Background Positive Quotes

Silence is a 'contingent' phenomenon with positive or negative qualities. When it has to be assessed it needs to be 'contextualized' by exploring its background.

No matter how dysfunctional your background, how broke or broken you are, where you are today, or what anyone else says, YOU MATTER, and your life matters!

It's an amazing experience when you focus on the positive things in your life. Things start to change. You become happier. You see things differently. There might still be negative things there, but like an airplane flying overhead, they become the background noise of your mind.

On the day he was born, Muhammad was given a unique name—and with it a mission to model positive behavior to inspire others. The great inventors of the Golden Age sought to emulate his success by applying his mindset of blossoming to their own circumstances. Each manifested his methodology in trailblazing innovations that not only reflected their individuality but also transformed the world—precisely the lifetime goal Muhammad’s mother had articulated for her son on her deathbed. Indeed, Aminah’s inspiring last words reverberate beyond six-year- old Muhammad to reach people of all backgrounds across the genera- tions: strive to be a world-changer in your own unique way.

Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and he strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were chubby and delicate, like those of a plump little girl. She looked out into the sunshine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

When people from similar backgrounds get together, are isolated from dissenting views, and are trying to please a strong leader, the result is consensus around the preferred position, even if it is clearly wrongheaded.

The best way to respond to distracting personal attacks is to practice bringing the conversation back to the issue at hand. Never fall into the trap of engaging in personal attacks while letting the topic of conversation slip into the background. Doing so allows your opponent to escape the need to explain her position.

The first thing others see is YOU—not your resume, background, or credentials. A picture is truly worth a thousand words and how you dress is the “picture” you provide for all the world to see.

At the end of that class Demian said to me thoughtfully: "There’s something I don’t like about this story, Sinclair. Why don’t you read it once more and give it the acid test? There’s something about it that doesn’t taste right. I mean the business with the two thieves. The three crosses standing next to each other on the hill are almost impressive, to be sure. But now comes this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What’s the sense of repenting if you’re two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again, it’s nothing but a priest’s fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up with sentimentality and given a high edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which one you’d rather trust, you most certainly wouldn’t choose the sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he’s a man of character. He doesn’t give a hoot for ‘conversion’, which to a man in his position can’t be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to it’s appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he’s even a descendant of Cain. Don’t you agree?" I was dismayed. Until now I had felt completely at home in the story of the Crucifixion. Now I saw for the first time with how little individuality, with how little power of imagination I had listened to it and read it. Still, Demian’s new concept seemed vaguely sinister and threatened to topple beliefs on whose continued existence I felt I simply had to insist. No, one could not make light of everything, especially not of the most Sacred matters. As usual he noticed my resistance even before I had said anything. "I know," he said in a resigned tone of voice, "it’s the same old story: don’t take these stories seriously! But I have to tell you something: this is one of the very places that reveals the poverty of this religion most distinctly. The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represent. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental—true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it’s all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn’t close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.

As Darwin pointed out in The Origin of Species (opening pages of chapter three), the 'struggle for existence' can often be described just as well as a mutual dependence. And harmless coexistence as parts of the same eco-sphere is also a very common relation. . . . Among social creatures, positive gregariousness, a liking for each other's company, is the steady, unnoticed background for the conflicts.

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness, of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment...the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.

The religious faith that we are born into is largely determined by the region where we live and the ethnic background of our family. In my case, I was born to an African American family in the southern region of the United States. Like most families of our description, we embraced the Baptist religious tradition. Although I went from Baptist to Buddhist, I’ve honored my family’s heritage and cherish the similarities between these two paths. Baptist teachings encouraged me to work toward attaining admission into a heavenly paradise, while Buddhism inspires me to attain the enduring and enlightened life condition of Buddhahood. Although the goals of these two spiritual paths may sound somewhat different, both focus on creating a state of indestructible, eternal happiness. To me, that is an important similarity. I’ve met people from all over the world, from many cultures and faiths, and I believe that all religious traditions share the same basic aspirations at their core—to experience everlasting joy by aligning with the positive forces of the universe. We may describe this ultimate reality as Jehovah, God, Allah, Jesus, Hashem, Tao, Brahma, the Creator, the Mystic Law, the Universe, the Force, Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, or any number of other expressions.

A certain amount of native skill and training can allow many individuals to be fairly successful magicians, achieving a surprisingly high ratio of positive results through sorcery.(...) These outer changes, no matter how dramatic, will not necessarily have a deep impact on the deepest levels of your psyche, which is where the process of initiation most meaningfully manifests.' --Zeena Schreck for “Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,” University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004

He sounded positively hostile. I could tell he was about to hang up. “Wait a minute. Who’s IYCGM?” “If you can’t get me,” he gritted. “And IYD?” “If you’re dying, Ms. Lane. But if I were you, I’d call that one only if I was sure I was dying, otherwise I’ll kill you myself.” I heard a man in the background laugh. The line went dead.

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter 'Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?' in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton 'rapid response' team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's 'issues.

You are making this fuss because I did not issue a proper proposal? Very well." He began to kneel and she grasped a fistful of his hair and yanked him back to a standing position. He yelped and rubbed his head. "Even you cannot deny that your background and family connections are less than desirable, yet I am still willing to do the honorable thing and marry you.

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.

So too then is it with the Virtues: for by acting in the various relations in which we are thrown with our fellow men, we come to be, some just, some unjust: and by acting in dangerous positions and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we come to be, some brave, others cowards.

During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and 'experience' to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband’s help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration?

Initially when feminist leaders in the United States proclaimed the need for gender equality here they did not seek to find out if corresponding movements were taking place among women around the world. Instead they declared themselves liberated and therefore in the position to liberate their less fortunate sisters, especially those in the “third world.” This neocolonial paternalism had already been enacted to keep women of color in the background so that only conservative/liberal white women would be the authentic representatives of feminism.

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is dullness made God.

It is plain then that the wicked man cannot be in the position of a friend even towards himself, because he has in himself nothing which can excite the sentiment of Friendship. If then to be thus is exceedingly wretched it is a man's duty to flee from wickedness with all his might and to strive to be good, because thus may he be friends with himself and may come to be a friend to another.

When you pay attention to sensory details in the present moment, your thoughts and mental chatter fade into the background. Your nervous system settles down. It makes room for positive feelings to bubble up within you.

As it was, she always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where rick of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to work hard to fail in her world.

Throughout his first term Putin had favored the security men in his appointments, by some estimates filling as many as 70 percent of senior government positions with former military, police, or intelligence officers, many of whom had the same background in the KGB.

The assembly of the innovation engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution becomes easier to see once we recognize how the psychology of premodern Europeans had been quietly evolving in the background for at least eight centuries. Of course, there are many economic and geographic factors that matter too, but if there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries.

The messages we receive as children become the core information we use about ourselves and our position in the world for the rest of our lives. Often, however, we do not consciously realize that this information even exists. One of the greatest benefits of reexamining our backgrounds is that we discover what messages we got from our parents. Although this discovery process is painful, it assists us in our efforts to change our current behavior and even our feelings about ourselves. Messages, after all, are learned; any anything we learned can be unlearned.

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster. All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.) Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

Given that background, I was interested in what Steve Jobs might say about the future of Apple. His survival strategy for Apple, for all its skill and drama, was not going to propel Apple into the future. At that moment in time, Apple had less than 4 percent of the personal computer market. The de facto standard was Windows-Intel and there seemed to be no way for Apple to do more than just hang on to a tiny niche. In the summer of 1998, I got an opportunity to talk with Jobs again. I said, “Steve, this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the PC business says that Apple cannot really push beyond a small niche position. The network effects are just too strong to upset the Wintel standard. So what are you trying to do in the longer term? What is the strategy?” He did not attack my argument. He didn’t agree with it, either. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.

The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority. If their children were doing poorly at school, the wealthier parents challenged their teachers. They intervened on behalf of their kids. One child Lareau follows just misses qualifying for a gifted program. Her mother arranges for her to be retested privately, petitions the school, and gets her daughter admitted. The poor parents, by contrast, are intimidated by authority. They react passively and stay in the background.

