Battle Tendency Quotes

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

Disease [is] not an entity, but a fluctuating condition of the patient's body, a battle between the substance of disease and the natural self-healing tendency of the body.

Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions.In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

The longer you live by the dark, the better you come to understand its dark nature. It takes darkness to see darkness. Maybe they are suspicious for a reason, or for no reason other than they know what the Dark has a tendency to be. Maybe their human side trusts you more than their dark side trusts him.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Here it is in modern English: Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

What did you say? Depending on your answer I may have to kick your ass! - Joseph Joestar

But I fought this battle every day, fighting upstream against the inevitable, inexorable pull of my own destructive tendencies,

Many a ship's officer, caught in a storm or battle, and seized by a natural tendency to freeze up in terror, was moved to action by the vivid helplessness of his crew.

Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War is the culmination of the fifth-century tendency toward the exclusion of divine explanation. Not only does he refuse to admit non-naturalistic causality, but he cynically skewers any attempts on the part of the actors in his story to invoke the gods. Whatever his own personal beliefs were, the History can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.

Understand: as an individual you cannot stop the tide of fantasy and escapism sweeping a culture. But you can stand as an individual bulwark to this trend and create power for yourself. You were born with the greatest weapon in all of nature—the rational, conscious mind. It has the power to expand your vision far and wide, giving you the unique capacity to distinguish patterns in events, learn from the past, glimpse into the future, see through appearances. Circumstances are conspiring to dull that weapon and render it useless by turning you inward and making you afraid of reality. Consider it war. You must fight this tendency as best you can and move in the opposite direction. You must turn outward and become a keen observer of all that is around you. You are doing battle against all the fantasies that are thrown at you. You are tightening your connection to the environment. You want clarity, not escape and confusion. Moving in this direction will instantly bring you power among so many dreamers.

Grimdark is often called hopeless, but in doing so people miss that it isn't apathetic - it is (for me) characterised by defiance in the absence of hope. Grimdark is often called nihilistic, but this misses the idea that you can accept a nihilistic truth and still choose to die for a principle you know is an emotional construct. A grimdark 'hero' has a tendency to go all in - to burn their bridges even when they don't need the warmth. They are in their way an allegory for hope in so much as having been shown there's no meaning in the world, they still cling to some elements of it. And in those choices they are revealed. The way it's painted by the disapproving you would think that grimdark fiction was the literature of surrender to the inevitable. When in truth it is the story of the battle against it - sharpened by the knowledge that there's no ultimate victory to be had.

In the course of your life you will be continually encountering fools. There are simply too many to avoid. We can classify people as fools by the following rubric: when it comes to practical life, what should matter is getting long term results, and getting the work done in as efficient and creative a manner as possible. That should be the supreme value that guides people’s action. But fools carry with them a different scale of values. They place more importance on short-term matters – grabbing immediate money, getting attention from the public or media, and looking good. They are ruled by their ego and insecurities. They tend to enjoy drama and political intrigue for their own sake. When they criticize, they always emphasize matters that are irrelevant to the overall picture or argument. They are more interested in their career and position than in the truth. You can distinguish them by how little they get done, or by how hard they make it for others to get results. They lack a certain common sense, getting worked up about things that are not really important while ignoring problems that will spell doom in the long term. The natural tendency with fools is to lower yourself to their level. They annoy you, get under your skin, and draw you into a battle. In the process, you feel petty and confused. You lose a sense of what is really important. You can’t win an argument or get them to see your side or change their behavior, because rationality and results don’t matter to them. You simply waste valuable time and emotional energy. In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them. It is all part of the human comedy, and it is nothing to get upset or lose sleep over.

There’s a natural tendency in American political life to think that things were always better in the past. The passions of previous years fade, to be inevitably replaced by the passions of the present. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and in the maelstrom of the moment many of us seek comfort in imagining that once there was a Camelot—without quite remembering that the Arthurian legend itself was about a court riven by ambition and infidelity. One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception.

Of course. We should all solve the problems that arise from the inequalities between people by adopting isolationist tendencies interspersed with brute force.

There is a curious tendency in our modern world to overidentify with our shortcomings and even define ourselves by our mistakes, presumed limitations, and all the things we can’t yet do.

At DC there was a tendency sometimes to resist learning from the competition because it was the competition,” says Mark Evanier, a screenwriter and former DC freelancer. “And when they did learn, they frankly learned the wrong things.

Presently, I grew tired and swam back to shore, long, pulling strokes that nevertheless did not seem to take me anywhere. My arms and legs felt leaden, my injured wrist tender and sore. It felt as though I would never reach dry land, and I began to worry that I would indeed drown. But I fought this battle every, fighting upstream against the inevitable, inexorable pull of my own destructive tendencies, and if the body was exhausted, then at least the mind was willing.

The battle ahead requires courage and determination but also knowledge and awareness: • We have to understand the ways our mind is working against us and take steps to counter the unhealthy urges and habits that are setting us back. • We have to fight the addictive tendency to keep those whom we have lost in our lives, whether via memories or reminders. • We have to rebuild our self-esteem by practicing self-compassion. • We have to adopt mindfulness to battle obsessive thoughts of our loss. • We have to recognize the voids that have been created in our lives and take steps to fill them. • We have to reconnect to our core so we can get back in touch with the essence of what makes us who we are.

In 1858, during his debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln predicted a future crisis over “the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants.” But he also saw hope for a solution, right in front of all Americans: “When in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.”56 In other words, Lincoln came to Independence Hall with as clear a purpose as Thomas Jefferson had in 1776. He had spent his entire life approaching this stage.

