingly by automatized activities in which we take no part: listening to piped-in words and viewing television screens (no portable smartphones, laptops back when Dr. Meerloo wrote his book). We hurry along with cars and go to bed with a sleeping pill. This pattern of living in turn may open the way for renewed sneak attacks on our mind. Our boredom may welcome any seductive suggestion.
”
”
Joost A.M. Meerloo (The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing)
“
Feminist-dominated administrations in the United States have elevated child protection to a paramilitary operation. In 1993, US Attorney General Janet Reno used unsubstantiated child abuse rumors to launch military operations against American citizens in Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 24 children that she was ostensibly protecting. The militarization of child protection was seen again in the largest seizure of children in American history, when almost five hundred children were seized from their polygamous parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without any evidence of abuse. “A night-time raid with tanks, riot police, SWAT teams, snipers, and cars full of Texas Rangers and sheriff’s deputies—that is the new face of state child protection,” writes attorney Gregory Hession, “social workers backed up with automatic weapons.
”
”
Stephen Baskerville
“
How could any citizen or Representative or Senator even have had the guts to propose such a thing for passage into law in this country? Fortunately, it was removed by amendment; however in some cases a trial isn't automatic, you must request a hearing. (Sec. 6480) Do I have your attention yet? $10,000 is the maximum fine for knowingly possessing any amount of a drug of any kind (even the kind that an enemy might plant in your car or home) (Sec. 6480).
”
”
Milton William Cooper (Behold! a Pale Horse, by William Cooper: Reprint recomposed, illustrated & annotated for coherence & clarity (Public Cache))
“
It is possible to insult Americans?”
“They are automatically insulted and enraged,” said the young composer. “They form splenetic organizations by the hundreds, and write letters to periodicals and congressmen. They gather in mobs and pay no attention. They hang people without trial and shoot citizens down with machine guns out of passing cars. They will despise you because you do not eat the same things they eat for breakfast. They even apply indifference.
”
”
Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The City of Trembling Leaves (Western Literature and Fiction Series))
“
Once the mobilization button was pushed, the whole vast machinery for calling up, equipping, and transporting two million men began turning automatically. Reservists went to their designated depots, were issued uniforms, equipment, and arms, formed into companies and companies into battalions, were joined by cavalry, cyclists, artillery, medical units, cook wagons, blacksmith wagons, even postal wagons, moved according to prepared railway timetables to concentration points near the frontier where they would be formed into divisions, divisions into corps, and corps into armies ready to advance and fight. One army corps alone—out of the total of 40 in the German forces—required 170 railway cars for officers, 965 for infantry, 2,960 for cavalry, 1,915 for artillery and supply wagons, 6,010 in all, grouped in 140 trains and an equal number again for their supplies. From the moment the order was given, everything was to move at fixed times according to a schedule precise down to the number of train axles that would pass over a given bridge within a given time.
”
”
Barbara W. Tuchman (The Guns of August)
“
We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?” He paused. “You need someone to probe you in that direction. It won’t just happen automatically.” I knew what he was saying. We all need teachers in our lives. And mine was sitting in front of me.
”
”
Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie)
“
Suppose a man had an appointment a hundred miles north of his home, and that if he kept it he would be sure of having health, much happiness, fair prosperity, for the rest of his life. He has just time enough to get there, just enough gas in his car. He drives out, but decides that it would be more fun to go twenty-five miles south before starting out in earnest. That is nonsense! Yes, isn't it? The gas had nothing to do with it; time had no preference as to how it would be spent; the road ran north as well as south, yet he missed his appointment. Now, if that man told us that, after all, he had quite enjoyed the drive in the wrong direction, that in some ways he found it pleasanter to drive with no objective than to try to keep a date, that he had had a touching glimpse of his old home by driving south, should we praise him for being properly philosophical about having lost his opportunity? No, we should think he had acted like an imbecile. Even if he had missed his appointment by getting into a daydream in which he drove automatically past a road sign or two, we should still not absolve him. Or if he had arrived too late from having lost his way when he might have looked up his route on a good map and failed to do so before starting, we might commiserate with him, but we should indict him for bad judgment. Yet when it comes to going straight to the appointments we make with ourselves and our own fulfillment we all act very much like the hero of this silly fable: we drive the wrong way. We fail where we might have succeeded by spending the same power and time. Failure indicates that energy has been poured into the wrong channel. It takes energy to fail.
”
”
Dorothea Brande (Wake Up And LIVE!)
“
Don't get me wrong, loyalty is an admirable quality. But the number of years one has been around does not automatically equate with being a good leader, any more than does merely having the title of manager or vice president. And certainly the things we acquire- fine cars, nice homes- are not measures of our leadership ability.
Leadership, more than anything else, is about the way we think. It's a moment-to-moment disciplining of our thoughts. It's about practicing personal accountability and choosing to make a positive contribution, no matter what out role or "level".
”
”
John G. Miller (QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life)
“
What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto
”
”
Reid Hoffman (The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career)
“
Achieving an all-white jury, or nearly all-white jury, is easy in most jurisdictions, because relatively few racial minorities are included in the jury pool. Potential jurors are typically called for service based on the list of registered voters or Department of Motor Vehicle lists—sources that contain disproportionately fewer people of color, because people of color are significantly less likely to own cars or register to vote. Making matters worse, thirty-one states and the federal government subscribe to the practice of lifetime felon exclusion from juries. As a result, about 30 percent of black men are automatically banned from jury service for life.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
This is textbook Bad Idea. We're driving with a stranger, no one knows where we are, and we have no way of getting in touch with anyone. This is exactly how people become statistics."
"Exactly?" I asked, thinking of all the bizarre twists and turns that had led us to this place.
Ben ceded the point with a sideways shrug. "Maybe not exactly. But still..."
He let it go, and the cab eventually stopped at the edge of a remote, forested area. Sage got out and paid. "Everybody out!"
Ben looked at me, one eyebrow raised. He was leaving the choice to me. I gave his knee a quick squeeze before I opened the door and we piled out of the car.
Sage waited for the cab to drive away, then ducked onto a forest path, clearly assuming we'd follow.
The path through the thick foliage was stunning in the moonlight, and I automatically released my camera from its bag.
"I wish you wouldn't," Sage said without turning around. "You know I'm not one for visitors."
"I'll refrain from selling the pictures to Travel and Leisure, then," I said, already snapping away. "Besides, I need something to take my mind off my feet." My shoes were still on the beach, where I'd kicked them off to dance.