Elnora lifted the violin and began to play. She wore a school dress of green gingham, with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. She seemed a part of the setting all around her. Her head shone like a small dark sun, her face never had seemed so rose-flushed and fair. From the instant she drew the bow, her lips parted and her eyes fastened on something far away in the swamp, and never did she give more of that immpression of feeling for her notes and repeating something audible only to her. Ammon was to near to get the best effect. he arose and stepped back several yards, leaning against a large tree, looking and listening with all his soul. As he changed position he saw that Mrs. Comstock had followed them, and was standing on the trail, where she could not have helped hearing everything Elnora had said. So to Ammon before her and the mother watching on the trail, Elnora played the Song of the Limberlost. It seemed as if the swamp hushed all its other voices and spoke only through her dancing bow. The mother out on the trail had heard it all once before from the girl, many times from her father. To the man it was a revelation. He stood so stunned he forgot Mrs. Comstock. He tried to realize what a great city audience would say to that music, from such a player, with a like background, he could not imagine.

For to constitute Happiness, there must be, as we have said, complete virtue and a complete life: for many changes and chances of all kinds arise during a life, and he who is most prosperous may become involved in great misfortunes in his old age, as in the heroic poems the tale is told of Priam: but the man who has experienced such fortune and died in wretchedness, no man calls happy. Are we then to call no man happy while he lives, and, as Solon would have us, look to the end? And again, if we are to maintain this position, is a man then happy when he is dead? or is not this a complete absurdity, specially in us who say Happiness is a working of a certain kind?

The man of Self-Control does not change by reason of passion and lust, yet when occasion so requires he will be easy of persuasion: but the Positive man changes not at the call of Reason, though many of this class take up certain desires and are led by their pleasures. Among the class of Positive are the Opinionated, the Ignorant, and the Bearish: the first, from the motives of pleasure and pain: I mean, they have the pleasurable feeling of a kind of victory in not having their convictions changed, and they are pained when their decrees, so to speak, are reversed: so that, in fact, they rather resemble the man of Imperfect Self-Control than the man of Self-Control.

LOIS: The personal stuff you've been dealing with, did you feel like you needed someone to catch you? Were we not there for you? DIANA: (pauses) You know how when people talk of depression, they talk of it both coming in storms and coming stealthily? So that, for many, it is the status quo, before they realize... that we lose our self-awareness in that. So I can't... I can't fault the people who love and care for me for not seeing what I did not myself see. I think, again, when we have our moments of clarity, it is very easy to brush past them, to let the status quo continue. It can be very difficult and sometimes painful to turn and confront them. The only analogy I can think of is chronic pain. When that pain has been with you for so very long, it is background noise. And one is not aware of it until something happens that places it into relief. LOIS: But you're not talking about physical pain? DIANA: No. And I am not certain I am talking about emotional pain either. It has been difficult for me to untangle. I think there is a psychological element to it. I think it is important--and I think as a reporter that you would be inclined to agree--that we question those basic assumptions that we often decide are true. I have found myself in a position where a great deal of what I took as true no longer seems accurate. That may be because I have changed. That may be because the world has changed. Or it may be because I was mistaken. And it is that last that is the most concerning. I put great stock in truth--I think that's one of the reasons why we get along.

When Copernicus and Galileo discovered that the planets orbit the Sun rather than the Earth, and Newton discovered the laws that govern their motion, astrology became extremely implausible. Why should the positions of other planets against the background sky as seen from Earth have any correlations with the macromolecules on a minor planet that call themselves intelligent life? Yet this is what astrology would have us to believe.

You should first of all assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position, and external appearance; moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations, All this work on your material will help you permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this you will have no art.

People who create successful strategic relationships demonstrate 10 essential character traits:    1. Authentic. They are genuine, honest, and transparent. They are cognizant of (and willing to admit to) their strengths and weaknesses.    2. Trustworthy. They build relationships on mutual trust. They have a good reputation based on real results. They have integrity: their word is their bond. People must know, like, and trust you before sharing their valuable social capital.    3. Respectful. They are appreciative of the time and efforts of others. They treat subordinates with the same level of respect as they do supervisors.    4. Caring. They like to help others succeed. They’re a source of mutual support and encouragement. They pay attention to the feelings of others and have good hearts.    5. Listening. They ask good questions, and they are eager to learn about others—what’s important to them, what they’re working on, what they’re looking for, and what they need—so they can be of help.    6. Engaged. They are active participants in life. They are interesting and passionate about what they do. They are solution minded, and they have great “gut” instincts.    7. Patient. They recognize that relationships need to be cultivated over time. They invest time in maintaining their relationships with others.    8. Intelligent. They are intelligent in the help they offer. They pass along opportunities at every chance possible, and they make thoughtful, useful introductions. They’re not ego driven. They don’t criticize others or burn bridges in relationships.    9. Sociable. They are nice, likeable, and helpful. They enjoy being with people, and they are happy to connect with others from all walks of life, social strata, political persuasions, religions, and diverse backgrounds. They are sources of positive energy.   10. Connected. They are part of their own network of excellent strategic relationships.

Marshall was watching her again, and Jane’s skin prickled under his perusal. That was when Jane realized she’d made a mistake. Those freckles, his background—they’d all misled her into thinking that he was a quiet little rabbit. He wasn’t. He was the wolf that looked as if he were lounging about on the outskirts of the pack, a lone hanger-on, when in truth he had adopted that position simply so that he could see everything that transpired in the fields below. He wasn’t solitary; he was waiting for someone to make a mistake. He looked willing to wait a very long time.

There was no night there at this season, any more than all the year through in heaven. Indeed we have seldom real positive night in this world—so many provisions have been made against it. Every time we say, "What a lovely night!" we speak of a breach, a rift in the old night. There is light more or less, positive light, else were there no beauty. Many a night is but a low starry day, a day with a softened background against which the far-off suns of millions of other days show themselves: when the near vision vanishes the farther hope awakes. It is nowhere said of heaven, there shall be no twilight there,

We have posited that the fundamental theory is background independent, which means there are no symmetries. This in turn means that we cannot regard energy and momentum, and their conservation, as emergent from the properties of space. But we still have to explain why energy and momentum play the ubiquitous role they do in the structure of the equations of physics. Further, we have hypothesized that space is not present at the fundamental level in nature, but is emergent. So if we want energy and momentum to play a role in physics, there seems to be no alternative but to put them in at the beginning. What we want

Once a transition of value creates an emotion, feeling comes into play. Although they're often mistaken for each other, feeling is not emotion. Emotion is a short-term experience that peaks and burns rapidly. Feeling is a long-term, pervasive, sentient background that colors whole days, weeks, even years of our lives. Indeed, a specific feeling often dominates a personality. Each of the core emotions in life - pleasure and pain - has many variations. So which particular negative or positive emotion will we experience? The answer is found in the feeling that surrounds it. For, like adding pigment to a pencil sketch or an orchestra to a melody, feeling makes emotion specific.

When Lee arrived to pick me up, I introduced Diana simply as Diana Spencer. They exchanged a few brief words while I kissed Patrick good-bye, and off we went. As we struggled through the southbound traffic in Lewes, Lee and I had a conversation about Diana that seems both remarkable and humorous in retrospect. I started out by saying, “Lee, you’ll never believe who my nanny is.” Then I told him about Diana’s title and background and how amazed and grateful I was that she was looking after Patrick so sweetly and carefully. Lee and I agreed that she was awfully pretty and down to earth. I mentioned that she did not appear to have a steady boyfriend, and perhaps Lee might want to give her a call. Lee had a very respectable background—a good public school, university, solid career prospects, and a father who’d retired from the foreign service. Lee chuckled at my naiveté and explained that in England the social gulf between the daughter of an earl and a commoner was so great that he would never presume to ask Diana out. He reiterated that her social position and lineage were as exalted as they could possibly be. “In fact,” he added, “with her background, she’d be a suitable match for Prince Andrew.” Direct as usual, I replied, “Forget about Prince Andrew. If her background’s as impeccable as you say, she ought to be a match for Prince Charles. She’d be perfect as the next queen of England!” Then touching on a critical qualification for any future queen, I added, “And I’d bet my life on her virtue.