Tendency amongst many men in business. They worked against a day when they might record and live on an income, get out of the strife. Life to them was a battle, to be ended as soon as possible. That was another point that I couldn’t understand. Life is not a battle. If to petrify is success, all one has to do is to humor the lazy side of the mind. But if to grow is success, then one must wake up anew everyday

Often the greatest obstacle to our pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. If we are not careful, our minds become absorbed in endless political intrigues and battles. The principal problem we face in the social arena is our naïve tendency to project onto people our emotional needs and desires of the moment. We misread their intentions and react in ways that cause confusion or conflict. Social intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible. By moving past our usual self-absorption, we can learn to focus deeply on others, reading their behavior in the moment, seeing what motivates them, and discerning any possible manipulative tendencies. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. Success attained without this intelligence is not true mastery, and will not last.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

Most great poems are concerned with wickedness, violence, and horror. But often, at least among civilized people, the whole tendency of the same poems is really towards peaceful goodness, humanity, and reconciliation. Virgil's poem pre-eminently has this tendency. Few if any poets have been so tender and sympathetic as Virgil; and for him the ideas of reconciliation and harmony amount almost to an obsession.And for Virgil it is not only by heroic champions in battle that valour is shown, and it is not only on their courage and resolution that a great future may depend. (In his introduction to Virgil's Aenied)

Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Orwell’s version goes: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Students at the University of Chicago were warned that the adult world was “rough and bloody … but if you have enough of the lust of battle in you, you will have a pretty good time after all.” Elsewhere in the Windy City, in a major address to mark Washington’s birthday, he thundered his gospel, “Life is strife,” against a backdrop of Stars and Stripes. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people,” Roosevelt went on, “to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer.” He urged his audience, in the name of Washington, to be ready for the day when America had to uphold its honor “by an appeal to the supreme arbitrament of the sword.

[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such." But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war). The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions.

Unconscious, perhaps, of the remote tendency of his own labours, he [Joseph Black] undermined that doctrine of material heat, which he seemed to support. For, by his advocacy of latent heat, he taught that its movements constantly battle, not only some of our senses, but all of them; and that, while our feelings make us believe that heat is lost, our intellect makes us believe that it is not lost. Here, we have apparent destructibility, and real indestructibility. To assert that a body received heat without its temperature rising, was to make the understanding correct the touch, and defy its dictates. It was a bold and beautiful paradox, which required courage as well as insight to broach, and the reception of which marks an epoch in the human mind, because it was an immense step towards idealizing matter into force.

When I saw them on the beach, perfectly tanned, or when I watched them twirling in the waves, I grasped the transcendental element in surf music. It was all about freedom from the rules of life, the whole of your being concentrated in the act of shooting the tube. For several years after that trip to L.A. I subscribed to Surfer magazine, and I practiced the Atlantic Ocean version of the sport, though only with my body and on rather tame waves. With my voice muffled by the water I would shout a line from “Surf City.” To me, this was the ultimate fantasy of plenty: “two girls for every boy,” except I sang it as “Two girls for every goy.” Fortunately, Brian has survived the schizoid tendencies that seemed close to the surface when I met him. He’s still performing and writing songs. But it was his emotional battle and the intersection of that struggle with the acid-dosed aesthetic of the sixties that produced his most astonishing music.

It is not only through their complexity that the immune systems confuse their owners' longing for security; they cause even more perplexity through their immanent paradox, as their successes, if they become too thorough, are perverted to become their own kind of reasons for illness: the growing universe of auto-immune pathologies illustrates the dangerous tendency of the own to win itself to death in the battle against the other. It is no coincidence that recent interpretations of the immunity phenomenon exhibit a tendency to assign far greater significance to the presence of the foreign amidst the own than was intended in traditional identitary understandings of a monolithically closed organismic self - one could almost speak of a post-structuralist turn in biology. In the light of this, the patrol of antibodies in an organism seems less like a police force applying a rigid immigration policy than a theater troupe parodying its invaders and performing as their transvestites.

John Stott comments: Thank God there are those in the contemporary church who are determined at all costs to defend and uphold God’s revealed truth. But sometimes they are conspicuously lacking in love. When they think they smell heresy, their nose begins to twitch, their muscles ripple, and the light of battle enters their eye. They seem to enjoy nothing more than a fight. Others make the opposite mistake. They are determined at all costs to maintain and exhibit brotherly love, but in order to do so are prepared even to sacrifice the central truths of revelation. Both these tendencies are unbalanced and unbiblical. Truth becomes hard if it is not softened by love; love becomes soft if it is not strengthened by truth. The apostle calls us to hold the two together, which should not be difficult for Spirit-filled believers, since the Holy Spirit is himself ‘the Spirit of truth’, and his first fruit is ‘love’. There is no other route than this to a fully mature Christian unity.12