"Hey, I offered to carry you," Sage offered.
"No, thank you."
I suppose I should have been able to move swiftly and silently without my shoes, but I only managed to stab myself on something with every other footfall, giving me a sideways, hopping gait. Every few minutes Sage would hold out his arms, offering to carry me again. I grimaced and denied him each time.
After what felt like about ten miles, even the photos weren't distracting enough. "How much farther?" I asked.
"We're here."
There was nothing in front of us but more trees.
"Wow," Ben said, and I followed his eyes upward to see that several of the tree trunks were actually stilts supporting a beautifully hidden wood-and-glass cabin, set high among the branches. I was immediately charmed.
"You live in a tree house," I said. I aimed my camera the façade, answering Sage's objection before he even said it. "For me, not for Architectural Digest."
"Thank you," Sage said.
”
”
Hilary Duff (Elixir (Elixir, #1))
“
Someone must be having a big party, Shyla thought as she turned into her neighborhood, the rhythmic salsa beat of Latin music was so loud.
A car she didn't recognize was parked in the middle of her driveway. She had to drive over the grass in order to get around it. She pushed the automatic opener to raise the garage door. Another car was parked where she normally parked, and it wasn't Carl's. It belonged to Pilar. Leaving her car where it was, she got out and went into the house through the back door from the garage.
Inside the house, the noise was almost deafening. Two young children were thrashing one another in the middle of the family room while some woman, presumably their mother, yelled at them in Spanish. The woman barely noticed Shyla.
Shyla went into the living room and could hear other voices and laughter coming from her bedroom. There, she found a young woman going through her jewelry box, and someone else holding up one of her bras. When they saw Shyla, they stopped laughing.
Pilar and another elderly woman were just coming down the stairs when Shyla went back into the living room.
"Shyla, why are you home?" Pilar asked, then shrugged.
Shyla could hardly hear her over the noise. "I live here," she said, too stunned to say anything else. She went back into the family room and turned off the compact disc player. There, on the floor, lay her great grandmother's china clock, broken.
”
”
Barbara Casey (Shyla's Initiative)
“
You don’t understand,” my dad said. “They stop you.”
“Who? What are you talking about?” my mom asked.
“That’s why I was being cautious.”
“Who stops you?”
“The police. If you’re white, or maybe Oriental, they let you drive however you want. But if you’re not, they stop you.”
“Who told you that?”
“The guys at the diner. That’s what they say. If you’re black or if you’re brown, they automatically think you’ve done something wrong.”
“Rafa, that’s ridiculous. We’ve lived here for fifteen years. We’re citizens.”
“The police don’t know that by looking at us. They see a brown face through the windshield and boom! Sirens!”
My mom shook her head. “That’s what that was about?”
“I didn’t want to give them reason to stop me.”
“You were driving like a blind man, Rafa. That will give them reason to stop you.”
“Everybody else just has to obey the law. We have to obey it twice as well.”
“But that doesn’t mean you have to go twice as slow as everybody else!”
The light turned green and my dad brought the car out of first. We cruised under the overpass, a shadow draping over the car like a blanket.
“Next time, just try to blend in with everyone else and you’ll be fine,” my mom offered.
“The way of the world,” my dad said.
“What?” my mom asked as we emerged back into the sunlight.
“Just trying to blend in. That’s the way of the world.”
“Well, that’s the way of America, at least,” my mom said.
”
”
Cristina Henríquez (The Book of Unknown Americans)
“
if consumer demand should increase for the goods or services of any private business, the private firm is delighted; it woos and welcomes the new business and expands its operations eagerly to fill the new orders. Government, in contrast, generally meets this situation by sourly urging or even ordering consumers to “buy” less, and allows shortages to develop, along with deterioration in the quality of its service. Thus, the increased consumer use of government streets in the cities is met by aggravated traffic congestion and by continuing denunciations and threats against people who drive their own cars. The New York City administration, for example, is continually threatening to outlaw the use of private cars in Manhattan, where congestion has been most troublesome. It is only government, of course, that would ever think of bludgeoning consumers in this way; it is only government that has the audacity to “solve” traffic congestion by forcing private cars (or trucks or taxis or whatever) off the road. According to this principle, of course, the “ideal” solution to traffic congestion is simply to outlaw all vehicles! But this sort of attitude toward the consumer is not confined to traffic on the streets. New York City, for example, has suffered periodically from a water “shortage.” Here is a situation where, for many years, the city government has had a compulsory monopoly of the supply of water to its citizens. Failing to supply enough water, and failing to price that water in such a way as to clear the market, to equate supply and demand (which private enterprise does automatically), New York’s response to water shortages has always been to blame not itself, but the consumer, whose sin has been to use “too much” water. The city administration could only react by outlawing the sprinkling of lawns, restricting use of water, and demanding that people drink less water. In this way, government transfers its own failings to the scapegoat user, who is threatened and bludgeoned instead of being served well and efficiently. There has been similar response by government to the ever-accelerating crime problem in New York City. Instead of providing efficient police protection, the city’s reaction has been to force the innocent citizen to stay out of crime-prone areas. Thus, after Central Park in Manhattan became a notorious center for muggings and other crime in the night hours, New York City’s “solution” to the problem was to impose a curfew, banning use of the park in those hours. In short, if an innocent citizen wants to stay in Central Park at night, it is he who is arrested for disobeying the curfew; it is, of course, easier to arrest him than to rid the park of crime. In short, while the long-held motto of private enterprise is that “the customer is always right,” the implicit maxim of government operation is that the customer is always to be blamed.
”
”
Murray N. Rothbard (For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (LvMI))
“
It looked like every cartoon of a flying saucer Newt had ever seen.
As he stared over the top of his map, a door in the saucer slid aside with a satisfying whoosh, revealing a gleaming walkway which extended automatically down to the road. Brilliant blue light shone out, outlining three alien shapes. They walked down the ramp. At least, two of them walked. The one that looked like a pepper pot just skidded down it, and fell over at the bottom.
The other two ignored its frantic beeping and walked over to the car quite slowly, in the worldwide approved manner of policemen already compiling the charge sheet it their heads. The tallest one, a yellow toad dressed in kitchen foil, rapped on Newt's window. He wound it down. The thing was wearing the kind of mirror-finished sunglasses that Newt always thought of as Cool Hand Luke shades.
'Morning, sir or madam or neuter,' the thing said. 'This your planet, is it?'
