Catastrophic Famous Quotes

Socrates was famous in Athens for saying, “Know thyself.” It is said that one of his students said to him: “Socrates, you go around saying ‘Know thyself,’ but do you know yourself?” Socrates was said to have replied, “No, but I understand something about this not knowing.

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.*1 Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.

But life is fragile. Earth’s occasional encounters with large, wayward comets and asteroids, a formerly common event, wreaks intermittent havoc upon our ecosystem. A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna—including all the famous outsized dinosaurs. Extinction. This ecological catastrophe enabled our mammal ancestors to fill freshly vacant niches, rather than continue to serve as hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

The demographic ageing of Europe and other leading industrial countries is multiplied by the economic burden of immigration. For the time being, we can still hold out, but this will not last. The lack of active workers, the burden of retirees and the expenses of healthcare will end, from 2005-2010, with burdening European economies with debt. Gains in productivity and technological advances (the famous ‘primitive accumulation of fixed capital’, the economists’ magic cure) will never be able to match the external demographic costs. Lastly, far from compensating for the losses of the working-age native-born population, the colonising immigration Europe is experiencing involves first of all welfare recipients and unskilled workers. In addition, this immigration represents a growing expense (insecurity, the criminal economy, urban policies, etc.). An economic collapse of Europe, the world’s leading commercial power, would drag down with it the United States and the entire Western economy.

There's a swell book that's out of print now. Maybe Seven Stories will bring it out again. It's called The Writer and Psychoanalysis by a man who's now dead named Edmund Bergler. He claimed he had treated more writers than anyone else in his field, and being that he practiced in New York, he probably did. Bergler said that writers were fortunate in that they were able to treat their neuroses every day by writing. He also said that as soon as a writer was blocked, this was catastrophic because the writer would start to go to pieces. And so I said in a piece in Harper's, or a letter I wrote to Harper's, about "the death of the novel": People will continue to write novels, or maybe short stories, because they discover that they are treating their own neuroses. And I have said about the practice of the arts that practicing any art—be it painting, music, dance, literature, or whatever—is not a way to make money or become famous. It's a way to make your soul grow. So you should do it anyway.

Indefinite Pessimism Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.

Loving your fate and joyful acceptance Epictetus actually describes a three-stage process to his students, which relates to the discipline of desire. He begins by emphasizing the need for Stoics to train themselves rigorously to adhere to their principles, having certain phrases constantly ready-to-hand day and night. These should be written down, read over, analysed and discussed, until they have been memorized and understood. We should then rehearse all the possible catastrophes that can befall us in life, things the majority of people fear, and prepare for them in advance. Then, if one of those things happens which are called ‘undesirable’, immediately the thought that it was not unexpected will be the first thing to lighten the burden. For in every case it is a great help to be able to say, ‘I knew the son whom I had begotten was mortal.’ [A famous saying, attributed to various wise men.] For that is what you will say, and likewise, ‘I knew that I was mortal’, ‘I knew that I was vulnerable to exile’, ‘I knew that I might be sent off to prison.’ (Discourses, 3.24)

And, insofar as the Freudian name for this radical negativity is the death drive, Schuster is right to point out how, paradoxically, what Sade misses in his celebration of the ultimate Crime of radical destruction of all life is, precisely, the death drive: “for all its wantonness and havoc, the Sadeian will-to-extinction is premised on a fetishistic denial of the death drive. The sadist makes himself into the servant of universal extinction precisely in order to avoid the deadlock of subjectivity, the “virtual extinction” that splits the life of the subject from within. The Sadeian libertine expels this negativity outside himself in order to be able to slavishly devote himself to it; the apocalyptic vision of an absolute Crime thus functions as a screen against a more intractable internal split. What the florid imagination of the sadist masks is the fact that the Other is barred, inconsistent, lacking, that it cannot be served for it presents no law to obey, not even the wild law of its accelerating auto-destruction. There is no nature to be followed, rivalled or outdone, and it is this void or lack, the non-existence of the Other, that is incomparably more violent than even the most destructive fantasm of the death drive. Or as Lacan argues, Sade is right if we just turn around his evil thought: subjectivity is the catastrophe it fantasizes about, the death beyond death, the “second death.” While the sadist dreams of violently forcing a cataclysm that will wipe the slate clean, what he does not want to know is that this unprecedented calamity has already taken place. Every subject is the end of the world, or rather this impossibly explosive end that is equally a “fresh start,” the unabolishable chance of the dice throw.”[6] Kant characterized the free autonomous act as an act that cannot be accounted for in the terms of natural causality, of the texture of causes and effects: a free act occurs as its own cause, it opens up a new causal chain from its zero-point. So, insofar as “second death” is the interruption of the natural life-cycle of generation and corruption, no radical annihilation of the entire natural order is needed for this—an autonomous free act already suspends natural causality, and the subject as such is already this cut in the natural circuit, the self-sabotage of natural goals. The mystical name for this end of the world is “the night of the world,” while the philosophical name is “radical negativity” as the core of subjectivity. And, to quote Mallarmé, a throw of the dice will never abolish the hazard, i.e., the abyss of negativity remains forever the unsublatable background of subjective creativity. We may even risk here an ironic version of Gandhi’s famous motto “be the change you want to see in the world”: the subject is itself the catastrophe it fears and tries to avoid.