When I look at this age with the eye of a distant future, I find nothing so remarkable in the man of the present day as his peculiar virtue and sickness called "the historical sense." It is a tendency to something quite new and foreign in history: if this embryo were given several centuries and more, there might finally evolve out of it a marvellous plant, with a smell equally marvellous, on account of which our old earth might be more pleasant to live in than it has been hitherto. We moderns are just beginning to form the chain of a very powerful, future sentiment, link by link, we hardly know what we are doing. It almost seems to us as if it were not the question of a new sentiment, but of the decline of all old sentiments: the historical sense is still something so poor and cold, and many are attacked by it as by a frost, and are made poorer and colder by it. To others it appears as the indication of stealthily approaching age, and our planet is regarded by them as a melancholy invalid, who, in order to forget his present condition, writes the history of his youth. In fact, this is one aspect of the new sentiment He who knows how to regard the history of man in its entirety as his own history, feels in the immense generalisation all the grief of the invalid who thinks of health, of the old man who thinks of the dream of his youth, of the lover who is robbed of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is destroyed, of the hero on the evening of the indecisive battle which has brought him wounds and the loss of a friend. But to bear this immense sum of grief of all kinds, to be able to bear it, and yet still be the hero who at the commencement of a second day of battle greets the dawn and his happiness, as one who has an horizon of centuries before and behind him, as the heir of all nobility, of all past intellect, and the obligatory heir (as the noblest) of all the old nobles; while at the same time the first of a new nobility, the equal of which has never been seen nor even dreamt of: to take all this upon his soul, the oldest, the newest, the losses, hopes, conquests, and victories of mankind: to have all this at last in one soul, and to comprise it in one feeling: this would necessarily furnish a happiness which man has not hitherto known, a God's happiness, full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness which, like the sun in the evening, continually gives of its inexhaustible riches and empties into the sea, and like the sun, too, feels itself richest when even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars! This divine feeling might then be called humanity!

Well, Mr Markham, you that maintain that a boy should not be shielded from evil, but sent out to battle against it, alone and unassisted - not taught to avoid the snares of life, but boldly to rush into them, or over them, as he may - to seek danger rather than shun it, and feed his virtue by temptation - would you-' 'I beg your pardon, Mrs Graham - but you get on too fast. I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life - or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it - I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe; and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hot-house, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered form the shock of the tempest.' 'Granted; but would you use the same arguments with regard to a girl?' 'Certainly not.' 'No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant - taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?' 'Assuredly not.' 'Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith. It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin, is at once to make her a sinner, and the greater her knowledge, the wider her liberty, the deeper will be her depravity - whereas, in the nobler sex, there is a natural tendency to goodness, guarded by a superior fortitude, which, the more it is exercised by trials and dangers, it is only further developed-' 'Heaven forbid that I should think so!' I interrupted her at last. 'Well then, it must be that you think they are both weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the nearest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished - his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things. Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree. You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others.

These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ``We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'' This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began---so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

It is a well known fact that warriors and wizards do not get along, because one side considers the other side to be a collection of bloodthirsty idiots who can't walk and think at the same time, while the other side is naturally suspicious of a body of men who mumble a lot and wear long dresses. Oh, say the wizards, if we're going to be like that, then, what about all those studded collars and oiled muscles down at the Young Men's Pagan Association? To which the heroes reply, that's a pretty good allegation coming from a bunch of wimpsoes who won't go near a woman on account, can you believe it, of their mystical power being sort of drained out. Right, say the wizards, that just about does it, you and your leather posing pouches. Oh yeah, say the heroes, why don't you... And so on. This sort of thing has been going on for centuries, and caused a number of major battles which have left large tracts of land uninhabitable because of magical harmonics. In fact, the hero even at this moment galloping towards the Vortex Plains didn't get involved in this kind of argument, because they didn't take it seriously, mainly because this particular hero was a heroine. A redheaded one. Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thigh-boots and naked blades. Words like "full", "round" and even "pert" creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and lie down. Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialised buyer. Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.

If possible, always let the first members of an enemy patrol pass you by, then shoot the third or fourth man. Here again, laid down drills will dictate which member of your patrol will spring the ambush. Remember that in the heat of battle, particularly with today’s automatic weapons, the tendency is to fire high, often missing the target altogether. Aim low and shoot to kill.

White men alone must manage the South,” Johnson remarked in 1865. Two years later, in 1867, the president asserted that blacks were incapable of self-government. “No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands,” Johnson wrote in his annual message. “On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” It was, the historian Eric Foner observed, “probably the most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American president.

Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today. You must cut yourself loose from the past and open your eyes to the present. Your tendency to fight the last war may lead to your final war.

Other notable books on whaling—despite their age and antiquated writing style—include Alpheus Hyatt Verrill's The Real Story of the Whaler: Whaling Past and Present (1916); Clifford Ashley's The Yankee Whaler (1939), written by a whaleman and offering perhaps the best overview of the physical characteristics and mechanics of a whaleship; Samuel Eliot Morison's The Maritime History of Massachusetts (1921); and Edouard Stackpole's The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen during Two Centuries, 1635–1835 (1953). The best recent book on whaling is Eric Jay Dolan's Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (2007), which views the whaling profession through a modern lens and thoroughly explores the socioeconomic aspects of whaling. Like Melville, Dolan doesn't ignore the biology of the mammal itself. In the literature of the Civil War navies, there has been a tendency to, unfortunately, glorify the same subjects, almost to the point of cliché. Hence bookshelves are stacked with discussions of ironclads, blockade-runners, and the most sensational of the sea battles. There's a reason there are so few books concerning Civil War naval logistics and the Union blockade: the work was, more often than not, mind-numbingly tedious. As one “bluejacket” humorously noted in a letter he wrote home, “We have not much to do at present and I don't know what I should do if we did not have our pig and kittens to play with.”1

the cultural influences of the civilized south only clothed their barbaric tendencies like a nightclub doorman wearing an ill-fitting dinner jacket.

As in all armies, it was not so much the fear of death as the fear of mutilation which preyed on minds. A German field hospital, or Feldlazarett, was little more than an amputation line. American doctors were horrified by the German army’s tendency to cut off limbs without a moment’s thought. A

The war dragged on, as wars tend to do.