The other alien, which was stubby and green, had wandered off into the woods by the side of the road. Out of the corner of his eye Newt saw it kick a tree, and then run a leaf through some complicated gadget on its belt. It didn't look very pleased.
'Well, yes. I suppose so.' he said.
The toad stared thoughtfully at the skyline.
'Had it long, have we, sir?' it said.
'Er. Not personally. I mean, as a species, about half a million years. I think.'
The alien exchanged glances with its colleague. 'Been letting the old acid rain build up, haven't we, sir?' it said. 'Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?'
'I'm sorry.'
'Could you tell me your planet's albedo, sir?' said the the toad, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting.
'Er. No.'
'Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir.'
'Oh, dear,' said Newt. He was wondering who he could tell about this, and realizing that there was absolutely no one who would believe him. [...]
The small alien walked past the car.
'CO2 level up 0.5 percent,' it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. 'You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day— doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents— it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of “independents” and “moderates” may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.
”
”
William E. Connolly (The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism)
“
No one said a word, and I waited a beat, then pushed forward. Screw Kevin. Screw Maggie. Screw whatever happened to them now. I went after Caden.
He didn’t have to push his way through the crowd. It automatically opened for him. Not so much for me. I was at a disadvantage, and when I ran to the parking lot, he was already in the car and peeling past me.
“HEY!” I yelled, raising my hands in the air.
He braked, a little too close for comfort, right next to me. The passenger window rolled down. “What?”
I reached for the door. “Let me in.”
His eyebrows pinched together. “Why?”
“Let me in.”
He unlocked the door.
I opened it and climbed in. “Okay. I’m with you.” I had no idea what I was doing.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m with you.” I clapped the dashboard, pointing ahead. “Whatever you’re going to do, I’m in. You seem to need a friend. You’re in luck. I could use one myself. So I’m in.”
“I’m going to get drunk and have sex.”
“Oh.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You still in?”
He was laughing now. He was still mad, but he was laughing.
For whatever reason—maybe I did want to go with him, or maybe I heard my own voice calling me boring and pathetic again—I sat back and folded my hands in my lap. “I’m in.”
He shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into..” He shifted his Land Rover into drive and started forward. “But that’s your problem, not mine.”
He careened out of the parking lot, and I fell against the door. I grabbed the oh shit handle above my head, and I had a feeling that was going to be the theme for the rest of the night: Oh, shit.
”
”
Tijan (Anti-Stepbrother)
“
Our conscious memory is full of gaps, of course, which is actually a good thing. Our brains filter out the ordinary and expected, which is utterly necessary to allow us to function. When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash. As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates—essentially memory—of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking “Is this new?” and “Is this something I need to attend to?” So as you move down the road, your brain’s motor vestibular system is telling you that you are in a certain position. But your brain is probably not making new memories about that. Your brain has stored in it previous sitting experiences in cars, and the pattern of neural activity associated with that doesn’t need to change. There’s nothing new. You’ve been there, done that, it’s familiar. This is also why you can drive over large stretches of familiar highways without remembering almost anything at all that you did during the drive. This is important because all of that previously stored experience has laid down the neural networks, the memory “template,” that you now use to make sense out of any new incoming information. These templates are formed throughout the brain at many different levels, and because information comes in first to the lower, more primitive areas, many are not even accessible to conscious awareness.
”
”
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
“
When it passes us, the driver tips his cap our way, eying us as if he thinks we're up to no good-the kind of no good he might call the cops on. I wave to him and smile, wondering if I look as guilty as I feel. Better make this the quickest lesson in driving history. It's not like she needs to pass the state exam. If she can keep the car straight for ten seconds in a row, I've upheld my end of the deal.
I turn off the ignition and look at her. "So, how are you and Toraf doing?"
She cocks her head at me. "What does that have to do with driving?"
Aside from delaying it? "Nothing," I say, shrugging. "Just wondering."
She pulls down the visor and flips open the mirror. Using her index finger, she unsmudges the mascara Rachel put on her. "Not that it's your business, but we're fine. We were always fine."
"He didn't seem to think so."
She shoots me a look. "He can be oversensitive sometimes. I explained that to him."
Oversensitive? No way. She's not getting off that easy. "He's a good kisser," I tell her, bracing myself.
She turns in her seat, eyes narrowed to slits. "You might as well forget about that kiss, Emma. He's mine, and if you put your nasty Half-Breed lips on him again-"
"Now who's being oversensitive?" I say, grinning. She does love him.
"Switch places with me," she snarls. But I'm too happy for Toraf to return the animosity.
Once she's in the driver's seat, her attitude changes. She bounces up and down like she's mattress shopping, getting so much air that she'd puncture the top if I hadn't put it down already. She reaches for the keys in the ignition. I grab her hand. "Nope. Buckle up first."
It's almost cliché for her to roll her eyes now, but she does. When she's finished dramatizing the act of buckling her seat belt-complete with tugging on it to make sure it won't unclick-she turns to me in pouty expectation. I nod.
She wrenches the key and the engine fires up. The distant look in her eyes makes me nervous. Or maybe it's the guilt swirling around in my stomach. Galen might not like this car, but it still feels like sacrilege to put the fate of a BMW in Rayna's novice hands. As she grips the gear stick so hard her knuckles turn white, I thank God this is an automatic.
"D is for drive, right?" she says.
"Yes. The right pedal is to go. The left pedal is to stop. You have to step on the left one to change into drive."
"I know. I saw you do it." She mashes down on the brake, then throws us into drive. But we don't move.
"Okay, now you'll want to step on the right pedal, which is the gas-"
The tires start spinning-and so do we. Rayna stares at me wide-eyed and mouth ajar, which isn't a good thing since her hands are on the wheel. It occurs to me that she's screaming, but I can't hear her over my own screeching. The dust wall we've created whirls around us, blocking our view of the trees and the road and life as we knew it.
"Take your foot off the right one!" I yell. We stop so hard my teeth feel rattled.
"Are you trying to get us killed?" she howls, holding her hand to her cheek as if I've slapped her. Her eyes are wild and glassy; she just might cry.
"Are you freaking kidding me? You're the one driving!
”
”
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
“
Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”).
Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus.
This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task.
A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing.
A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.