Patriarchy creates coercive background conditions for women, and thus patriarchy, not capitalism, is to blame for women’s exploitation under capitalism. Women are exploited under capitalism because they are forced by gendered expectations of women’s place into segregated spaces. In the home, gendered expectations about what women ought to do causes them to devote more time and energy to caring activities. Not only are women expected to be the main source of childcare and domestic labor in the home, they are also the psychic caregivers, coordinating social, spiritual, and emotional efforts for families. Their doing this explains the exploitation of women qua women in capitalism. The best evidence for this claim is that women in other economic systems are also exploited. For example, in the Soviet Union women were exploited for their domestic and sexual labor despite living under a noncapitalist economic system.121 I do not mean to say that there is no economic or material component to women’s condition. Women are stuck in these roles in part for material and economic reasons; they do not have enough bargaining power within heterosexual relationships generally to escape these roles. If women are able to gain an economic foothold, as is possible in an enlightened capitalism that eschews discrimination and gender segregation, then they can begin to work their way into better bargaining positions in their homes. And with better bargaining outcomes in their domestic lives, women can do better in the capitalist economy. Thus, capitalism does not provide an easy escape route, but it does point in the direction of escape from patriarchy.

But overprotection is just one part of a larger trend that we call problems of progress. This term refers to bad consequences produced by otherwise good social changes. It’s great that our economic system produces an abundance of food at low prices, but the flip side is an epidemic of obesity. It’s great that we can connect and communicate with people instantly and for free, but this hyperconnection may be damaging the mental health of young people. It’s great that we have refrigerators, antidepressants, air conditioning, hot and cold running water, and the ability to escape from most of the physical hardships that were woven into the daily lives of our ancestors back to the dawn of our species. Comfort and physical safety are boons to humanity, but they bring some costs, too. We adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk. By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress. To repeat, we are not saying that the problems facing students, and young people more generally, are minor or “all in their heads.” We are saying that what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them. Our argument is ultimately pragmatic, not moralistic: Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals if you do the opposite of what Misoponos advised.

It [the charcuterie] was almost on the corner of the Rue Pirouette and was a joy to behold. It was bright and inviting, with touches of brilliant colour standing out amidst white marble. The signboard, on which the name QUENU-GRADELLE glittered in fat gilt letter encircled by leaves and branches painted on a soft-hued background, was protected by a sheet of glass. On the two side panels of the shop front, similarly painted and under glass, were chubby little Cupids playing in the midst of boars' heads, pork chops, and strings of sausages; and these still lifes, adorned with scrolls and rosettes, had been designed in so pretty and tender a style that the raw meat lying there assumed the reddish tint of raspberry jam. Within this delightful frame, the window display was arranged. It was set out on a bed of fine shavings of blue paper; a few cleverly positioned fern leaves transformed some of the plates into bouquets of flowers fringed with foliage. There were vast quantities of rich, succulent things, things that melted in the mouth. Down below, quite close to the window, jars of rillettes were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some boned hams, nicely rounded, golden with breadcrumbs, and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Then came the larger dishes--stuffed Strasbourg tongues, with their red, varnished look, the colour of blood next to the pallor of the sausages and pigs' trotters; strings of black pudding coiled like harmless snakes; andouilles piled up in twos and bursting with health; saucissons in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; pies, hot from the oven, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great cuts of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as crystallized sugar. Towards the back were large tureens in which the meats and minces lay asleep in lakes of solidified fat. Strewn between the various plates and sishes, on the bed of blue shavings, were bottles of relish, sauce, and preserved truffles, pots of foie gras, and tins of sardines and tuna fish. A box of creamy cheeses and one full of snails stuffed with butter and parsley had been dropped in each corner. Finally, at the very top of the display, falling from a bar with sharp prongs, strings of sausages and saveloys hung down symmetrically like the cords and tassels of some opulent tapestry, while behind, threads of caul were stretched out like white lacework. There, on the highest tier of this temple of gluttony, amid the caul and between two bunches of purple gladioli, the alter display was crowned by a small, square fish tank with a little ornamental rockery, in which two goldfish swam in endless circles.

Yale political scientist Alexander Coppock conducted a series of experiments designed to measure incremental changes in political opinion when people are presented with new information about a topic. ... [H]e was able to draw four consistent conclusions about the way that our brains react to new political information: 1. Effects are nearly uniformly positive: individuals are persuaded in the direction of evidence. 2. Effects are small: changes in opinion are incremental. 3. Effects are relatively homogenous: regardless of background, individuals respond to information by similar degrees. 4. Effects are durable: at a minimum, effects endure for weeks, albeit somewhat diminished. ... This means that people do not change their opinions dramatically in a short amount of time. But it also means that partisans don't reject good arguments and good evidence when they encounter it just because it does not conform to their worldview.

The problem, Augustine came to believe, is that if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word “pride” has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the things associated with you. When we use it negatively, we think of the arrogant person, someone who is puffed up and egotistical, boasting and strutting about. But that is not really the core of pride. That is just one way the disease of pride presents itself. By another definition, pride is building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth. It is believing that you can arrive at fulfillment on your own, driven by your own individual efforts. Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven’t lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don’t associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it’s just that they are giving themselves a D– rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way. One key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with extreme anxiety. The proud person often appears self-sufficient and egotistical but is really touchy and unstable. The proud person tries to establish self-worth by winning a great reputation, but of course this makes him utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity. The proud person is competitive. But there are always other people who might do better. The most ruthlessly competitive person in the contest sets the standard that all else must meet or get left behind. Everybody else has to be just as monomaniacally driven to success. One can never be secure. As Dante put it, the “ardor to outshine / Burned in my bosom with a kind of rage.” Hungry for exaltation, the proud person has a tendency to make himself ridiculous. Proud people have an amazing tendency to turn themselves into buffoons, with a comb-over that fools nobody, with golden bathroom fixtures that impress nobody, with name-dropping stories that inspire nobody. Every proud man, Augustine writes, “heeds himself, and he who pleases himself seems great to himself. But he who pleases himself pleases a fool, for he himself is a fool when he is pleasing himself.”16 Pride, the minister and writer Tim Keller has observed, is unstable because other people are absentmindedly or intentionally treating the proud man’s ego with less reverence than he thinks it deserves. He continually finds that his feelings are hurt. He is perpetually putting up a front. The self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact that he is happy—posting highlight reel Facebook photos and all the rest—than he does actually being happy. Augustine suddenly came to realize that the solution to his problem would come only after a transformation more fundamental than any he had previously entertained, a renunciation of the very idea that he could be the source of his own solution.

...the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve.” There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal faith in progress which inspired the nineteenth century was itself a substitute for the simpler and more positive religious faith which was the vital bond of the Western community. If we wish to understand our past and the inheritance of Western culture, we have to go behind the nineteenth century development and study the old spiritual community of Western Christendom as an objective historical reality.

If somebody comes and scoops up all of my neighbor’s information because they’re on Verizon and just gathers all of that information, it is a violation of my civil rights as well. I’m telling you, America, we are the civil rights leaders of this day. Accept your position. Accept your role. Square your shoulders. Stand up. Link arms. Some of us will not make it to the end, as they used to say because this is a long, long journey to the end of the road. But man will be free as long as people understand the Bill of Rights. It was given to us, yes, by man, and flawed men, but it was inspired by God. Those rights don’t belong to you. You are merely a guardian of those rights for our children and our grandchildren, of all color, of all races, of all theological backgrounds. You are a guardian and a steward. Recognize what time it is. Recognize why you have been born, where you have been born. You have been given much, and believe me, much is required, not just expected.

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior. Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them. Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more “scientific.” But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.

People, especially those in charge, rarely invite you into their offices and give freely of their time. Instead, you have to do something unique, compelling, even funny or a bit daring, to earn it. Even if you happen to be an exceptionally well-rounded person who possesses all of the scrappy qualities discussed so far, it’s still important to be prepared, dig deep, do the prep work, and think on your feet. Harry Gordon Selfridge, who founded the London-based department store Selfridges, knew the value of doing his homework. Selfridge, an American from Chicago, traveled to London in 1906 with the hope of building his “dream store.” He did just that in 1909, and more than a century later, his stores continue to serve customers in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Selfridges’ success and staying power is rooted in the scrappy efforts of Harry Selfridge himself, a creative marketer who exhibited “a revolutionary understanding of publicity and the theatre of retail,” as he is described on the Selfridges’ Web site. His department store was known for creating events to attract special clientele, engaging shoppers in a way other retailers had never done before, catering to the holidays, adapting to cultural trends, and changing with the times and political movements such as the suffragists. Selfridge was noted to have said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.” How do you get people to take notice? How do you stand out in a positive way in order to make things happen? The curiosity and imagination Selfridge employed to successfully build his retail stores can be just as valuable for you to embrace in your circumstances. Perhaps you have landed a meeting, interview, or a quick coffee date with a key decision maker at a company that has sparked your interest. To maximize the impression you’re going to make, you have to know your audience. That means you must respectfully learn what you can about the person, their industry, or the culture of their organization. In fact, it pays to become familiar not only with the person’s current position but also their background, philosophies, triumphs, failures, and major breakthroughs. With that information in hand, you are less likely to waste the precious time you have and more likely to engage in genuine and meaningful conversation.