SCALE THE HUMAN MOUNTAIN OF SUMLESS LIES UNTIL YOU LABORIOUSLY REACH THE SUMMIT THEN CAUSE IT TO CRUMBLE BY YOUR EQUALLY SUMLESS BURDEN OF VERITY THAT NO HUMAN MAY FAVOUR YOU WITH A GLANCE ANY MORE AND THOSE WHO DO ARE NO LONGER HUMAN HAVING DIVESTED THEMSELVES OF THEIR HUMANITY AS YOU DID BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT OF * WHAT MAN HAS DONE TO HIMSELF BESIDES , YOU ARE ABLE TO ASCERTAIN HOW MANY '' FRIENDS '' YOU HAVE WHICH IS THE EMPTY SET CONTAINING ONE ELEMENT ONLY : VERITY ! , TO WHICH YOU PERTAIN AS WELL IT IS WHY IT IS THE HARDEST THING TO FIND THE PATH LEADING TO YOURSELF AND IT IS BY THE EMPTY SET THAT ALL OF MATHEMATICS HAS BEEN MADE AN EGREGIOUS LIE TOO IT IS MORE FACILE TO KILL SOMEONE OR , IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO , YOURSELF DO YOU SEE THE POPLAR AND THE ROBIN THAT IS PERCHED ON IT ? ASK THEM ! THEY KNOW HOW TO LIVE YOU DON'T BECAUSE YOU ARE HUMAN AND INTELLIGENT : MAN IS ENDUED WITH HIS SPIRIT OF INVENTION WHICH HAS REDUCED LIFE TO ABSURDITY AS ALL THOSE THEORIES AND TEACHINGS SPRINGING FROM IT HAVE NEVER BENEFITED LIFE , ON THE CONTRARY , DESTROYED IT ! AN APPRECIATION OF THE MAJESTY OF VERITY ALSO ENTAILS THE INEVITABLE CATASTROPHE OF '' BEING '' AND HENCE THE INFELICITY OF YOURSELF WHICH HAS TO BE ASCRIBED TO THOSE PROFOUND TEACHINGS OF MAN AND THE IMPRECATIONS WHICH THEY HEAPED UPON LIFE AND BEHIND WHICH EVERYONE STRIVES TO CONCEAL HIMSELF AS SOMETHING SUBLIME , BROTHERLY , CUNNING , INGENIOUS CONVINCED OF THE '' SUCCESS '' OF SUCH BEING ! INGENUITY AND SUCCESS , DO THOSE TWO WORDS DIFFER ? , AS MAN IS DETREMINED BY THOSE CRITERIA AND HENCE LIFE !... WHAT ALSO COMES TO MIND HERE IS THIS - THERE IS SOMETHING VASTLY ABOMINABLE ABOUT SOCIETY : ITS MEMBERS ARE EVER SO FOND OF ALL THOSE MOVIE STARS AND ALL THOSE OTHER LUMINARIES AND WHAT IS LUMINOUS ABOUT THEM I DO NOT KNOW ! YET THEY ARE IN THE HABIT OF TREATING THOSE VERY SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE DIFFERENTLY FROM ORDINARY PEOPLE SUCH AS A HOUSEMAID OR A GROCER OR A SALESMAN AND SO FORTH , THEREBY CREATING SOMETHING UTTERLY CORRUPT : A FALSE IDEALISM ! THEY NEED THOSE LUMINARIES AS THEY LACK ANY IDEALISM THEMSELVES IN THEIR EVERYDAY REALITY WHICH HAS DEPRAVED THEM OF IT , OVERLOOKING HOWEVER , HOW TRULY ORDINARY IN TRUTH ALL THOSE STARS ARE ! AND ALLOWING THEIR LACK OF IDEALISM TO BE SUPERSEDED BY OTHER PEOPLE'S NONPRESENT IDEALISM ON ACCOUNT OF THEIR PROMINENCE MAKES EVERYTHING LOOK EVEN DARKER IN LIFE , AS THOUGH LIFE CONSISTED IN FAME ! IS THIS WHY IT IS SO DARK IN THE HUMAN WORLD ? AM I THE ONLY PERSON TO APPREHEND DARKNESS IN THEIR LIGHTNESS ? OR WHY IS SO DARK IN THIS WORLD ? SOMETHING LIKE THAT NEEDS TO BE SHRUGGED OFF AS SOMETHING INEXPLICABLY RATIONAL , WHENCE I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT MYSELF IRRATIONAL IN NOT GROVELLING BEFORE THOSE WHO ARE EVEN MORE ORDINARY THAN ALL THE OTHER ORDINARY NON-FAMOUS PEOPLE ARE ! IT IS IN PARTICULAR THOSE ALL-IMPORTANT DIGNITARIES WHO TASTE OF METHYLATED SPIRITS IN A MOST ACRID AND NAUSEATING FASHION ! SO MUCH FOR CEANLINESS !...