”
”
J. Russell Ramsay (The Adult ADHD Tool Kit)
“
I'm to have dinner with some people from the bookshop, which is as posh as the motel, at six, then read at seven-thirty. I will have to watch my mouth. Some sarcastic remark about gentrification is almost bound to slip out. Even though the topography is right, this doesn't even look like Vermont. Not a cow in sight, not a single shack held together with staples and Masonite. Where are my people? The ones who used to go to Canada automatically at age 18 and get all their teeth pulled out, a standard right of passage. The ones who believe you can't be an alcoholic if you drink nothing but beer. The ones who know how to roast a haunch of venison with onions and garlic and sage and mustard (and where to find the haunch in July). The ones who buy their clothes at rummage and their cars at the junkyard. The ones who used to be me. Here I am on my balcony with a finger or two of cognac, a cigar, and a laptop computer, wearing my black jeans and my Reeboks. God, it's awful.
”
”
Hayden Carruth (Letters to Jane)
“
After dinners in Ris-Orangis, Derrida would gladly offer to drive home any guests without transport. He enjoyed driving, and always went into Paris by car. He’d learned when still very young, on the job, with his father’s car. But since he had never studied the highway code, he had his own ideas about it, which could sometimes lead to spectacular results. He considered, for example, that most ‘no entry’ signs did not actually apply to him, and that big roads should automatically have priority over smaller ones. At the wheel, he rapidly lost his cool. In traffic jams, he could almost get hysterical. And, to crown it all, whenever he stopped for even a short time he would start taking notes. In a letter to Éric Clémens, he indicated in a PS: ‘Excuse the handwriting, I’m writing in the car (what a life!), but I’ve stopped, not even at a red light. I’ve just thought of the title for a book: Written at a Red Light . . .’33 But while he was not a reassuring figure at the wheel, he never had an accident.
”
”
Benoît Peeters (Derrida: A Biography)
“
It was a sort of car that seemed to have a faculty for motion with an absolute lack of any accompanying sound whatsoever.
This was probably illusory; it must have been, internal combustion engines being what they are, tires being what they are, brakes and gears being what they are, even raspy street-surfacing being what it is. Yet the illusion outside the hotel entrance was a complete one. Just as there are silencers that, when affixed to automatic hand-weapons, deaden their reports, so it was as if this whole massive car body were encased in something of that sort. For, first, there was nothing out there, nothing in sight there. Then, as though the street-bed were water and this bulky black shape were a grotesque gondola, it came floating up out of the darkness from nowhere. And then suddenly, still with no sound whatsoever, there it was at a halt, in position.
It was like a ghost-car in every attribute but the visual one. In its trancelike approach and halt, in its lightlessness, in its enshrouded interior, which made it impossible to determine (at least without lowering one's head directly outside the windows
and peering in at nose-tip range) if it were even occupied at all, and if so by whom and by how many.
You could visualize it scuttling fleetly along some overshadowed country lane at dead of night, lightless, inscrutable, unidentifiable, to halt perhaps beside some inky grove of trees, linger there awhile undetected, then glide on again, its unaccountable errand accomplished without witness, without aftermath. A goblin-car that in an earlier age would have fed folklore and rural legend. Or, in the city, you could visualize it sliding stealthily along some warehouse-blacked back alley, curving and squirming in its terrible silence, then, as it neared the mouth and would have emerged, creeping to a stop and lying there in wait, unguessed in the gloom. Lying here in wait for long hours, like some huge metal-cased predatory animal, waiting to pounce on its prey.
Sudden, sharp yellow spurts of fangs, and then to whirl and slink back into anonymity the way it came, leaving the carcass of its prey huddled there and dead.
Who was there to know? Who was there to tell? ("The Number's Up")
”
”
Cornell Woolrich
“
In typical cases, that a are no official policies authorizing race drposcrimination is obvious yet unstated, and the systematic exclusion of black jurors continues largely unabated through the use of the peremptory strike,
Peremptory strikes have long been controversial. . . .In practice, however, peremptory challenges are notoriously discriminatory. Lawyers typically have little information about potential jurors, so their decisions to strike individual jurors tend to be based on nothing more than stereotypes, prejudices,and hunches. . . . Potential jurors are typically called for service based on the list of registered voters or Department of Motor Vehicle lists--spurces that contain dispropinately fewer people of color, because people of color are significantly less likely to own cars or to register to vote. Making matters worse, thirty-one States and the federal government subscribe to the practice of lifetime felon exclusion from juries. As a result, about 30 percent of black me are automatically banned from jury service for life. . . .[T]jemonly thing that has changed is that prosecutors must come up with a race-neutral excuse for the strikes--an exceeding easy task.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
TOM: Slušaj! Misliš da ludujem za skladištem? Misliš da sam zaljubljen u tvornicu cipela Kontinental? Misliš da želim provesti pedeset i pet godina u onoj prostoriji od celoteksa s' fluorescentnim cijevima? Više bih volio da mi netko maljem razbije glavu i prospe mozak nego da se onamo vraćam svakoga jutra! A ipak idem! Svaki put kad mi uđeš u sobu i vikneš ono prokleto:"Ustani i blistaj! Ustani i blistaj!" - ja kažem samome sebi: "Blago mrtvima!" A ipak ustajem! I idem! Za šezdeset i pet dolara mjesečno odričem se svega što bih želio raditi i biti! A ti kažeš da sam sebičan... da uvijek mislim samo na sebe. Čuj me, majko, da mislim na sebe, učinio bih ono što je on učinio - OTIŠAO BIH! Što dalje moguće! Ne diraj me, majko!
AMANDA: Kamo ćeš?
TOM: Idem u kino!
AMANDA: Ne vjerujem u tu laž!
TOM: Idem u jazbine gdje se puši opijum! Da, majko, u jazbine, u jazbine poroka gdje se sastaju kriminalci. Pridružio sam se Hoganovoj bandi, ja sam plaćeni ubojica, nosim automat u kutiji za violinu! Upravljam nizom bordela! Zovu me Koljač, Koljač Vingfield, živim dvostrukim životom, majko, danju sam običan pošteni namještenik u skladištu, a noću svemoćni car podzemlja! Zalazim u kockarnice, za ruletnim stolom rasipam silna bogatstva! Preko oka nosim crni ovoj i stavljam lažni brk, katkad stavljam zelenu bradu i brkove. Tada me zovu El Diablo! Mogao bih ti ispričati takve stvari da ne bi mogla oka sklopiti! Moji neprijatelji namjeravaju dići ovu kuću u zrak. Oni će nas jedne noći otpremiti u nebeske visine!