In every generation, the embrace of Calvinism by a faction of students and faculty placed schools and administrators in a difficult position. Since the 1920s, Calvinism had acquired a reputation among fundamentalist institutions of higher education as both compelling and disruptive. Calvinists often demanded greater theological consistency than school leaders wanted to endorse. And they sometimes disparaged important elements of American evangelicalism, including the emotional revivalism and dispensational Bible-reading methods beloved by so many evangelicals. In addition, school administrators remained painfully aware of the fact that their interdenominational schools needed to remain friendly to a relatively wide variety of denominational backgrounds. The big tent of American evangelicalism often included groups that considered Calvinism a foreign imposition. As in all things, school administrators balked at the idea of embracing any idea that would drive away students and their tuition dollars. In effect, Calvinism served as a perennial reminder of the unresolvable tension in fundamentalist and evangelical institutions between the demands of theological purity, interdenominational viability, and institutional pragmatism.

TRUMP EVENTUALLY REALIZED THAT he needed executives with a strong background in running casinos. He scouted the competition and picked Stephen Hyde, a devout Mormon with a large family. The Church of Latter-day Saints opposed gambling, but the casino industry employed many Mormons in key positions, in part because executives believed the faithful wouldn’t be tempted to bet. Hyde was soft-spoken, unflappable, and widely considered one of the nation’s savviest gaming executives, having most recently worked for Trump’s competitor Steve Wynn. Trump, who once wrote, “I can be a screamer,” would occasionally humiliate Hyde by cursing him out in front of other executives. Yet Trump recognized Hyde’s capabilities and entrusted him with a business potentially worth billions of dollars. Hyde was, Trump wrote, “a very sharp guy and highly competitive, but most of all, he had a sense of how to manage to the bottom line.” Trump throughout his career would rely on small circles of advisers, and Hyde became one of Trump’s most trusted associates at the time. That meant some other senior executives felt shut out, unable to convey their concerns to Trump without going through the tight inner circle. Hyde was at the top of that chain of command. Hyde

Don’t just make statements. Just look. There are two million years of inheritance, thousands and thousands of experiences, impressions, conditions, knowledge. All that is my background, and I want to learn about it, open it all up and be free of it, because those things are controlling my present and shaping the future, and so I continue to live in a cage. So I say to myself: ‘This is terrible. I must get rid of it.’ I do not know what to do. I do not know. Then I ask myself: what is the state of my mind when I say I really do not know? You and I are the result of two million years of conditioning. Right? In that two million years there is not only the animal inheritance but the human endeavour to grow, to become – hundreds of things. We are that. And all that is operating in the present and the future. This is the rat race I have lived in. So I look at this rat race, and I say: ‘I must get rid of it.’ I ask you about it, and you do not know: I ask the Pope, dozens of people, and they do not know. They know only according to their terminology; that is, if you believe in Jesus, if you believe in God, you think you know according to that. So I am now in a position to find out what is the state of my mind when I say: I really do not know.

Movies create the parameters against which we measure our lives.  They can either be a force for positive change or reinforce existing structures.  Mason asks, “How do we take control of the hallucination?”  The series itself is a response:  The Invisibles is a fictional work that’s programmed to redefine the way we view reality.  Download this series into your mind, and you’ll come out the other side changed. This also ties into the way that Mason has discussed movies over the course of the series.  By finding the evolutionary message in non-intellectual, popular works like Speed and Independence Day, Mason is trying to take control of the hallucination.  Any work of art does not exist in a vacuum.  We assess it through cultural and social lenses, biased by our own circumstances and background.  Mason seeks out Invisible messages in everything he sees, and because that’s what he’s looking for, he finds them.  His goal is to teach everyone to think like that, to not see the intended pro-America or pro-hetero-normative message of a typical studio film, to instead find something subversive lurking in the most mundane entertainments.  If people build their lives in response to the films they see, then controlling the way they perceive the films means controlling the future direction of their lives. Next,

Things you shouldn’t do when someone is dying: Don’t talk about when your aunt or your grandmother or your dog died. This isn’t about you, and the sick person shouldn’t have to comfort you; it should be the other way around. There are concentric circles of grief: the patient is at the center, the next layer is the caregiver, then their kids, then close friends, and so on. Figure out what circle you’re in. If you are looking into the concentric circles, you give comfort. If you’re looking out, you receive it. Don’t say things that aren’t true: You’re going to beat this cancer! It’s all about a positive outlook! You look stronger! You aren’t fooling anyone. Don’t overact your happiness. It’s okay to be sad with someone who is dying. They’ve invited you close at a very tender time, and that’s a moment of grace you can share. Don’t think you have to discuss the illness. Sometimes, a sick person needs a break. And if you ask up front if he wants to talk about how he feels—or doesn’t—you’re giving him control at a time when he doesn’t have a lot of choices. Don’t be afraid of the silence. It’s okay to say nothing. Don’t forget: No one knows what to say to someone who’s dying. Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s more important to be there than to be right. Win and I have reached the stage where we can sit in quiet, without a background noise of NPR on the radio or the television murmuring.

As the pumping engines for the circulatory system, ventricles must have a particular ovoid, lemonlike shape for strong, swift ejection of blood. If the end of the left ventricle balloons out, as it does in takotsubo hearts, the firm, healthy contractions are reduced to inefficient spasms—floppy and unpredictable. But what’s remarkable about takotsubo is what causes the bulge. Seeing a loved one die. Being left at the altar or losing your life savings with a bad roll of the dice. Intense, painful emotions in the brain can set off alarming, life-threatening physical changes in the heart. This new diagnosis was proof of the powerful connection between heart and mind. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy confirmed a relationship many doctors had considered more metaphoric than diagnostic. As a clinical cardiologist, I needed to know how to recognize and treat takotsubo cardiomyopathy. But years before pursuing cardiology, I had completed a residency in psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Having also trained as a psychiatrist, I was captivated by this syndrome, which lay at the intersection of my two professional passions. That background put me in a unique position that day at the zoo. I reflexively placed the human phenomenon side by side with the animal one. Emotional trigger … surge of stress hormones … failing heart muscle … possible death. An unexpected “aha!” suddenly hit me. Takotsubo in humans and the heart effects of capture myopathy in animals were almost certainly related—perhaps even the same syndrome with different names.

For thousands of years a debate has been going on in the shadowy background of human affairs. The issue to be resolved: “What should we say about being alive?” Overwhelmingly, people have said, “Being alive is all right.” More thoughtful persons have added, “Especially when you consider the alternative,” disclosing a jocularity as puzzling as it is macabre, since the alternative is here implied to be both disagreeable and, upon consideration, capable of making being alive seem more agreeable than it alternatively would, as if the alternative were only a possibility that may or may not come to pass, like getting the flu, rather than a looming inevitability. And yet this covertly portentous remark is perfectly well tolerated by anyone who says that being alive is all right. These individuals stand on one side of the debate. On the other side is an imperceptible minority of disputants. Their response to the question of what we should say about being alive will be neither positive nor equivocal. They may even fulminate about how objectionable it is to be alive, or spout off that to be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive, and so on. Now, there are really no incisive answers as to why anyone thinks or feels one way and not another. The most we can say is that the first group of people is composed of optimists, although they may not think of themselves as such, while the contending group, that imperceptible minority, is composed of pessimists.

Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with childbearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard2 of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and her strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were chubby and delicate, like those of a plump little girl. She looked out into the sunshine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

In one of her most influential studies, she and her team tracked the emotional experiences of nearly two hundred people over years of their lives. The subjects spanned a broad range of backgrounds and ages. (They were from eighteen to ninety-four years old when they entered the study.) At the beginning of the study and then every five years, the subjects were given a beeper to carry around twenty-four hours a day for one week. They were randomly paged thirty-five times over the course of that week and asked to choose from a list all the emotions they were experiencing at that exact moment. If Maslow’s hierarchy was right, then the narrowing of life runs against people’s greatest sources of fulfillment and you would expect people to grow unhappier as they age. But Carstensen’s research found exactly the opposite. The results were unequivocal. Far from growing unhappier, people reported more positive emotions as they aged. They became less prone to anxiety, depression, and anger. They experienced trials, to be sure, and more moments of poignancy—that is, of positive and negative emotion mixed together. But overall, they found living to be a more emotionally satisfying and stable experience as time passed, even as old age narrowed the lives they led. The findings raised a further question. If we shift as we age toward appreciating everyday pleasures and relationships rather than toward achieving, having, and getting, and if we find this more fulfilling, then why do we take so long to do it? Why do we wait until we’re old? The common view was that these lessons are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time. Carstensen was attracted to a different explanation. What if the change in needs and desires has nothing to do with age per se? Suppose it merely has to do with perspective—your personal sense of how finite your time in this world is. This idea was regarded in scientific circles as somewhat odd. But Carstensen had her own reason for thinking that one’s personal perspective might be centrally important

You need to make sure you always have a reserve of willpower available for the on-the-fly decision making and controlling your reactions. If you run your willpower tank too low, you’ll end up making poor choices or exploding at people. The following are some ways of making more willpower available to you: --Reduce the number of tasks you attempt to get done each day to a very small number. Always identify what your most important task is, and make sure you get that single task done. You can group together your trivial tasks, like replying to emails or paying bills online, and count those as just one item. --Refresh your available willpower by doing tasks slowly. My friend Toni Bernhard, author of How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow, recommends doing a task 25% slower than your usual speed. I’m not saying you need to do this all the time, just when you feel scattered or overwhelmed. Slowing down in this way is considered a form of mindfulness practice. --Another way to refresh your willpower is by taking some slow breaths or doing any of the mindfulness practices from Chapter 5. Think of using mindfulness as running a cleanup on background processes that haven’t shut down correctly. By using mindfulness to do a cognitive cleanup, you’re not leaking mental energy to background worries and rumination. --Reduce decision making. For many people, especially those in management positions or raising kids, life involves constant decision making. Decision making leeches willpower. Find whatever ways you can to reduce decision making without it feeling like a sacrifice. Set up routines (like which meals you cook on particular nights of the week) that prevent you from needing to remake the same decisions over and over. Alternatively, outsource decision making to someone else whenever possible. Let other people make decisions to take them off your plate. --Reduce excess sensory stimulation. For example, close the door or put on some dorky giant headphones to block out noise. This will mean your mental processing power isn’t getting used up by having to filter out excess stimulation. This tip is especially important if you are a highly sensitive person.

Here's a simplified version of what the Stanford group did. They started with a much-studied kind of string theory-a flat four-dimensional spacetime with a small six-dimensional geometry over each point. They chose the geometry of the six wrapped-up dimensions to be one of the Calabi-Yau spaces (see Chapter 8). As noted, there are at least a hundred thousand of these, and all you have to do is pick a typical one whose geometry depends on many constants. Then they wrapped large numbers of electric and magnetic fluxes around the six-dimensional spaces over each point. Because you can wrap only discrete units of flux, this tends to freeze out the instabilities. To further stabilize the geometry, you have to call on certain quantum effects not known to arise directly from string theory, but they are understood to some extent in supersymmetric gauge theories, so it is possible that they play a role here. Combining these quantum effects with the effects from the fluxes, you get a geometry in which all the moduli are stable. This can also be done so that there appears to be a negative cosmological constant in the four-dimensional spacetime. It turns out that the smaller we want the cosmological constant to be, the more fluxes we must wrap, so we wrap huge numbers of fluxes to get a cosmological constant that is tiny but still negative. (As noted, we don't know explicitly how to write the details of a string theory on such a background, but there's no reason to believe it doesn't exist.) But the point is to get a positive cosmological constant, to match the new observations of the universe's expansion rate. So the next step is to wrap other branes around the geometry, in a different way, which has the effect of raising the cosmological constant. Just as there are antiparticles, there are antibranes, and the Stanford group used them here. By wrapping antibranes, energy can be added so as to make the cosmological constant small and positive. At the same time, the tendency of string theories to flow into one another is suppressed, because any change requires a discrete step. Thus, two problems are solved at once: The instabilities are eliminated and the cosmological constant is small and positive.

Action Step: Nourished by “Light” You can prove to yourself how nourishing a new word can be once it begins to be your personal theme. Let’s use the word light. Since it’s the opposite of heavy, this word is one of the best for our purposes. The more you bring light into your life, the easier it will be to lose weight. Why? Because light covers so many positive experiences. Look at the following usages: Lighthearted Light-handed Enlightened Feeling light and bright The light of inspiration Lightness of being The light of the soul The light of God If you had these things in your life, it would be much easier for your body to be light. Your mind would be sending messages that are the opposite of heavy, dull, inert, tired, bored, dark, unenlightened. Start to rid yourself of those messages and let your body conform to lightness and all of its positive connotations. With this background, you can proceed to use light in various ways, beginning with the physical sensation of being light. Exercise: Filling with Light Sit in a quiet room by yourself. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths until you feel centered and ready. (It’s best to sit upright if you can rather than lounging back in your chair.) Breathing normally, visualize light filling your chest each time you inhale. The light is soft, warm, and white. Watch it suffuse your chest. Now exhale normally, but leave the light inside. On your next breath, take in more light. See the light filling your chest now begin to suffuse the rest of your body, moving down into your abdomen. Don’t force the visualization, and don’t worry if you have trouble seeing the light—even a faint sense of white light is good enough. With each breath, let the light suffuse your arms, then your hands all the way to the fingertips. Let it suffuse your legs down to your toes. Finally, send the light into your head and out the top in a beam that reaches high. Sit with the light for a few moments, then lift your arms, letting them float upward as if the light is causing them to rise. You are like a balloon filled completely with light. Enjoy the sensation, then open your eyes. This is a good exercise to counteract feelings of dullness, heaviness, fatigue, and sadness. The sensation of being physically light, paired with the visualization of inner light, creates a big change in how you relate to your body.

Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t - a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Esperanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers … One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of coloured cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.” It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and town sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said that this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza … My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural cliches, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about woman’s horrible accumulations.

Since my visit to the Hermitage, I had become more aware of the four figures, two women and two men, who stood around the luminous space where the father welcomed his returning son. Their way of looking leaves you wondering how they think or feel about what they are watching. These bystanders, or observers, allow for all sorts of interpretations. As I reflect on my own journey, I become more and more aware of how long I have played the role of observer. For years I had instructed students on the different aspects of the spiritual life, trying to help them see the importance of living it. But had I, myself, really ever dared to step into the center, kneel down, and let myself be held by a forgiving God? The simple fact of being able to express an opinion, to set up an argument, to defend a position, and to clarify a vision has given me, and gives me still, a sense of control. And, generally, I feel much safer in experiencing a sense of control over an undefinable situation than in taking the risk of letting that situation control me. Certainly there were many hours of prayer, many days and months of retreat, and countless conversations with spiritual directors, but I had never fully given up the role of bystander. Even though there has been in me a lifelong desire to be an insider looking out, I nevertheless kept choosing over and over again the position of the outsider looking in. Sometimes this looking-in was a curious looking-in, sometimes a jealous looking-in, sometimes an anxious looking-in, and, once in a while, even a loving looking-in. But giving up the somewhat safe position of the critical observer seemed like a great leap into totally unknown territory. I so much wanted to keep some control over my spiritual journey, to be able to predict at least a part of the outcome, that relinquishing the security of the observer for the vulnerability of the returning son seemed close to impossible. Teaching students, passing on the many explanations given over the centuries to the words and actions of Jesus, and showing them the many spiritual journeys that people have chosen in the past seemed very much like taking the position of one of the four figures surrounding the divine embrace. The two women standing behind the father at different distances the seated man staring into space and looking at no one in particular, and the tall man standing erect and looking critically at the event on the platform in front of him--they all represent different ways of not getting involved. There is indifference, curiosity, daydreaming, and attentive observation; there is staring, gazing, watching, and looking; there is standing in the background, leaning against an arch, sitting with arms crossed, and standing with hands gripping each other. Every one of these inner and outward postures are all too familiar with me. Some are more comfortable than others, but all of them are ways of not getting directly involved," (pp. 12-13).