Since the aim of masturbation is to give the male an edge over others in sperm warfare, he gains most if he masturbates but can dissuade those around him from doing so. That way, he gains competitive benefits that his rivals do not. The world-wide tendency to criticise, even victimise, other people for masturbating while continuing to masturbate oneself is thus as strategic as masturbation itself.

Edward was not exactly saintly—more weird than anything. In the words of one historian, ‘the personality described by eyewitnesses is that of a … neurotic with a tendency to paranoia and possessed of a fearsome temper that often made him impervious to reason’.2 While ‘his “saintly” detachment can be read in quite another way, as the “schizoid” alienation of the classic lone wolf, who has decided that since no one cares for him he in turn will care for nobody’.

Kevin Kelly: That became one of the biggest jobs that we had: people having to moderate the conversation. Lee Felsenstein: And so I had to bust up some kind of paranoid discussion threads that mostly had to do with other personalities in the conference. A couple of times I had to jump in and say, “Now you are all making far too much out of this. There’s nothing there.” And, you know, “Calm down, for God’s sake.” It was worth the effort. But it took effort. Kevin Kelly: These systems are natural amplifiers, and negative things are somehow easier to amplify or become much louder than positive things, there’s something about a negative amplification that just powers up. And so we saw these phenomena where small slights would be amplified into huge harm and pilings on, and people who were normally very civil would get sucked up into battles. And they would have what we call flame wars. It was sort of like a flame in the sense that the hotter it got, the more that would be sucked into it and burn. Lee Felsenstein: We discovered early on about the tendency to flame. Hackers do that, of course. But we thought that was just a hacker thing and it turned out not to be. Kevin Kelly: And we began to see trolls, although we didn’t use that term at the time, where there were people who were getting satisfaction out of starting fires or nudging people. They would do that over and over again just because they liked to see what would happen. Stewart Brand: People learned how to deal with trolls. If you respond to them, they will make the flame even brighter. Kevin Kelly: So we had to deal with that. And issues about people wanting to remove what they had said and whether that was okay. And so there were all these things that are now very familiar dynamics that were completely new to us. And each one we had to address, and we were spending days and nights and evenings trying to manage these things.

O my Beloved! this was but the prelude of graces yet greater which Thou didst desire to heap upon me. Let me remind Thee of them to-day, and forgive my folly if I venture to tell Thee once more of my hopes, and my heart's well nigh infinite longings—forgive me and grant my desire, that it may be well with my soul. To be Thy Spouse, O my Jesus, to be a daughter of Carmel, and by my union with Thee to be the mother of souls, should not all this content me? And yet other vocations make themselves felt—I feel called to the Priesthood and to the Apostolate—I would be a Martyr, a Doctor of the Church. I should like to accomplish the most heroic deeds—the spirit of the Crusader burns within me, and I long to die on the field of battle in defence of Holy Church. The vocation of a Priest! With what love, my Jesus, would I bear Thee in my hand, when my words brought Thee down from Heaven! With what love would I give Thee to souls! And yet, while longing to be a Priest, I admire and envy the humility of St. Francis of Assisi, and am drawn to imitate him by refusing the sublime dignity of the Priesthood. How reconcile these opposite tendencies? Like the Prophets and Doctors, I would be a light unto souls, I would travel to every land to preach Thy name, O my Beloved, and raise on heathen soil the glorious standard of Thy Cross. One mission alone would not satisfy my longings. I would spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, even to the most distant isles. I would be a Missionary, not for a few years only, but, were it possible, from the beginning of the world till the consummation of time. Above all, I thirst for the Martyr's crown. It was the desire of my earliest days, and the desire has deepened with the years passed in the Carmel's narrow cell. But this too is folly, since I do not sigh for one torment; I need them all to slake my thirst. Like Thee, O Adorable Spouse, I would be scourged, I would be crucified! I would be flayed like St. Bartholomew, plunged into boiling oil like St. John, or, like St. Ignatius of Antioch, ground by the teeth of wild beasts into a bread worthy of God. With St. Agnes and St. Cecilia I would offer my neck to the sword of the executioner, and like Joan of Arc I would murmur the name of Jesus at the stake. ...Open, O Jesus, the Book of Life, in which are written the deeds of Thy Saints: all the deeds told in that book I long to have accomplished for Thee.

Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help -may even be hindrances- to a civilized man

Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help -may even be hindrances- to a civilized man.

Since you shared your struggles with me, let me acknowledge that one of my battles is with my constant tendency to forget what God has done for

The art critic Robert Hughes pointed out that if you were to take the pile of bricks that compromises Carl Andre’s minimalist sculpture Equivalent VIII (1966) out of the museum and place it in a parking lot, it would no longer be a work of art but a neat stack of building materials. If you were to put a sculpture by Rodin in a parking lot, by contrast, it would be a ‘misplaced’ work of art. Hughes was emphasizing that the Rodin is identified as art by its form, while the Andre (which Hughes also admired) is identified as art by the idea behind it. For all that I have issues with this tendency to draw battle lines between form and content, to trust in the aura of an artwork and to assume that art should be found in museums and never parking lots, it does identify a useful distinction: a large part of the contemporary art I like does not aspire to independence from the everyday world but to alert us to it.

Dealing with an Upholder Child In most ways, the parents of Upholder children have an easy time. Upholder children want to understand and meet expectations, and they’re self-motivated. Parents don’t have to be involved in many homework battles or remind a child to feed a fish. An Upholder child will practice the piano without many reminders, plan ahead to pack the right soccer equipment, and keep track of the school schedule. Parents enjoy this aspect of Upholderness, but they may get frustrated when a child can’t turn off the Upholder Tendency. From time to time, they want the child to loosen up or let go of expectations. Not likely. The Upholder child may go nuts if he can’t do the thirty minutes of reading that he’s supposed to do before bed or if she arrives five minutes late for school.