”
”
Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)
“
He stared down at her for a moment, wanting to heal every
cut on her soft skin. But he couldn’t, not yet. He needed to get her,
and her car, far from this place so neither he nor Kate would be
implicated in any way with the gruesome murder site.
It also meant he would have to drive.
In all his years, he had never driven an automobile. The closest he
had come was watching various assistants through the years as they
chauffeured him. He wasn’t sure he could even remember how to
start the car, but right now he had no choice.
Grudgingly, he got into the driver’s seat, and finding the lever
underneath, he pushed it back so he sat comfortably behind the
wheel. After trying three different keys, he found one that slipped into
the ignition.
From what he had seen over the past hundred years, driving was
not a complex operation, and he was an immortal with reflexes far
more keen than a human man.
How difficult could it be?
He turned the key and nearly jerked the wheel off the steering
column when the car surprised him by lurching forward. The car went
silent. The engine wasn’t running. What was he doing wrong?
He stared at the gearshift, wondering if he should move it. His
frustration reared up, but his agitation would not make the car drive
itself. He had to keep a cool head.
Not knowing what else to try, he pushed one of the pedals at his
feet to the floor and turned the key again. This time the car didn’t
move, and it roared to life. Grasping the gearshift, he jammed it into
the first position and glanced over at Kate.
Why couldn’t she have owned a car with an automatic
transmission?
Shaking his head, he put some pressure on the gas pedal and
slowly released the clutch. Thankfully the car rolled a few feet, but
without warning it jumped forward. He pressed the clutch back to the
floor before the engine lost power again.
Calisto slammed his hand against the wheel, muttering under his
breath in Spanish. At this rate it would take him all night to drive her
home.
The faded yellow convertible pitched forward again, threatening
to stall as he continued out of the parking lot, thankful it was late. The
streets were fairly empty. At least he wouldn’t get into an accident
with another car. Her car staggered ahead, lurching each time he
tried to release the clutch, bouncing and jostling them both until Kate
finally stirred and woke up.
§
“Are we out of gas or something?”
Calisto watched her with a tight smile. “Not exactly.”
Kate winced in pain when she laughed. “You can’t drive a stickshift,
can you?”
“Does it show?” Calisto pulled over, finally allowing the engine to
stall.
She nodded her head slowly to avoid more pain. “Just a little.
What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember being mugged. And I remember seeing you, but
everything after that is blank.” She watched his eyes as Calisto
reached over to brush her hair back from her face, and his touch sent
shivers through her body. This wasn’t how she had hoped she would
run into him, but she learned a long time ago fate didn’t always work
out the way you expected.
”
”
Lisa Kessler (Night Walker (Night, #1))
“
So the Formula One driver has a dual status: he is both an automatic terminal of the most refined technical machinery, a technical operator, and he is the symbolic operator of crowd passions and the risk of death. The paradox is the same for the motor companies, caught as they are between investment and potlatch. Is all this a calculated — and hence rational — investment (marketing and advertising)? Have we here a mighty commercial operation, or is the company spending inordinate sums, far beyond what is commercially viable, to assuage a passion for prestige and charisma (there is also a manufacturers' world championship)? In this confrontation between manufacturers, isn't there an excessive upping of the stakes, a dizzying passion, a delirium? This is certainly the aspect which appeals, in the first instance, to the millions of viewers. In the end, the average TV viewer has doubtless never been aware that McLaren is a flagship for Honda. And I am not sure he or she is tempted to play the Formula One driver in ordinary life. The impact of Formula One lies, then, in the exceptional and mythic character of the event of the race and the figure of the driver, and not in the technical or commercial spin-offs. It is not clear why speed would be both severely limited and morally condemned in the public domain and, at the same time, celebrated in Formula One as never before, unless there is an effect of sublime compensation going on here. Formula One certainly serves to popularize the cult of the car and its use, but it does much more to maintain the passion for absolute difference — a fundamental illusion for all, and one which justifies all the excesses.
In the end, however, hasn't it gone about as far as it can? Isn't it close to a final state, a final perfection, in which all the cars and drivers, given the colossal resources deployed, would, in a repetitive scenario, achieve the same maximum performance and produce the same pattern in each race? If Formula One were merely a rational, industrial performance, a test-bed for technical possibilities, we should have to predict that it would simply burn itself out. On the other hand, if Formula One is a spectacle, a collective, passionate (thoug h perfectly artificial) event, embracing the multiple screens of technological research, the living prosthesis of the driver, and the television screens into which the viewers project themselves, then it certainly has a very fine future.
In a word, Formula One is a monster. Such a concentration of technology, money, ambition and prestige is a monster (as is the world of haute couture, which is equally abstract, and as far removed from real clothing as Formula One is from road traffic). Now, monsters are doomed to disappear, and we are afraid they might be disappearing. But we are not keen, either, to see them survive in a domesticated, routinized form. In an era of daily insignificance — including the insignificance of the car and all its constraints — we want at least to save the passion of a pure event, and exceptional beings who are permitted to do absolutely anything.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
“
Society would have much to gain from decriminalization. On the immediate practical level, we would feel safer in our homes and on our streets and much less concerned about the danger of our cars being burgled. In cities like Vancouver such crimes are often committed for the sake of obtaining drug money. More significantly perhaps, by exorcising this menacing devil of our own creation, we would automatically give up a lot of unnecessary fear. We could all breathe more freely. Many addicts could work at productive jobs if the imperative of seeking illegal drugs did not keep them constantly on the street.
It’s interesting to learn that before the War on Drugs mentality took hold in the early twentieth century, a prominent individual such as Dr. William Stewart Halsted, a pioneer of modern surgical practice, was an opiate addict for over forty years. During those decades he did stellar and innovative work at Johns Hopkins University, where he was one of the four founding physicians. He was the first, for example, to insist that members of his surgical team wear rubber gloves — a major advance in eradicating post-operative infections. Throughout his career, however, he never got by with less than 180 milligrams of morphine a day.
“On this,” said his colleague, the world-renowned Canadian physician Sir William Osler, “he could do his work comfortably and maintain his excellent vigor.” As noted at the Common Sense for Drug Policy website: Halsted’s story is revealing not only because it shows that with a morphine addiction the proper maintenance dose can be productive. It also illustrates the incredible power of the drug in question. Here was a man with almost unlimited resources — moral, physical, financial, medical — who tried everything he could think of and he was hooked until the day he died. Today we would send a man like that to prison. Instead he became the father of modern surgery.