Similarly, the computers used to run the software on the ground for the mission were borrowed from a previous mission. These machines were so out of date that Bowman had to shop on eBay to find replacement parts to get the machines working. As systems have gone obsolete, JPL no longer uses the software, but Bowman told me that the people on her team continue to use software built by JPL in the 1990s, because they are familiar with it. She said, “Instead of upgrading to the next thing we decided that it was working just fine for us and we would stay on the platform.” They have developed so much over such a long period of time with the old software that they don’t want to switch to a newer system. They must adapt to using these outdated systems for the latest scientific work. Working within these constraints may seem limiting. However, building tools with specific constraints—from outdated technologies and low bitrate radio antennas—can enlighten us. For example, as scientists started to explore what they could learn from the wait times while communicating with deep space probes, they discovered that the time lag was extraordinarily useful information. Wait times, they realized, constitute an essential component for locating a probe in space, calculating its trajectory, and accurately locating a target like Pluto in space. There is no GPS for spacecraft (they aren’t on the globe, after all), so scientists had to find a way to locate the spacecraft in the vast expanse. Before 1960, the location of planets and objects in deep space was established through astronomical observation, placing an object like Pluto against a background of stars to determine its position.15 In 1961, an experiment at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California used radar to more accurately define an “astronomical unit” and help measure distances in space much more accurately.16 NASA used this new data as part of creating the trajectories for missions in the following years. Using the data from radio signals across a wide range of missions over the decades, the Deep Space Network maintained an ongoing database that helped further refine the definition of an astronomical unit—a kind of longitudinal study of space distances that now allows missions like New Horizons to create accurate flight trajectories. The Deep Space Network continued to find inventive ways of using the time lag of radio waves to locate objects in space, ultimately finding that certain ways of waiting for a downlink signal from the spacecraft were less accurate than others. It turned to using the antennas from multiple locations, such as Goldstone in California and the antennas in Canberra, Australia, or Madrid, Spain, to time how long the signal took to hit these different locations on Earth. The time it takes to receive these signals from the spacecraft works as a way to locate the probes as they are journeying to their destination. Latency—or the different time lag of receiving radio signals on different locations of Earth—is the key way that deep space objects are located as they journey through space. This discovery was made possible during the wait times for communicating with these craft alongside the decades of data gathered from each space mission. Without the constraint of waiting, the notion of using time as a locating feature wouldn’t have been possible.

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

Eight months [after 9/11], after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn't know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States. After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn't given them any evidence because they didn't have any. But secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we're going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we're going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government. This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it's much worse. It's aggression. How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don't know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They're undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that's what will happen. Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing. That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It's very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn't want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule. ...There are geostrategic reasons. They're not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asian, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don't know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI)from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved. The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That's the new "great game": Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It's a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan. The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that.

Human beings of every background are imperfect creatures. When they are in a position high enough for their imperfections to bring disasters to more than 300 million Americans, the last thing we need is to stifle criticism of what they do.

Parenthood, it turns out, is common to all the negative transition sequences (that is, those that depress socioeconomic prospects) and delayed parenthood is common to the positive transition sequences.

It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery expressed in the ancients’ texts, even if we probe that mystery. Modern affirmations of such faith as well as denials of it are acts of faith. Yet these critiques of religion bring us closer to understanding the human side of divine-human relations. And this is what believers and nonbelievers, believing and unbelieving theologians and historians of religion share: a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions.

A 2011 survey of 204 Muslim-background believers who would be more closely described as C4, revealed that, before coming to Christ, most of these believers came from a strong Muslim background, and held a very negative view of Christianity.10 In fact, only one out of 204 surveyed expressed a positive view of Christians prior to becoming a follower of Christ. These Isai Muslims revealed that the biggest obstacle they faced in coming to Christ was their own Muslim family and community. When asked what God had used to change their views of Jesus, 168 of the 204 mentioned the salvation they had found in Jesus Christ. Most of them cited specific biblical passages such as Romans 8:1 (“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”); Acts 4:12 (“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved”); and John 14:6 (“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’”).

Nowadays, as ever, the pendulum has started to swing back to a more balanced view, where multiple causes of error are acknowledged. Lightbown and Spada (2006: 187), for example, accept that ‘the transfer of patterns from the native language is one of the major sources of errors in learner language’, but they qualify this position by adding that there are also errors that learners from different language backgrounds not only share but are surprisingly similar to the kinds of errors made by first language learners: In such cases, second language errors are evidence of the learners’ efforts to discover the structure of the target language itself rather than attempts to transfer patterns from the first language.

footballers who come from a poor family, play good football, get rich and go off the rails. Put yourself in their position. Just try to digest it. In fact, hardly any European clubs even look at that kind of issue. Because the worlds are too far apart. The board, the directors and the managers who should be keeping an eye on things like that don’t understand the culture of players from that sort of background. They just don’t have the life experience to be able to imagine themselves in that situation.

It was her concern and commitment to a friend which last year involved her in perhaps the most emotional period of her life. For five months she secretly helped to care for Adrian Ward-Jackson who had discovered that he was suffering from AIDS. It was a time of laughter, joy and much sorrow as Adrian, a prominent figure in the world of art, ballet and opera, gradually succumbed to his illness. A man of great charisma and energy, Adrian initially found it difficult to come to terms with his fate when in the mid-1980s he was diagnosed as HIV positive. His word as deputy chairman of the Aids Crisis Trust, where he first met the Princess, had made him fully aware of the reality of the disease. Finally he broke the news in 1987 to his great friend Angela Serota, a dancer with the Royal Ballet until a leg injury cut short her career and now prominent in promoting dance and ballet. For much of the time, Angela, a woman of serenity and calm practicality, nursed Adrian, always with the support of her two teenage daughters. He was well enough to receive a CBE at Buckingham Palace in March 1991 for his work in the arts--he was a governor of the Royal Ballet, chairman of the Contemporary Arts Society and a director of the Theatre Museum Association--and it was at a celebratory lunch held at the Tate Gallery that Angela first met the Princess. In April 1991 Adrian’s condition deteriorated and he was confined to his Mayfair apartment where Angela was in almost constant attendance. It was from that time that Diana made regular visits, once even brining her children Princes Willian and Harry. From that time Angela and the Princess began to forge a supportive bond as they cared for their friend. Angela recalls: “I thought she was utterly beautiful in a very profound way. She has an inner spirit which shines forth though there was also a sense of pervasive unhappiness about her. I remember loving the way she never wanted me to be formal.” When Diana brought the boys to see her friends, a reflection of her firmly held belief that her role as mother is to bring them up in a way that equips them for every aspect of life and death, Angela saw in William a boy much older and more sensitive than his years. She recalls: “He had a mature view of illness, a perspective which showed awareness of love and commitment.” At first Angela kept in the background, leaving Diana alone in Adrian’s room where they chatted about mutual friends and other aspects of life. Often she brought Angela, whom she calls “Dame A”, a gift of flowers or similar token. She recalls: “Adrian loved to hear about her day-to-day work and he loved too the social side of life. She made him laugh but there was always the perfect degree of understanding, care and solicitude. This is the point about her, she is not just a decorative figurehead who floats around on a cloud of perfume.” The mood in Mount Street was invariably joyous, that sense of happiness that understands about pain. As Angela says: “I don’t see death as sad or depressing. It was a great journey he was going on. The Princess was very much in tune with that spirit. She also loved coming for herself, it was an intense experience. At the same time Adrian was revitalized by the healing quality of her presence.” Angela read from a number of works by St. Francis of Assisi, Kahil Gibran and the Bible as well as giving Adrian frequent aromatherapy treatments. A high spot was a telephone call from Mother Teresa of Calcutta who also sent a medallion via Indian friends. At his funeral they passed Diana a letter from Mother Teresa saying how much she was looking forward to meeting her when she visited India. Unfortunately Mother Teresa was ill at that time so the Princess made a special journey to Rome where she was recuperating. Nonetheless that affectionate note meant a great deal to the Princess.