The typical self-centered goals of a young Midwestern white man were absent. I had no interest in McMansions, Rolexes, or Range Rovers. I just liked to get fucked up and fuck things and other people up.               Maybe I was looking for something to believe in when the planets aligned to set me down that path. I was drawn to racist ideology because I felt like white people were getting shafted. We were the underdogs. It was us against the world in an epic battle for forever. Such romance! Yes, I have a tendency to make it sound that way, which I guess is really just getting back in that moment, because the taint we cast upon reality definitely had that saga feel. And that was by design. Hitler did it with the torch-lit ceremony and iconic swastika. It felt like you were Beowulf, Siegfried, and Conan all rolled into one. Just a big fucking game of Dungeons & Dragons, till death and prison inevitably show up. Then the shit is real. Then comes the real challenge, the true test of will.

There was no more nonsense about shock waves and concussions. When you went under in 1941 to 1945 it was not because of shock waves rattling your brains, but the sudden surfacing of emotionally unresolved, though persistent conflicts. The soldier who broke did not break so much from the fear of having someone trying to kill him or even from the harrowingness of battle, but from some neurotic tendency, deep-seated, that had always been there eating him away, or ready to eat him away. “The Newmans had been trained to address themselves to the eradication of psychiatric symptomatology, to intrinsic psychopathology, to the symptoms of conflict within the patient. Armed with what were essentially individual theories and techniques, they were suddenly presented not with one or two patients, who, subjected to the normal stresses of living, had decompensated, but thousands who had been exposed to the unique and terrifying prospect of war. Viewed from the outside, the Newmans’ reactions to this flood of patients was either to withdraw into the spotty use of intensive psychotherapy or simply to wring their hands and abandon the mass of patients to the V.A. system as treatable only if more psychiatrists were provided, which of course they weren’t.

One of the greatest skills in the practice of the military art is the avoidance of the natural tendency to overrate or underestimate the enemy.

recognize. In the 1980s, with rivals operating far from the productivity frontier, it seemed possible to win on both cost and quality indefinitely. Japanese companies were all able to grow in an expanding domestic economy and by penetrating global markets. They appeared unstoppable. But as the gap in operational effectiveness narrows, Japanese companies are increasingly caught in a trap of their own making. If they are to escape the mutually destructive battles now ravaging their performance, Japanese companies will have to learn strategy. To do so, they may have to overcome strong cultural barriers. Japan is notoriously consensus oriented, and companies have a strong tendency to mediate differences among individuals rather than accentuate them. Strategy, on the other

We live under the New Testament principles of grace and mercy toward our enemies, but when it comes to sin, God wants us to be ruthless. The moment we believe in Jesus as our Savior, God initiates the process of making us holy through his Spirit. He expects us to participate in the lifelong process by battling any tendencies to follow our old nature when it fights against our desire to please God. Since there’s no such thing as a harmless sin, any compromise is dangerous. God’s battle plan is clear: wipe out any sinful desires, attitudes, and habits before they lead us into disaster.

It was over a century and a half ago that Clausewitz made his now famous remarks on the relationship of war to policy. Most simply, "war is not a mere act of policy, but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means." Political considerations reach into the military means, to influence "the planning of war, of the campaign, and often of the battle." Clausewitz clearly believed that statesmen could and should ensure that policy infuse military operations. Those in charge of policy require "a certain grasp of military affairs." They need to be soldiers, however. "What is needed in the post is distinguished intellect and character. He [the statesman] can always get the necessary military information somehow or other." Clausewitz was overoptimistic on this score. Few have challenged his judgement that policy must infuse acts of war, but the achievement of this goal has proven more difficult that he imagined... Functional specialization between soldiers and statesmen, and the tendency of soldiers to seek as much independence from civilian interference as possible, combine to make political-military integration an uncertain prospect.

An aversion – almost – towards listening to the rich multiplicity of ‘reality’ seems to be linked with a background of profound fears and to the resulting defensive postures that express themselves in a tendency to reduce knowledge in general to a set of principles from which nothing can escape. A relentless battle is waged as an attempt is made to organize everything in the light, or shadow, of the ‘best’ principles of knowledge: a chronic struggle of territorial conquest where the ‘territory’ is the set of notions and principles for constructing reality. Listening thus comes to be an essential function in the attempt to identify and monitor possible predatory aspects of our knowledge, no longer even capable of rememorizing or imagining the Parmenidean function of the ‘shepherds of being

So life is an everlasting battle between those two forces: to get these advantages of scale on one side and a tendency to get a lot like the US Department of Agriculture on the other side, where they just sit around and so forth. I don’t know exactly what they do. However, I do know that they do very little useful work.

Pride also causes us to be very judgemental toward other people. We are right, if they would do everything we do then they would be better. Satan wants us to focus on things that annoy us about the people we live and work with. These daily annoyances keep us from focusing on what God would like us to see about ourselves. I am going to rewind that and say it again, the enemy seeks to have us focus on the things that annoy us about the people we are in relationship with. We ought to help carry the doubts and qualms of others, and not to please ourselves. In other words, there is more about me that’s annoying than there is about him, it is just that we do not see what we do, because we are so busy seeing what everybody else is doing. Satan has won a battle if the believer sees nothing wrong with himself and a great deal wrong with everybody else. Is there anybody here that has a tendency to be a bit judgemental? Do not judge and criticize and condemn others so that you may not be judged and criticized and condemned yourselves. The best piece of advice I could give you today and I am still learning myself – mind your own business. I do not need to have an opinion where I do not have any responsibility.