Of course, television is not alone in being confronted with this destiny - this vicious circle: the destiny of all those things which , no longer having an objective purpose, take themselves for their own ends. In so doing, they escape all responsibility, but also become bogged down in their own insoluble contradictions. This is, however, more particularly the critical situation of all the current media. Opinion polls themselves are a good example. They have had their moment of truth (as, indeed, did television), when they were the representative mirror of an opinion, in the days when such a thing still existed, before it became merely a conditioned reflex. But perpetual harassment by opinion polls has resulted in their being no longer a mirror at all; they have, rather, become a screen. A perverse exchange has been established between polls which no longer really ask questions and masses who no longer reply. Or rather they become cunning partners, like rats in laboratories or the viruses pursued in experiments. They toy with the polls at least as much as the polls toy with them. They play a double game. It is not, then, that the polls are bogus or deceitful, but rather that their very success and automatic operation have made them random. There is the same double game, the same perverse social relationship between an all-powerful, but wholly self-absorbed, television and the mass of TV viewers, who are vaguely scandalized by this misappropriation, not just of public money, but of the whole value system of news and information. You don't need to be politically aware to realize that, after the famous dustbins of history, we are now seeing the dustbins of information. Now , information may well be a myth, but this alternative myth, the modern substitute for all other values, has been rammed down our throats incessantly. And there is a glaring contrast between this universal myth and the actual state of affairs. The real catastrophe of television has been how deeply it has failed to live up to its promise of providing information- its supposed modern function. We dreamed first of giving power - political power- to the imagination, but we dream less and less of this, if indeed at all. The fantasy then shifted on to the media and information. At times we dreamed (at least collectively, even if individually we continued to have no illusions) of finding some freedom there — an openness, a new public space. Such dreams were soon dashed: the media turned out to be much more conformist and servile than expected, at times more servile than the professional politicians. The latest displacement of the imagination has been on to the judiciary. Again this has been an illusion, since, apart from th e pleasing whiff of scandal produced, this is also dependent on the media operation. We are going to end up looking for imagination in places further and further removed from power - from any form of power whatever (and definitely far removed from cultural power, which has become the most conventional and professional form ther e is). Among the excluded, the immigrants, the homeless. But that will really take a lot of imagination because they, who no longer even have an image, are themselves the by-products of a whole society's loss of imagination, of the loss of any social imagination. And this is indeed the point. We shall soon see it is no use trying to locate the imagination somewhere. Quite simply, because there no longer is any. The day this becomes patently obvious, the vague collective disappointment hanging over us today will become a massive sickening feeling.