Outer influences and distractions Consider the power of external influences to condition your life experience. Spend a day watching how what you encounter impacts your attitude and spirit. Pay attention to what is usually mere background noise. Probe all sights, sounds, and touches as life swirls about. Listen to the radio carefully. Study the comments on talk shows. Listen to popular music lyrics and rhythms. Pay attention to words and worldview, tones and timbre. What and how do you feel as a result? Watch people at a shopping mall. How many appear trim and in vibrant health? How many look happy? What are people wearing and how are they groomed? What does their appearance suggest about your community’s values? Does the appearance of others affect how you feel? Chat with coworkers. What comes up about the economy, government, and company management? Suggest changes in attitudes and actions for more happiness or productivity. What kind of responses do they give you? Look at Internet discussions and news. What is the tone and logic of the posts? Does the commenters’ passion reflect their intellectual depth and degree of knowledge? How many stories are negative and how many are positive? Could any of the negative stories be written with a positive spin and still remain true? How do you feel about what you observe? Is it possible that even if you had not been paying close attention, those experiences out on the margin of awareness might have affected your mood or attitude?

To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word “pride” has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the things associated with you. When we use it negatively, we think of the arrogant person, someone who is puffed up and egotistical, boasting and strutting about. But that is not really the core of pride. That is just one way the disease of pride presents itself. By another definition, pride is building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth. It is believing that you can arrive at fulfillment on your own, driven by your own individual efforts. Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven’t lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don’t associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it’s just that they are giving themselves a D– rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way. One key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with extreme anxiety. The proud person often appears self-sufficient and egotistical but is really touchy and unstable. The proud person tries to establish self-worth by winning a great reputation, but of course this makes him utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity. The proud person is competitive. But there are always other people who might do better. The most ruthlessly competitive person in the contest sets the standard that all else must meet or get left behind. Everybody else has to be just as monomaniacally driven to success. One can never be secure. As Dante put it, the “ardor to outshine / Burned in my bosom with a kind of rage.

The first is affect regulation, specifically, the taming of fear and anger. The second is the creation of new meanings that allow the traumatic experience to be integrated into a positive and empowered sense of self. It is interesting, however, that even if the goals of therapy are framed in intrapsychic terms, clinicians generally agree that the “success of treatment depends on the patient’s ability to tolerate intimacy, in other words, the patient’s ability to trust another person with his or her helplessness and pain” (Turner, McFarlane, & van der Kolk, 1996). Success in helping the survivor recast his or her intrapsychic world depends on the creation of new interpersonal connections. This is necessary for the process of intrapsychic change and is also, although often left in the background, a major goal of therapy.

By priming your subconscious mind you are allowing it to run in the background, and that way you are actually sending out positive thoughtforms from your subconscious in the waking state!

Simple Ways To Harness The Power Of Tiktok For Business Success In 2020, social media has been empowered in the world of digital marketing. TikTok is one of the traditional video-sharing platforms, for all the individual and business accounts use this platform to entertain people. TikTok gives you an amazing way to share your posts with your audience and get more visibility to your website. Make sure you can only post your video through reactions. TikTok allows you to share 15-second videos with a variety of topics. It gives different songs with filters to shoot your video directly from your mobile device. But many also struggle to exactly use TikTok for business purposes. Here are some simple ways to harness the power of TikTok for business success. TikTok On Business TikTok is a great opportunity to start your business, promote your brand, and create a connection with your audience and brand by using engaging videos. It is one of the most popular social media in the world because it connects with a wider audience. Under this updated world, everything is changed into online marketing and purchasing. This is the big advantage to start your business with this social media. TikTok is relative to a younger audience, so you should target teens and promote your brand relevant to their needs and interest to get better positive results. Create Engaging Contents TikTok is only a place to make fun and creativity. TikTok short-form videos easily capture the audience's attention because of the entertaining nature. It gives the big opportunity to create your content that focuses more on the fun and entertaining to connect the wider audience. So, you don’t need to feel the pressure of creating your content. You can simply make your video with an effective background and showing your product. But your main goal is to keep managing your product offers. Get More Influencers There are lots of ways to take advantage of the platform to promote your brand. One easy way to advertise your products on TikTok via influencers. You need to find the right influencer to develop your business. If you grow your TikTok likes, you can improve your brand identity and get more profit. Also, you can analyze which kind of products you offer to get the best and positive results. If you share more videos whether or not they are relevant to your industry, you can change to become a good influencer. But, you need to post your stories frequently. Promote Hashtag Challenges If you add your branded hashtag with your video, you can get more visibility in your audience. A hashtag challenge is one of the effective ways to reach your targeted audience to talk about your business. The main goal of the hashtag challenge is to encourage your audience and create a brand identity. Most of the users love to participate in these challenges. TikTok Growth TikTok is undoubtedly a powerful social media tool with billions of followers sharing their expressions every day. This is a new platform compared to other social media networks, but it contains large competitors. It is worth spending your time developing for the benefit of your business.

Onora O’Neill (1987) argues that idealization occurs when, in the process of abstraction required by theorizing, we represent objects in ways that distort them. The distortion usually occurs by falsely attributing (putatively) positive features to the object or by downplaying negative ones. As feminist philosophers have consistently argued, practices of abstracting about objects in order to theorize about them risk—under unjust background conditions, at least—not random forms of distortion but rather emphasizing attributes that are associated with the dominant or that justify domination.

Donald Trump made politics fun and comedic. You can't take that away from the man. Today everyone has learnt that they can also be the President of their country regardless of their background in politics. And that's commendable.

Possibly the most glaring blindspot in current leftist discourse is its apathy for—or worse yet, outright opposition to—the Second Amendment. Ironically this trend seems to have evolved out of the lie long lobbied by the NRA that posits a zero-sum contest between proven gun control measures (e.g. waiting periods, safe storage, universal background checks for mental and criminal records, etc.) and a citizen’s right and duty to bear arms in defense of self and others. Like many such partisan dichotomies, this is utterly false. What left-leaning gun skeptics must recognize […] is that the final political veto always rests with the armed, for better or for worse; and that while might of course does not make right, right just as surely requires might if it’s to endure worth a damn. Only the nihilist can, of right accord, embrace a life of weakness, whereby the meek in effect surrender the earth to the highest bid of brute force.

She opened the case file and attached an audio clip, hitting the background record button. She still had the doctor’s number in her call log and dialled it.  It rang for a while and then went to voicemail. ‘You’ve reached Elliot Day, I can’t get to the phone just now, but if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll return your call as soon as I can. Thank you.’ The voice told her he was well-brought-up. South-England native. But she couldn’t place where. ‘Hi,’ she said after the beep. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Jamie Johansson. I’d like to speak to you regarding your work at the homeless shelter in Enfield. It’s in accordance with an active investigation. If you could call me back at your earliest convenience, that would be great. Thank you.’ She hung up and sighed, stopped the recording, and then went back to the case file, finding the number for Oliver’s parents. She hit record again, copied it and called them immediately, not wanting to put it off any longer. After three rings, a tired voice answered. ‘Hello?’ ‘Mr Hammond?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘This is Detective Sergeant Jamie Johansson with the London Metropolitan Police. I understand that one of my colleagues informed you that I might be getting in touch?’ There was silence for a second and then she heard him swallow. ‘That’s right… But I don’t know what I can tell you,’ he said quietly. It sounded like he was moving from room to room, cupping the phone to his mouth. Maybe he didn’t want Oliver’s mum to hear. ‘Any information you provide could be very useful. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’ ‘Sure,’ he said, his voice small. ‘Would it be okay if I recorded this conversation?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, almost absently. Jamie hated asking it — it never had a positive impact on the conversations that came after. Made them stunted, reserved. But she had to ask.

Her amazingly long legs… Ga! What the hell am I thinking? I can’t be thinking about Kiri-Kiri like this! I—she’s just some girl I used work with! Who cares if she’s gorgeous. And what about Gabrielle? We might not be dating, but we—aren’t we still sort of together? Even if it’s only temporary? I can’t cheat on her like that… “You could always build a harem?” I don’t know who you are, but if you mention that again, I’m going to come in there and hit you! “Oh, my. That sounds positively… delightful. Will you tie me down, bend me over your lap, and spank me until—kya!” Alex blinked when the voice yelped. Then Voice Number Two spoke up. “I apologize. It appears that I cannot take my eyes off of her for even one second. Please, pretend that we are naught but static noise in the background and ignore us.