The biography of John Wesley is surely unique. Here is a man born in the first decade of his century, who sees it through into the last; a man so far in reaction from the tendencies of his age that he seems a living commentary on them, yet so much the child of his age that you cannot think of him as fitting in with any other. A High Churchman in his youth, he makes for himself in the unsympathetic surroundings of Oxford an enclave of primitive observance and of ascetic living; such is his personal influence that he seems destined, if that were possible, to shake Oxford out of its long dream. Dis aliter visum; he undergoes an experience of conversion before his lifetime has reached its mid-point. A sensational conversion; the finished product of the schools becomes the disciple of a foreign visitor to our shores, by no means his match in intellect. Thenceforward, he must fight by other methods, and for the most part with other companions, that battle against irreligion to which he has dedicated his youth. He has made his own soul, but the battle is not yet over; he finds himself in conflict with the men who had been his closest comrades in arms, and who still share his own beliefs but exaggerate their emphasis in a degree which he thinks dangerous. A man who once seemed likely to do great things for the Church of England, yet whose influence, on the whole, was to damage her position in the eyes of his contemporaries; a man, nevertheless, who lived to see something of the old bitterness against him die down, whose age was cheered by public recognition at once welcome, unsought, and unexpected. So far, however, there is nothing unique about John Wesley. A careful reperusal of the foregoing paragraph will show that it all applies equally to the career of Cardinal Newman. Wesley and Newman-you might think that some elfin fate had arranged this odd consent between the stars of the two men, just so as to throw into relief the vast difference there was between them. Newman, so sensitive, so warm in his attachments, so revealing in This content downloaded from his literary confidences, Wesley, so unruffled by opposition, so half-hearted in his familiarities, so circumspect in his admissions; Newman, the recluse, Wesley, a lifelong vagabond in the service of his gospel; Newman, painstaking in his judgements, fastidious in his style, Wesley, leaping to infallible conclusions and throwing them at you with the first words that came to hand; Newman, such a child of the Renaissance, Wesley, so fundamentally a Puritan. And, deeper down, Newman the apostle of religious authority, Wesley, a cheerful experimentalist who in all the hesitations of a lifetime never asked himself by what right he ruled, or on what basis of intellectual certainty he believed.

Being sensual denotes that you have transcended the battle between the masculine and feminine. The masculine and feminine are like kids. They have a tendency to throw tantrums and can get on your nerves. Being sensual is being a mature adult who knows exactly who they are and what they want.

I turned to Nari. “But getting back to the big picture,” I continued, “without your intervention, the odds we’d unleash some kind of WMD on ourselves were basically a hundred percent, right? So what are the odds now, given that we do have your help?” “Still fairly high,” admitted the alien. “About eighteen percent.” “Why?” “Mainly due to social media,” replied Brad. “It’s the most divisive technology the world has ever seen. It’s polarizing and promotes our worst tendencies. Mistrust, tribalism, zealotry. And it fosters and aids in the mobilization of those intent on violence. We’ve been working on ways to eliminate social media for years, but short of killing the internet—which would cripple the world—we haven’t come up with any solutions. So we just have to continue battling the violence it inspires.

She wasn’t going to be moved on the issue, and time was a factor he couldn’t ignore. Somewhere, hundreds of thousands of clones were gearing up for a battle. He had to fix his mistake, or people who hadn’t volunteered to be put in the line of fire were going to die. He wiped the blood from his nose and followed her into the Etheric. The mists were as agitated as he expected, given his wife’s mood. He spotted her heading in the direction of the planet. “Bethany Anne, wait.” She lifted a hand and extended her middle finger without slowing her pace or turning to look at him. As he broke into a run, Michael reminded himself that he loved her, not despite her tendency toward an uncompromising nature but because of it. Like attracted like, and while that could easily lead to a battle of wills that neither of them would emerge from as the victor, it also made them strong enough to be the support the other needed when faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Lightning struck five feet ahead of Michael at the same time a lightbulb came on in his mind. I’m sorry, he sent. She ignored him, but she didn’t slam down the barrier to block their mental link. I shouldn’t have presumed I could flirt my way around your moral objections. Your very valid objections, he added. It was manipulative, and you fucking suck for doing it. If it makes any difference, I was not attempting to manipulate you. Just…ease you past your misgivings. Another lightning strike crashed into the mist barely five feet from where he was standing. Which, I realize, was manipulative. I’m sorry. Can we talk about it? You can talk. I’ll listen until you piss me off again, and the next bolt of lightning won’t miss.

Mainly due to social media,” replied Brad. “It’s the most divisive technology the world has ever seen. It’s polarizing and promotes our worst tendencies. Mistrust, tribalism, zealotry. And it fosters and aids in the mobilization of those intent on violence. We’ve been working on ways to eliminate social media for years, but short of killing the internet—which would cripple the world—we haven’t come up with any solutions. So we just have to continue battling the violence it inspires.

We often think of fight or flight as the main defensive reaction human beings turn to when faced with a threat. When under stress, we flee or hunker down for the impending battle. While this reaction does characterize a pervasive human tendency, researchers have documented another stress-response system that many people engage in when under threat: a “tend and befriend” response. They seek out other people for support and care.

terrible.So life is an everlasting battle between those two forces to get these advantages of scale on one side and a tendency to get a lot like the U.S. Agriculture Department on the other side-where they just sit around and so forth.