THIRD EMENDED VERSION , SOME OMISSIONS HAVING BEEN ADDED TO MY LAST '' PUBLICATION '' TO KEEP THE LOGIC MORE LUCID SORRY FOR SETTING EVERYTHING DOWN SO QUICKLY - ''SCALE THE HUMAN MOUNTAIN OF SUMLESS LIES UNTIL YOU LABORIOUSLY REACH THE SUMMIT THEN CAUSE IT TO CRUMBLE BY YOUR EQUALLY SUMLESS BURDEN OF VERITY THAT NO HUMAN MAY FAVOUR YOU WITH A GLANCE ANY MORE AND THOSE WHO DO ARE NO LONGER HUMAN HAVING DIVESTED THEMSELVES OF THEIR HUMANITY AS YOU DID BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT OF WHAT MAN HAS DONE TO HIMSELF BESIDES , YOU ARE ABLE TO ASCERTAIN HOW MANY '' FRIENDS '' YOU HAVE WHICH IS THE EMPTY SET CONTAINING ONE ELEMENT ONLY : VERITY ! , TO WHICH YOU PERTAIN AS WELL IT IS WHY IT IS THE HARDEST THING TO FIND THE PATH LEADING TO YOURSELF AND IT IS BY THE EMPTY SET THAT ALL OF MATHEMATICS HAS BEEN MADE AN EGREGIOUS LIE TOO IT IS MORE FACILE TO KILL SOMEONE OR , IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO , YOURSELF THAN IT IS TO LIVE ! DO YOU SEE THE POPLAR AND THE ROBIN THAT IS PERCHED ON IT ? ASK THEM ! THEY KNOW HOW TO LIVE YOU DON'T BECAUSE YOU ARE HUMAN AND INTELLIGENT : MAN IS ENDUED WITH HIS SPIRIT OF INVENTION WHICH HAS REDUCED LIFE TO ABSURDITY AS ALL THOSE THEORIES AND TEACHINGS SPRINGING FROM IT HAVE NEVER BENEFITED LIFE , ON THE CONTRARY , DESTROYED IT ! AN APPRECIATION OF THE MAJESTY OF VERITY ALSO ENTAILS THE INEVITABLE CATASTROPHE OF '' BEING '' AND HENCE THE INFELICITY OF YOURSELF WHICH HAS TO BE ASCRIBED TO THOSE PROFOUND TEACHINGS OF MAN AND THE IMPRECATIONS WHICH THEY HEAPED UPON LIFE AND BEHIND WHICH EVERYONE STRIVES TO CONCEAL HIMSELF AS SOMETHING SUBLIME , BROTHERLY , CUNNING , INGENIOUS CONVINCED OF THE '' SUCCESS '' OF SUCH BEING ! INGENUITY AND SUCCESS , DO THOSE TWO WORDS DIFFER ? , AS MAN IS DETREMINED BY THOSE CRITERIA AND HENCE LIFE !... WHAT ALSO COMES TO MIND HERE IS THIS - THERE IS SOMETHING VASTLY ABOMINABLE ABOUT SOCIETY : ITS MEMBERS ARE EVER SO FOND OF ALL THOSE MOVIE STARS AND ALL THOSE OTHER LUMINARIES AND WHAT IS LUMINOUS ABOUT THEM I DO NOT KNOW ! YET THEY ARE IN THE HABIT OF TREATING THOSE VERY SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE DIFFERENTLY FROM ORDINARY PEOPLE SUCH AS A HOUSEMAID OR A GROCER OR A SALESMAN AND SO FORTH , THEREBY CREATING SOMETHING UTTERLY CORRUPT : A FALSE IDEALISM ! THEY NEED THOSE LUMINARIES AS THEY LACK ANY IDEALISM THEMSELVES IN THEIR EVERYDAY REALITY WHICH HAS DEPRAVED THEM OF IT , OVERLOOKING HOWEVER , HOW TRULY ORDINARY IN TRUTH ALL THOSE STARS ARE ! AND ALLOWING THEIR LACK OF IDEALISM TO BE SUPERSEDED BY OTHER PEOPLE'S NONPRESENT IDEALISM ON ACCOUNT OF THEIR PROMINENCE MAKES EVERYTHING LOOK EVEN DARKER IN LIFE , AS THOUGH LIFE CONSISTED IN FAME ! IS THIS WHY IT IS SO DARK IN THE HUMAN WORLD ? AM I THE ONLY PERSON TO APPREHEND DARKNESS IN THEIR LIGHTNESS ? OR WHY IS SO DARK IN THIS WORLD ? SOMETHING LIKE THAT NEEDS TO BE SHRUGGED OFF AS SOMETHING INEXPLICABLY RATIONAL , WHENCE I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT MYSELF IRRATIONAL IN NOT GROVELLING BEFORE THOSE WHO ARE EVEN MORE ORDINARY THAN ALL THE OTHER ORDINARY NON-FAMOUS PEOPLE ARE ! IT IS IN PARTICULAR THOSE ALL-IMPORTANT DIGNITARIES WHO TASTE OF METHYLATED SPIRITS IN A MOST ACRID AND NAUSEATING FASHION ! SO MUCH FOR CLEANLINESS !... VENERABLE ANCIENT SHADES HOVERING OVER THIS LAKE THAT IS NO MORE AND OF WHICH I AM PART THE WORLD AROUND ME FADES I DISPEL ALL THOSE BLANK AND GRAINED IDEAS MAKING UP HUMAN EXISTENCE I AM NO MORE I DREAM AND HOPEFULLY I WILL NEVER TURN BACK SO AS TO SEE THAT BLANK AND GRAINED HUMAN EXISTENCE AGAIN WHICH CAUSES LIFE TO BLUR SO MUCH THAT I AM NO LONGER IN A POSITION TO SUFFER FOR THIS MUCH GUILT , WHAT IS LIFE ? AMEN !...