Generally speaking, helicopters produce a distinctive percussive chop-chop rotor sound caused by the positioning of the blades. Adjust the blade angle, increase the number of blades in the main and tail rotors from four to five or six, and the noise diminishes, blending into the background sounds. Moreover, these Sikorsky Black Hawks had been re-engineered and reimagined with swept stabilizers and a noise suppressing “dishpan” cover over the tail rotor. Further refinements included reducing the rpm, especially in forward flight below maximum speed. To the untrained ear, it appeared that the helicopters were much farther away, not heading in, but away from a target. There were also changes that reduced the chances of returning radar signals. Retractable landing gears and fairings over the rotor hubs cut down the radar cross-section (RCS). And sharp edges, standard on the UH-60s, were replaced with curved surfaces coated in a special silver-loaded infrared skin. These important

The pavement never ask about your financial status, background, weight or even your beliefs. It simply supports unconditional, no questions asked & without judgment.

FBI agent The interrogatory method seldom works to anyone’s satisfaction. The agent would be much more successful if he asked open-ended questions requiring more extensive answers. The detainee would cough up plenty of information effortlessly if given the opportunity. The agent also makes the mistake of settling for one- or two-word answers. Digging deeper could have uncovered motives, alibis, opportunities, and background information that would have proved quite helpful in the agent’s quest for conversation had he asked appropriate, probing questions. He misses a great opportunity to gain information by not confessing something about himself first, which might have caused you to drop your guard and be more at ease, turning the interrogation into a conversation.

Gestalt theory: the simplest formation is a figure on a background. This means: the very positing of the figure as in-itself, as something determinate, always presupposes the simultaneous presence of a background. The background forms part of the definition of the being (without it there is no figure, no outlines). Consequently there is always something inarticulate and implicit in that of which there is consciousness... Perception and imperception...the fact that one is conscious of this means that there is also that which is unspoken.

In terms of practice, the questions become broad and general so that the participants can construct the meaning of a situation, a meaning typically forged in discussions or interactions with other persons. The more open-ended the questioning, the better, as the researcher listens carefully to what people say or do in their life setting. Thus, constructivist researchers often address the “processes” of interaction among individuals. They also focus on the specific contexts in which people live and work in order to understand the historical and cultural settings of the participants. Researchers recognize that their own background shapes their interpretation, and they “position themselves” in the research to acknowledge how their interpretation flows from their own personal, cultural, and historical experiences. Thus the researchers make an interpretation of what they find, an interpretation shaped by their own experiences and background; for example,

The bizarre schizoid style of the Trump administration becomes intelligible as an attempt to escape this dilemma. Elected as an agent of negation, President Trump must now promote positive policies and programs. Any direction he takes will alienate some of his supporters, who are bound together largely on the strength of their repudiations. A predilection for the mainstream will alienate most of them. Against this background, the loud and vulgar sound of the president’s voice becomes the signal for a mustering of the political war-bands. The subject at issue is often elite behavior unrelated to policy: “fake news” in the media, for example, or an NFL star kneeling during the National Anthem. Those who oppose Trump can’t resist the lure of outrage. Their responses tend to be no less loud or vulgar, and are sometimes more violent, than the offending message.80 Groups on the other side of the spectrum, now stoked to full-throated rant mode, rally reflexively to the president’s defense. I have described this process elsewhere.81 It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices—and, without question, Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more “conventional” Republicans and conservatives. Politically, it’s a high-wire act without a net. Trump was never a popular candidate. He’s not a popular president. To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing. Ordinary Americans, inevitably, have come to regard the president as the sum of all his rants. For our confused and demoralized elites, who have no clue about the game being played, Donald Trump looks something like the Beast of the Apocalypse, a sign of chaotic end-times. Writes the normally reflective Ian Buruma: “the act of undermining democratic institutions by abusing them in front of braying mobs is not modern at all. It is what aspiring dictators have always done.

Eddie came from a disadvantaged background, and in such a place it was not uncommon to find unforgiving views on right and wrong. Perhaps it was only a prolonged education, coupled with the security it brought, that encouraged nuanced thinking. Isabel sometimes wondered whether liberalism was most enthusiastically practised by those who could afford it: you could be generous to others if the likelihood of your ever wanting for anything was remote; you could be kind to asylum seekers if they would never take up resources you would need yourself; you could be tolerant of crime if there was not much of it in your neighbourhood. And so on; and yet that was to dismiss the real arguments that the liberal position might muster—arguments that were nothing to do with self-interest, but were based on principle.

Do you think ADHD should be recognized as a separate disability category according to IDEA? Support your position. What are the three subtypes of ADHD? List three symptoms typical of each subtype. Identify three possible causes of ADHD. Give an example of each. Give five examples of characteristics typical of children and adolescents with ADHD. Why do you think pupils with ADHD frequently exhibit other academic and behavioral difficulties? How is ADHD diagnosed? What role do parents and teachers play in the diagnostic process? What role does medication play in the treatment of ADHD? Why is this approach controversial? Describe three other intervention options for students with ADHD. How can assistive technology help students with ADHD? ADHD is usually a lifelong condition. In what ways might this disorder affect the lives of adults with ADHD? Why are some professionals concerned about the identification of ADHD in students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds?

Chapter 3 Summary You can validate any emotion—positive or negative. While validating difficult emotions can lead to stronger, healthier, more satisfactory relationships, studies have shown that validating positive emotions and sharing in others’ excitement, pride, happiness, etc. can be equally beneficial. You can validate anyone, even if you disagree with them. When you validate someone, you’re essentially saying, “I get why you feel that way.” That’s different than saying, “You’re right” or “I agree.” The key point here is that if you were in that person’s shoes, having only the information, background, and perception that they do, you would likely feel the same way.

Jessie, a fifty-year-old woman with no skills, job opportunities were limited. She may have had a historic family background, but pedigree was of little use when it came to job skills. A few years later, Daisy ghost-wrote an article, “On the Fourteenth Floor,” a first-person account of a woman—a mother of two daughters—who has run out of money and moves to New York City in search of a job. Retail work is available, but she wisely decides that she would not be a good candidate to be a saleswoman. One day, she lunches with a friend at a large hotel in the city and notices that the hotel is bursting with business. Foot traffic in the lobby is thick and without letup. The woman realizes that this is a thriving operation and most likely has job positions available. On a whim, the woman applies for a job, not really knowing what position they would place her in. The manager says she can begin the next day as a chambermaid for thirty-six dollars a month, along with room and board. “On the Fourteenth Floor,” rich in detail as to the woman’s responsibilities and day-to-day activities, is sprinkled with descriptions of her interactions with the clientele. The author also writes of a friendly co-worker named Zayda with whom she becomes close friends. Daisy would give homage to Zayda later in her early career at Street & Smith. Forty years later, Esther would tell stories of the time when the three women lived at a hotel in Manhattan. They lived at the Hotel Astor, Esther said, and socialized with Arturo Toscanini’s wife Carla. Esther remembered Mrs. Toscanini cooking traditional Italian dinners for her and her sister in her suite, much to the consternation of the hotel management. Although there is no documentation proving this, and neither Jessie nor Daisy mention living at the Astor in their journals, Esther’s reminisces about socializing with the wife of the legendary conductor line up chronologically with the time that she lived at the hotel.

By changing the way you give critical feedback, you can dramatically improve minority students' motivation and receptiveness. By improving a group's critical mass in a setting, you can improve its members' trust, comfort, and performance in the setting. By simply fostering intergroup conversations among students from different backgrounds, you can improve minority students' comforts and grades in a setting. By allowing students, especially minority students, to affirm their most valued sense of self, you can improve their grades, even for a long time. By helping students develop a narrative about the setting that explains their frustrations while projecting positive engagement and success in the setting, you can greatly improve their sense of belonging and achievement--which if done at a critical time could redirect the course of their lives.

Today, the leadership advantage goes to the people who are most closely linked to others and can work with a great variety of people from differing positions, backgrounds, and locations.