”
”
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
“
Q. How can I be certain that what I fear will happen will never really happen?
A. Sadly, the answer is you can't be certain! If you suffer from OCD you probably want a 100 percent guarantee that you will never do anything dangerous or that no harm will ever come to you or your family members. Unfortunately, life does not work like this. If I think about it, I know that there is no guarantee that I won't be hit by a car coming home from work today - but somehow my brain automatically accepts the very small chance of this happening and so permits me to go on living my life.
More than two thousand years ago the Buddha (a great psychologist besides being a religious teacher) warned that one of the key things that makes us suffer is that we always want more than we will actually get - whether what we want is material like gold and jewels, or (my addition) in the case of OCD, more certainty than you will ever achieve. Thus the solution the Buddha might have offered you in northern India those thousands of years ago might have been something like this: "To stop suffering you must learn to accept that you will never achieve as much certainty as you want, no matter how much you pursue it; so it is up to you to choose: Either accept this truth and live your life happily, or fight against this truth and continue to suffer."
Let me say it again for emphasis: you will never be certain that you won't act on the urges you have, or that the terrible things you fear will happen will not actually happen - but I can assure you that the odds of these things actually happening are small enough that it is not worth wasting your life trying (in vain) to get 100 percent certainty. Better to trust in yourself, your religious beliefs, or in evolution having prepared us well for surviving in this world.
If evidence from brain studies better helps to convince you this is true, brain imaging studies of OCD sufferers now suggest that there really is something wrong with their "certainty system"; whatever automatically lets someone without OCD feel that things are OK does not function correctly in the OCD sufferer's brain (who then tries to convince himself that everything is OK, eventually becoming tired and frustrated when he cannot use other brain functions to achieve 100 percent certainty).
”
”
Lee Baer (Getting Control (Revised Edition)
“
If YOUR free READ it calmly. This to all my FOLKS and MYSELF
our expectations,
our needs,
our dreams,
our destiny,
our life style,
Our likes and dislikes.
we always RUN around so many things without even THINKING.
Have a look on our SATISFACTION list
# new gadget or a mobile for example fun for 2 months?
# New bike fun for "2 months" . # New car for "3"?
# Getting into a relationship wantedly as we are alone max 3/4 months?
# Revenge ? A weak? Month?
# flirting ? 2/3 months # sex ? Few mins
# boozing, joint or a fag? Few hours?
# addicting to something leaving behind everything? One year?
# your example of anything repeatedly done for satisfaction? Max? Get a number yourself!
¦¦¦ Even though we satisfy our soul by all the above. Passing day by day. Years passed.
Yet left with the same IRRITATING feeling to satisfy our needs. ONE after ANOTHER . ¦¦¦
¦¦¦ Some day we realize it was " pure SELFISH satisfaction " and left with a "GUILT " and EMPTINESS . questioning LIFE ! ¦¦¦
"In the RAMPAGE of getting everything we wished. We might not realize what we MISSED . Being CARELESS of our surrounding."
"Feelings left hurt and hearts broken. Family friends and people we cares and who cares us. PRIORITIES made by ourself to be satisfied even here."
If LIFE was just to satisfy what ever we WISHED for. Was it A life worth lived? May be! Yes. But it's SURE you end up questioning life with BLACKNESS !
# So many questions unanswered.
Our EXISTENCE ?
Our DESTINY ?
To question the existence of God and HEAVEN .?
At Last questioning the existence of UNIVERSE itself?
The whole system CRACKS a nerve!
Why spoil our LIFE when we are the creators of our LIFE ! When we are capable of finding an answer to does questions by our self
Finding that true meaning of LIFE beyond all the mess we live by daily. which is Going to satisfy us.
We need to realize by now our Every action should lead to Happiness and satisfaction of the people around us. It's the real paradise feeling we all wish for. The real deal.
We disrupt our LIFE in the rampage of getting everything we need which can automatically be provided by LIFE .
When we start sacrificing our LIFE in a positive way being busy fulfilling the needs of our dears ones. They indeed be busy trying to fulfill our needs and wishes.
It's giving some things and getting something back. With less expectations. Rather than grabbing.
A SECRET for a PERFECT LIFE which we FAIL to live by.
Starting from FORGIVING everyone who tumbles in our path trying to steal away our positive life and happiness. Because as we all are tamed to do MISTAKE at some point.
There is not much TIME left to waste by hating and cursing LIFE when we can start LIVING right now.
"A REMINDER just to make sure we try to be SELFLESS and find that UNMATCHED HAPPINESS and SATISFACTION ."
~~¦¦ LIFE is complex to understand yet so SIMPLE ¦¦
¶¶ Never be in a hurry on GETTING on to something you might be left with NOTHING ¶¶
<< Being SELFISH makes us a HEALTHY human but being SELFLESS makes you A HUMAN >>
«« LIFE is meaningful when we forget about our THIRST and QUENCH the thirst of OTHERS .»»
RETHINK AND REDEFINE LIFE ¶¶
~ Sharath kumar G .
”
”
Sharath Kumar G
“
Today’s children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncrasies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right. Also, to start the engine of a modern car you do just two things, turn a key and touch the starter. Everything else is automatic. The process used to be more complicated. It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic, so that a man about to turn the crank of a Model T might be seen to spit on the ground and whisper a spell.
”
”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
“
Here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car. A car that pays for its Toyota lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. A car that is a corporation. A car that is a shareholder and owner of its own corporation. A car that exists as an autonomous financial entity with no human ownership. This has never happened before, and that’s just the beginning. Audience member gasps: "Oh shit!" I can guarantee you that one of the first distributed autonomous corporations is going to be a fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-based ransomware virus that will go out and rob people online of their bitcoin, and use that money to evolve itself to pay for better programming, to buy hosting, and to spread. That’s one vision of the future. Another vision of the future is a digital autonomous charity. Imagine a system that takes donations from people, and using those donations it monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook. When a certain threshold is reached and it sees 100,000 people talking about a natural disaster, like a typhoon in the Philippines, it can marshal the donations and automatically fund aid in that area, without a board of directors, without shareholders. One hundred percent of donations goes directly to charitable causes. Anyone can see the rules by which that autonomous altruistic charity works. We are beginning to approach things we have never seen before. This is not just a currency. Now, let’s look at how the bitcoin community is addressing this incredible potential with their design choices and metaphors. Oh boy, it’s a mess.