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.

An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.

These qualities are beautifully encapsulated in the famous statement of Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” MBSR,

. The rather boring debate about the origins of Maoism (or Stalinism) oscillates around three main options: (1) the "hard" anti-Communists and the "hard" partisans of Stalinism claim that there is a direct immanent logic which leads from Marx to Lenin and from Lenin to Stalin (and then from Stalin to Mao); (2) the "soft" critics claim that the Stalinist (or, prior to it, Leninist) turn is one of the historical possibilities present in Marx's theoretical edifice - it could have turned otherwise, yet the Stalinist catastrophe is nonetheless inscribed as an option into the original theory itself; (3) finally, the defenders of the purity of the "original teaching of Marx" dismiss Stalinism (or already Leninism) as a simple distortion, betrayal, insisting on the radical break between the two: Lenin and Stalin simply "kidnapped" Marx's theory and used it for purposes totally at odds with Marx. One should reject all three versions as based on the same underlying linear-historicist notion of time, and opt for the fourth version, beyond the false question "to what extent was Marx responsible for the Stalinist catastrophe": Marx is fully responsible, but retroactively, i.e., the same holds for Stalin as for Kafka in Borges's famous formulation: they both created their own predecessors.

Part of the American dream, for example, is to deny that there are class lines drawn through the middle of American society. Each year, however, the widening gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent turns that persistent American dream into more of a myth. Particularly instructive in this regard is the famous boast by Warren Buffett (quoted by the Marxist theorist Joerg Rieger) that “there is such a thing as class warfare and that his class is winning it.”1

At breakfast on Friday morning a crowd of curious hotel guests gathered around Arthur Peuchen in the Waldorf-Astoria’s dining room and made him recount his story once again. In the hotel’s largest ballroom, meanwhile, seven U.S. senators were preparing to question J. Bruce Ismay, the first witness to appear before the U.S. Senate investigation. As he began his testimony that morning, Ismay still seemed shaken by the disaster, and his voice was almost a whisper as he expressed his “sincere grief at this deplorable catastrophe” and offered his full cooperation to the inquiry. Yet his answers were guarded and often prefaced with “I presume” or “I believe” and concluded by “More than that I cannot say”—giving his testimony an air of evasiveness. His claims that he was simply a passenger like any other and that the Titanic was not pushed to its maximum speed were greeted with skepticism by the senators and with open hostility by the press. The Hearst newspapers famously dubbed him J. “Brute” Ismay and ran his photograph framed by those of Titanic widows. Edith Rosenbaum was among the few survivors who thought that the White Star chairman was being made a scapegoat and made a point of telling reporters that it was Ismay who had put her into a lifeboat.

It didn’t matter what expressions were on those famous faces at the moment the future erupted from Goettreider’s device—skeptical, awed, distracted, amused, jealous, angry, thoughtful, frightened, detached, concerned, excited, nonchalant, harried, weary, cheeky, or wise—they were all fatally irradiated. Hematopoietic degradation leading to aplastic anemia, irregular cell division, genetic warping, gastrointestinal liquefaction and vascular collapse, catastrophic neurological damage, coma, prayer, death.