The months since their marriage had demonstrated that the couple share a common character flaw – they both have a tendency to cascade downwards from their peaks of generous self-confidence into miserable moments of self-pitying victimhood. They see the world as hostile and start behaving in self-destructive ways that make that hostility come to pass.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure,” Baldwin wrote. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

When Adolfe Sax patented the first saxophone on June 23, 1846, the Creek Nation was in turmoil. The people had been moved west of the Mississippi River after the Creek Wars which culminated in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. We were putting our lives back together in new lands where we were promised we would be left alone. The saxophone made it across the big waters and was introduced in brass bands in the South. The music followed rivers into new towns, cities, all the way to our new lands. Not long after, in the early 1900s, my grandmother Naomi Harjo learned to play saxophone. I can feel her now when I play the instrument we both loved and love. The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little.

Tragedies change a person… for the better or worse. But overseeing your tragedies to realize the tragedies of the world… well it mutates the person. Evolves him into a singular, majestic and somewhat absurd being… Absurd, because the tendency to look beyond your own horizon makes you deliver …than expect. You don’t find the time to find your own problems leave it be battle them. The darkness of the world becomes yours to reckon with. This is not a reversible change. Once initiated… there is no looking behind.

The command, and its restatement, implies there is nothing automatic about setting our minds on Heaven. In fact, most commands assume a resistance to obeying them, which sets up the necessity for the command. We are told to avoid sexual immorality because it is our tendency. We are not told to avoid jumping off buildings because normally we don’t battle such a temptation. The command to think about Heaven is under attack in a hundred different ways every day. Everything militates against it. Our minds are so much set on Earth that we are unaccustomed to heavenly thinking. So we must work at it.

Therefore, all your care and attention must be concentrated on keeping watch, and it is particularly necessary for you to guard against sin in the place where it usually begins, to resist temptation at once the very first time it appears and thus to eliminate the evil before it can grow and spread. When something has to be feared from its smallest beginnings and is the more easily overcome the more speedily it is resisted, one must not wait for it to grow; that is why divine scripture exclaims: Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life (Pr.4.23). 27, 1. One has to make a distinction, however, between those of one’s thoughts which the will favors and embraces affectionately, and those which are wont to flit past the mind like an insubstantial shadow and merely show a glimpse of themselves in passing - the Greeks call them typoi, ‘impressions’ - and also those, to be sure, which offer promptings to a mind which is resistant and unwilling and as glad when they are expelled as it was sad when they were admitted in the first place. In those which show themselves only fleetingly to the mind and reveal themselves as if in flight, there is no underlying sin at all and no sign of fight; but with those which the soul struggles against for some time and which the will resists, we can expect an even contest. Either we consent to them and are conquered or we reject them and conquer them and win a victory in battle. Thus sin exists only in the thought which has given the mind’s consent to a suggestion, which flatters and fosters its own evil tendency and longs for it to erupt into action. This kind of thought, even if it is prevented from reaching any outcome and so fails to fulfill the wish that lies behind it, is nevertheless condemned as a criminal act by the Lord.

The most difficult battles we face in life are those we wage within. Self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, and fear of rejection: This is the trifecta of demons that holds us back from reaching our full potential. We’re not born with these demons; for proof of this, one need only look at how free and uncensored young kids are. By the time most of us reach adulthood, however, we’ve devolved into a tangle of insecurities and negative experiences. From what I’ve seen and from what I’ve suffered, I’d wager that perfectionism hits artists the hardest. Artists—whose very calling is based on the expression of feeling—tend to be more introspective than your average human being and spend much more time living internally. Releasing a creative project out into the world requires ceding a part of yourself to the world and exposing it to the slings and arrows of external criticism. So, it’s only natural that the artist, aware of the vulnerability and invitation for judgment inherent in the act of creating publicly, would take painstaking care to ensure that whatever is released into the world is as close as possible to “perfect.” If left unchecked, this tendency to obsess and strive for perfection can lead the artist to devote months, if not years, to producing a single flawless creation. The truth of the matter, though, is that our actual creations will never be so perfect as we’ve dreamt them to be; they can only be perfected in the sense that, when released, they exist. Sometimes, it takes losing control to gain control over this obsession with perfection.

It would not seem necessary to conduct any detailed dissection of Lewis's theology, for the job has already been done by John Beversluis, who in C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (1985) has keenly, pungently, but entirely without malice and rancor knocked down every pillar of Lewis's defenses of God, Jesus, and Christianity. (Richard H. Purtill's sorry attempt at rebutting Beversluis only proves that Lewis's advocates are, on the whole, even less worthy of consideration than he was himself.) Beversluis exposes the manifold fallacies of Lewis's mode of argumentation: question-begging, false dichotomies, sheer ignorance of philosophical complexities, rhetorical sleight of hand, and much more. Perhaps his most frequent error is the enunciation of his opponents' views in a highly superficial and even misleading manner, to the point that they become caricatures of the positions he is attempting to refute. As Beversluis notes: "His tendency is to rush into battle, misrepresent the opposition, and then demolish it. The demolition is often swift and the victory decisive, but the view refuted is seldom a position anyone actually holds." One gains the strong impression that Lewis was simply unwilling, or perhaps even afraid, to deal forthrightly with views he disagreed with. It would be surprising to find someone of his general (but not philosophical) intelligence making such crude and grotesque errors in reasoning, were it not that he manifestly considered his opponents not merely factually wrong but morally repugnant and even dangerous, so that he set about attacking them with every weapon available, legitimate or otherwise.