”
”
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
“
It is characteristic of all learning that as learning takes place, correction becomes more and more refined. We see this in a person just learning to drive a car, who “overcorrects” and zigzags back and forth across the street. Once, however, a correct or “successful response” has been accomplished, it is “remembered” for future use. The automatic mechanism then duplicates this successful response on future trials. It has “learned” how to respond successfully. It forgets its failures, and repeats the successful action without any further conscious thought—that is, as a habit.
”
”
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded (The Psycho-Cybernetics Series))
“
Driver Behavior & Safety
Proper driving behavior is vital for the safety of drivers, passengers, pedestrians and is a means to achieve fewer road accidents, injuries and damage to vehicles. It plays a role in the cost of managing a fleet as it impacts fuel consumption, insurance rates, car maintenance and fines. It is also important for protecting a firm’s brand and reputation as most company- owned vehicles carry the company’s logo.
Ituran’s solution for driver behavior and safety improves organizational driving culture and standards by encouraging safer and more responsible driving. The system which tracks and monitors driver behavior using an innovative multidimensional accelerometer sensor, produces (for each driver) an individual score based on their performance – sudden braking and acceleration, sharp turns, high-speed driving over speed bumps, erratic overtaking, speeding and more. The score allows fleet managers to compare driver performance, set safety benchmarks and hold each driver accountable for their action.
Real-time monitoring identifies abnormal behavior mode—aggressive or dangerous—and alerts the driver using buzzer or human voice indication, and detects accidents in real time. When incidents or accidents occurs, a notification sent to a predefined recipient alerts management, and data collected both before and after accidents is automatically saved for future analysis.
• Monitoring is provided through a dedicated application which is available to both fleet manager and driver (with different permission levels), allowing both to learn and improve
• Improves organizational driving culture and standards and increases safety of drivers and passengers
• Web-based reporting gives a birds-eye view of real-time driver data, especially in case of an accident
• Detailed reports per individual driver include map references to where incidents have occurred
• Comparative evaluation ranks driving according to several factors; the system automatically generates scores and a periodic assessment certificate for each driver and/or department
Highlights
1. Measures and scores driver performance and allows to give personal motivational incentives
2. Improves driving culture by encouraging safer and more responsible driving throughout the organization
3. Minimizes the occurrence of accidents and protects the fleet from unnecessary wear & tear
4. Reduces expenses related to unsafe and unlawful driving: insurance, traffic tickets and fines
See how it works:
”
”
Ituran.com
“
A heart monitor embedded in your shirt provides real-time data to a cardiologist, who can then send updated prescriptions to your pharmacist, who can, in turn, send an alert to your smartwatch while you are driving home to say that your medications are ready to pick up. Then your GPS can automatically update itself to route you to the pharmacy, where you arrive in your self-driving car and pay for the prescription using your smartphone.
”
”
Lasse Rouhiainen (Artificial Intelligence: 101 Things You Must Know Today About Our Future)
“
A heart monitor embedded in your shirt provides real-time data to a cardiologist, who can then send updated prescriptions to your pharmacist, who can, in turn, send an alert to your smartwatch while you are driving home to say that your medications are ready to pick up. Then your GPS can automatically update itself to route you to the pharmacy, where you arrive in your self-driving car and pay for the prescription using your smartphone.”[
”
”
Lasse Rouhiainen (Artificial Intelligence: 101 Things You Must Know Today About Our Future)
“
I wonder if this communal tenderness will last, or will it be like after the Second World War, when everyone eventually replaced their memories of gold stars and rationing with automatic dishwashers and two-car garages?
”
”
Kim Fay (Love & Saffron)
“
Willpower and brain capacity. Most of us are confused about what willpower really is. We tend to think some people have it in spades and that others like those with chemical and behavioral addictions are lacking in it. That's exactly how I saw myself as a person with no self-control or willpower which was not at all true. While impulse control was indeed a skill I had to hone. For instance through meditation, and mindfulness - staying present with feelings and reactions. Willpower, as in repression or inhibiting a desire. It isn’t a skill. It's a finite cognitive function known as inhibition. To understand a little bit more how willpower or inhibition works, a few pieces of information will help. First, willpower is one of five functions delegated to the prefrontal cortex or PFC. The other four functions are decision making, understanding, memorizing, and recalling. Second, it's important to know that the brain requires a crapload of energy from the body. It accounts for about 2% of our body mass and consumes about 20% of our energy. Most of our brain functions are automatic and don't require conscious processing. Like the beating of your heart, or a habit like driving a car. These automatic processes don't burn up metabolic resources. The PFC on the other hand requires a massive amount of energy or glucose to work. The same way you need energy to run a mile you need energy to make decisions or memorize facts. And this energy is not inexhaustible. We wake up every day with only so much gas in our tank to fuel our PFC. And we burn through it fairly quickly. What this means for willpower is that 1) it's a finite resource with only so much of it available to us each day and 2) it's a resource shared with other functions. Every time you solve a problem, make a decision, memorize a fact, remember something, or try not to do something, like eat that second cookie, or check your Instagram for the 14th time, you are draining your willpower reserves. Trying harder doesn't work when you've got nothing left in you to feel the effort. The thing about the Pfc is that there's no way to give it more gas. So there's no way to increase your willpower, or decision making, understanding, memorizing or recall. What you can do is approach those five functions as if they are precious resources because they are and plan your day in a way that uses them carefully. By creating more automation or habits so that you aren't using your decision making and willpower as often.
”
”
Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol)
“
Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas...
In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened.
During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked).
Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.
”
”
Paul Theroux
“
We search for situations that create superficial fear to cover up inner anxieties. We like to escape into the irrational because we dislike the challenge of self-study and self-thinking. Our leisure time is occupied increasingly by automatized activities in which we take no part: listening to piped-in words and viewing television screens. We hurry along with cars and go to bed with a sleeping pill. This pattern of living in turn may open the way for renewed sneak attacks on our mind. Our boredom may welcome any seductive suggestion.