Jack, R U alrite? That was the first text I got from Tom, my best friend. I peeked out from under the comforter to read it, then wrapped the blanket around my head again without replying. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with him right now. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with anyone. I just wanted to lie in the dark and pretend I didn’t exist. The cell phone buzzed again. I sighed. I made a little hole, just large enough for my eye, and stared angrily at the phone. I wanted it to realize what it was doing was wrong. That I wanted to be left alone. The phone stared back at me, a small notification light flashing on the top of the device. I picked it up and looked again. R U there? I heard U askd Jasmine 2 the dance! R U crazy??? D: )-:< I wished I was crazy. That would have made everything so much simpler. When I retreated back into my cave this time, I tried putting my pillow on my head too, hoping that it would stop the sound of the phone from cutting into my solitude. I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and tried to wish everything back to normal. That works sometimes in the movies, right? BUZZ BUZZ. “Agh!” I jumped slightly as the phone somehow buzzed even louder this time (how did it do that?) and the pillow flew off my head. Sunlight shone in through the window, blinding me. I squinted and waited for my room to blur into focus. The white walls, my posters of awesome superheroes, my laptop, my guitar… I grumbled as I leaned over and looked at my phone screen again. Wat abt HOLLY? UR GRLFRND? Ppl are sayn she is very upset! I threw the phone down on my bed. It bounced twice and ended up balancing on the edge of the mattress. I didn’t blame Holly. I was also very upset. A few weeks ago, my life had been pretty much perfect. I had the hottest girl in school as my girlfriend, I was a star player on the football team, I had a band that was definitely going to be famous someday soon, and it was all going my way. Now it was all gone, swirling towards disaster. Actually, disaster was a while back. Now things were definitely swirling towards complete chaos. My life was destroyed and I was hiding in my bed. That doesn’t happen in the movies. My phone buzzed again.

The second form of fuel was dust. Or to sound more professional, hot fuel particles (hot meaning radioactive). These particles penetrated the surfaces of walls, floors, ceilings, and were in the air. Almost all the premises of Shelter were contaminated. Later, we’ll talk about this, an especially “pleasant” fuel modification for us And the last, lava. Excepting the famous Elephant Leg, lava was discovered in many other places in Shelter, even at the lowest points of Unit 4. It spread via steam relief valves and pipes (fig. 15).

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.

Trevor Chase, the world-famous producer, has asked me to put together a thirty-minute show that includes our original song “Dorks Rule!

brainstorm ideas for their show, and I’ll try to be supportive of them from BEHIND the camera. I ALSO applied for a scholarship to study abroad in PARIS, FRANCE, this summer ! OMG! Can you imagine ME touring the city and hanging out at the famous Louvre art museum? . . . ME,

I plucked up the courage to ask our ill-mannered oracle the question I assumed—no, knew—obsessed my bride. I bent over the board and asked if we would become famous. The impact was catastrophic and defied all my expectations. With audacious strength Pan showed us why panic was named after him: he gave us the fright of our lives, as if we had become overly familiar and not been sufficiently respectful of his divinity. Out of nowhere an angry puppeteer abruptly pulled up my bride’s hand, her eyes shot full of frightened tears, and—having wanted only to please her, chasing after the American dream of a glorious existence like an obedient old sheepdog—I listened, stunned, as she spoke in tongues. Pan dispensed with the slowness of the alphabet and spoke directly through her in a deep, eerie growl, mocking her longing for that hollow display, and asked whether she realized that the fame she so passionately desired would destroy everything she had.

Legasov was treated especially poorly. On the eve of the publication of the list of rewarded people, everybody was absolutely sure he would be awarded, with other chosen ones, the high Soviet reward of Hero Star, Hero of Russia. Alexandrov, director of the Institute, congratulated Legasov in public at the Institute. And in the morning, his name wasn’t on the list. It was crossed out. There was a lot of talk and rumors about this. Then the Chernobylers decided that this was done by Gorbachev, who disliked the famous Academician. The image of the ex-president, firmly formed by people, was in absolute conformity with this action.[3]

As John Paul II once famously said, ‘Descartes got it precisely backwards. It’s not ‘I think therefore I am; It’s rather I am, therefore I think.’’ What I think he’s saying here is that philosophical error draws man away from a fundamental harmony with Original Design, if you will, and the consequences are usually catastrophic. Witness the ‘bloody century.