Given the recent remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, scouting will probably involve “algorithmic warfare,” with competing AI systems plowing through vast amounts of data to identify patterns of enemy behavior that might elude human analysts. Identifying enemy operational tendencies may also aid commanders in employing their forces more effectively, similar to the way the introduction of operations research aided the allies in identifying effective convoy operations during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.30 AI could potentially assist efforts to develop malware, which could be used to erase or corrupt enemy scouting information, including the enemy’s AI algorithms themselves. If these efforts are successful, enemy commanders may lose confidence in their scouts, producing a “mission kill,” in which much of the enemy’s scouting force continues to operate but where its product is suspect.

In the Israeli military, there is a tendency to treat all performance—both successful and unsuccessful—in training and simulations, and sometimes even in battle, as value-neutral. So long as the risk was taken intelligently, and not recklessly, there is something to be learned.

Once you step into a fight that is not of your own choosing, you lose all initiative. The combatants’ interests become your interests; you become their tool. Learn to control yourself, to restrain your natural tendency to take sides and join the fight. Be friendly and charming to each of the combatants, then step back as they collide. With every battle they grow weaker, while you grow stronger with every battle you avoid.

DAY 254 Controlling our appetite St. Augustine readily admitted the challenges of controlling physical appetites. The tendency to eat and drink too much is especially difficult to overcome, since we can’t simply “swear off” eating and drinking altogether. But he recognized that God is willing to help us in our weakness. By eating and drinking we restore the daily losses of the body. This activity must last, then, until the day comes when you, Lord, destroy both food and stomach; when you’ll slay this emptiness of mine with a marvelous fullness; when you’ll clothe this corruptible nature with eternal and incorruptible life. For now, however, this necessity of eating and drinking is sweet to me. So I must fight against this sweetness to keep from being made captive by it. I carry on my daily battle by fasting, “bringing my body into subjection,” as St. Paul put it (see 1 Corinthians 9:27). This much you’ve taught me, Lord: I must look upon food as medicine, and consume only as much as I need. Yet placed in the midst of these temptations to eat and drink too much, I must strive daily against craving for food and drink. For it’s not the kind of temptation I’m able to deal with simply by resolving to cut it off, once and for all, never to touch it again, as I was able to do with sexual sin. Instead, the throat is like the bridle of a horse that must be held with a hand that’s neither too firm nor too slack. For who, Lord, isn’t carried away in what he eats and drinks beyond the limits of what’s only necessary? Whoever can do that is a great man. Let him magnify your name for such a gift. But I’m not someone like that, for I’m a sinful man. Even so, I also magnify your name. And the one who has overcome the world makes intercession to you for my sins, counting me among the members of his body, however weak I may be. — St. Augustine, Confessions,

All that was possible—but not likely. Since the time of the czars, historians had noted Russia’s tendency to adopt with much fanfare the latest European ideas—whether representative government or modern bureaucracy, free markets or state socialism—only to subordinate or abandon such imported notions in favor of older, harsher ways of maintaining the social order. In the battle for Russia’s identity, fear and fatalism usually beat out hope and change. It was an understandable response to a thousand-year history of Mongol invasions, byzantine intrigues, great famines, pervasive serfdom, unbridled tyranny, countless insurrections, bloody revolutions, crippling wars, years-long sieges, and millions upon millions slaughtered—all on a frigid landscape that forgave nothing.

Since the time of the czars, historians had noted Russia’s tendency to adopt with much fanfare the latest European ideas—whether representative government or modern bureaucracy, free markets or state socialism—only to subordinate or abandon such imported notions in favor of older, harsher ways of maintaining the social order. In the battle for Russia’s identity, fear and fatalism usually beat out hope and change. It was an understandable response to a thousand-year history of Mongol invasions, byzantine intrigues, great famines, pervasive serfdom, unbridled tyranny, countless insurrections, bloody revolutions, crippling wars, years-long sieges, and millions upon millions slaughtered—all on a frigid landscape that forgave nothing. —

None of us knows how long this war will last, so make sure that you pace yourselves. Lives really will depend on the decisions that you make, and you won’t realize how much tiredness has affected your judgment until it’s too late. This isn’t a training exercise and you can’t just power through without sleep.’ On the eve of battle, the first thing that Nick had to tell us was to get some rest. At the time, it wasn’t the advice that I expected to hear, but in the years since have been reminded often of its wisdom. The kind of bone-deep tiredness wrought by prolonged stress and lack of sleep doesn’t simply sap your ability to make sound decisions, it alters the filter through which you see the world. I have seen exhausted commanders, myself included, driven by a sense of responsibility, and perhaps the Marine tendency towards masochism, do things that they would never contemplate when rested. This same ethos infuses the staff and subordinate

Once you step into a fight that is not of your own choosing, you lose all initiative. The combatants' interests becomes your interests; you become their tool. Learn to control yourself, to restrain your natural tendency to take sides and join the fight. Be friendly and charming to each of the combatants, then step back as they collide. With every battle they grow weaker, while you grow stronger with every battle you avoid.

Our addiction to shopping and spending makes many people think that we have already lost the battle against global warming. As well as leading most of us into an ostrich‐like denial of its implications for our way of life, the strength of our consumerist tendencies has reduced governments to a state of paralysis, too nervous of the electorate to implement any policy capable of making a real difference. How are we to transform this culture and make it possible to reduce the threat to the planet?

When under stress, we flee or hunker down for the impending battle. While this reaction does characterize a pervasive human tendency, researchers have documented another stress-response system that many people engage in when under threat: a “tend and befriend” response. They seek out other people for support and care.

Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.

The Problem of Moral Relativism A central obstacle in the battle with jihadism is the West’s tendency to engage in moral relativism. By this I mean placing the failings of different cultures or religions on an equal footing – assigning them equal portions of blame.