”
”
Joost A.M. Meerloo (The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing)
“
Adjustable girls’ are desirable, good girls. The English word ‘adjust’ is used so often in raising good girls that it has become a Hindi word. Adjustable girls automatically change their bodies and behaviour to please others; they fit in anywhere and obligingly slip, slide, squeeze and shrink into the tiniest physical and psychological spaces. Beta, thoda adjust kar lo , darling, adjust a little. You learn it when sitting in a car, legs tightly squeezed together, while the men sit back with their legs apart; you learn it when you can’t wear tight clothes, pants or dresses in front of disapproving visiting relatives; you learn it when you are not allowed to speak back to that idiot of an uncle who calls you dark, fat, hairy or stupid and pities you; you learn it when you are scolded for being upset about anything; you learn it as you watch your brother get the bigger chocolate or go to a better school or college and you pretend it does not hurt; you learn it when you are left at home but the boys go out; you learn it when your mother does nothing when your father is rude to her, scolds her, demeans her or hits her. As many mothers say to their daughters, Apne aap ko thoda adjust kar lo , you adjust yourself. This is a deceptively benign way, bit by bit, to start erasing any signs of an independent self in girls. It teaches girls to discount themselves and makes girls available at a permanent discount in the world. In marriage it is reflected in dowries and at work in lower salaries.
”
”
Deepa Narayan (Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women)
“
Companies need to build systems with the assumption that they will be hacked. They need to develop technologies that notify us when we’ve been compromised and take automatic actions to block attackers.
”
”
Vivek Wadhwa (The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future)
“
The lighthouse is remote enough that it’s not automatic, but still manned, and as Gammy tells me the story of her family and how they’ve always kept it, passed from generation to generation, I feel her deep sense of home. I can feel it in the earth, too, when I get out of the car and walk upon the rocks. It’s in the sky and the roaring ocean and the keening of the wind, it’s in the way she strides over her land and into her lighthouse; she owns this place and it owns her, tangible and unarguable. What must it be like to be bound so deeply and willingly to a place?
”
”
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
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He didn’t know a great deal about cars, but he liked the idea of a junkyard. There was a certain romance to them. Old wrecks from bygone eras, little slices of Americana. Cars with tailfins. Big chrome bumpers. Gas-guzzling behemoths that were far bigger than they needed to be. Like the song said – Automatic. Systematic. Hydromatic. Whatever the hell hydromatic was supposed to mean. No cars in the world looked like those old American cars, and no country in the world loved their cars like America did. All of which meant time strolling among the wrecks would be a morning well spent. Unfortunately, he and Diller were here to sneak in and steal a car to get themselves out of the insane situation in which they currently found themselves.
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Caimh McDonnell (Other Plans (McGarry Stateside Book #4))
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„Hi.“, I say, waving awkwardly.
„Hi.“, he says back and sits down immediately, „Sorry for making you wait.“
What does he mean by waiting? It is like he flew with his car down to my favourite spot. I hope he didn’t. Collecting speeding tickets for me should seriously NOT be an awarding thing to do.
„It’s alright.“, my head rests automatically against his shoulder, „As long as you didn’t get in any trouble because of me.
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Skylar C. R. Wolf (The Waves Will Chant About Us. Life is a Story - story.one)
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something and it automatically falls in your lap, is actually the reason why so many people try it out of excitement, but give it up too soon after its fails to deliver them any good. The reason for this is that there is an important part of Visualization that is often not emphasized enough and gets overlooked. It is the role of feelings and emotions that must accompany the visualization for it to be successful and bring any desired changes in our life. Therefore if you want a new car you just do not imagine a car and keep seeing the picture in your imagination you
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Jaspinder Grover (Stress Relief: Natural Stress Relief and Stress Management Using Relaxation and Stress Reduction Techniques based on Law of Attraction: Reduce Stress - ... Applications and Methodoly of Use Book 5))
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When you place an item in memory, it’s as if you’re sending a message to your future self,” according to Robert Jacobs, a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. “This channel has limited capacity, however, and thus it can’t transmit all details of a message. Consequently, a message retrieved from memory at a later time may not be the same as the message placed into memory at the earlier time. That is why memory errors occur.” Jacobs conceives of memory as a kind of communication channel which, like all communication channels, may break down. For instance, the brain is designed to favor filling in details when only the gist of an experience can be recalled. Was the Shelby Mustang I considered buying last month outfitted with a manual or an automatic transmission? If I don’t remember, it’s natural to “mentally fill in the missing details with the most frequent or commonplace properties,” says Jacobs. The car must have been equipped with a manual transmission because I don’t think Shelby ever made a car with an automatic transmission, I conclude, although I’m not all that sure of my memory for this fact and this car could be an exception or a conversion. In J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel Rushing to Paradise, he writes of the dangers of a “collective amnesia for the future. . . . a willed refusal to face the imminent.” Could this failure in future memory be part of the explanation for our response to the threat of Global Warming?
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Richard Restak (The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind)
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One note of caution: Do not use words describing your emotional reactions in the Automatic Thought column. Just write the thoughts that created the emotion. For example, suppose you notice your car has a flat tire. Don’t write “I feel crappy” because you can’t disprove that with a rational response. The fact is, you do feel crappy. Instead, write down the thoughts that automatically flashed through your mind the moment you saw
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David D. Burns (Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques)
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Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.
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Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
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Please, boy, five speed stick. What person in their right mind would purchase a high-performance muscle car with an automatic tranny,” she teased.
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T.L. Travis (In the Shadows (Social Sinners #2))
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It’s why for every 20-degree increase in a day’s temperature, researchers found that car dealers sell 8.5 percent more convertibles.5 “It’s been sunny in the last few hours, so a convertible is the right investment for me,” goes the logic of your shortsighted automatic system.
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Caroline Webb (How To Have A Good Day: The Essential Toolkit for a Productive Day at Work and Beyond)
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Up-front investment to try to professionalize the supply side early on in a network’s development inevitably comes with risk. In a well-publicized misstep for Uber, the company sought to expand its supply side by financing vehicles to provide cars to potential drivers who didn’t own vehicles, a program called XChange Leasing. The hypothesis was that this should push these drivers into power-driver territory quickly. Payments could be automatically deducted from their Uber earnings, and their driver ratings and trip data could be used to underwrite the loans. XChange Leasing unfortunately lost $525 million and failed to professionalize the driver side of the market. The problem was, it attracted drivers highly motivated by money—usually a positive—but who didn’t have high credit scores for good reason. They often failed to make payments, using their Uber-provided car to drive for competitors and avoid the automatic deductions. They would steal the cars and sell them for, say, half price. They would drive for Lyft instead of Uber, as a way to avoid the automatic payment deductions—they would try to have their cake and eat it, too. Uber needed to organize a massive repossession effort to get the cars back, but it was too late—many had been sold illegally, some finding themselves as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan, GPS devices still attached and running. This is a colorful example of how scaling the supply side, when a lot of capital is involved, can be tricky.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)