“
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)
“
I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.
I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.
I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.
I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.
I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.
I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
“
I love you. I hate you. I like you. I hate you. I love you. I think you’re stupid. I think you’re a loser. I think you’re wonderful. I want to be with you. I don’t want to be with you. I would never date you. I hate you. I love you…..I think the madness started the moment we met and you shook my hand. Did you have a disease or something?
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
Misery is a communicable disease.
”
”
Martha Graham
“
Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader)
“
Fear is a communicable disease; it comes out in the sweat and passes from host to host. Fear is an incendiary agent; it combusts with stupidity.
”
”
Brian McGreevy (Hemlock Grove)
“
The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.
When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
”
”
Terry Pratchett
“
Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred.
”
”
Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.)
“
We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.
”
”
James E. Lovelock (The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning)
“
One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.
”
”
Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
“
Fighting communicable disease was often like fighting a forest fire: sometimes you had to drop back and surrender a battle in hopes of winning the war.
”
”
Dan Brown (Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4))
“
Fear is a communicable disease; it comes out in the sweat and passes from host to host. Fear is an incendiary agent; it combusts with stupidity.
”
”
Brian McGreevy (Hemlock Grove)
“
Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics; laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
In 2011, an interesting milestone in human history was passed. For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined.1 We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle. We are in effect choosing how we shall die, albeit without much reflection or insight.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can’t be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases.
”
”
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
“
Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.
”
”
Algernon Blackwood (The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories)
“
In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on on hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.
”
”
Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)
“
Don't you find it odd that two of the foremost symptoms of insanity are the hearing voices and talking to oneself? Is it any wonder that language is an area of such interest in psychology?
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
”
”
Mort W. Lumsden (Citations: A Brief Anthology)
“
The terror of Black Lesbians is buried in that deep inner place where we have been taught to fear all difference—to kill or ignore it. Be assured: loving women is not a communicable disease. You don’t catch it like the common cold.
”
”
Audre Lorde (I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings)
“
The disease of intolerance is not communicated only in religious groups. I’ve seen it infect racial groups, economic groups and even whole nations (where it is often cleverly disguised as patriotism). Intolerance always fences people out. It creates one group we call US. And the rest we call THEM.
”
”
Steve Goodier
“
it is difficult to solve a problem that you are almost entirely ignorant about. You cannot work for peace while ignoring violence any more than a doctor can create treatments while refusing to study disease.
”
”
Rory Miller (ConCom: Conflict Communication A New Paradigm in Conscious Communication)
“
Cavendish is a book in himself. Born into a life of sumptuous privilege- his grandfathers were dukes, respectively, of Devonshire and Kent- he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a "degree bordering on disease." Any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort.
Once he opened his door to find an Austrian admirer, freshly arrived from Vienna, on the front step. Excitedly the Austrian began to babble out praise. For a few moments Cavendish received the compliments as if they were blows from a blunt object and then, unable to take any more, fled down the path and out the gate, leaving the front door wide open. It was some hours before he could be coaxed back to the property. Even his housekeeper communicated with him by letter.
Although he did sometimes venture into society- he was particularly devoted to the weekly scientific soirees of the great naturalist Sir Joseph Banks- it was always made clear to the other guests that Cavendish was on no account to be approached or even looked at. Those who sought his views were advised to wander into his vicinity as if by accident and to "talk as it were into vacancy." If their remarks were scientifically worthy they might receive a mumbled reply, but more often than not they would hear a peeved squeak (his voice appears to have been high pitched) and turn to find an actual vacancy and the sight of Cavendish fleeing for a more peaceful corner.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
Welcome to Final Forum. Use this board to communicate with other who are completers. Please note: Participants may not attempt to dissuade or discourage self termination. Disregard for free will informed consent will result in immediate removal from the board. Future access to Through-The-Light will be denied. This board is monitored at all times."
That's comforting. I've been to suicide boards before where people get on and say stuff like, "Don't do it. Suicide is not the answer."
They don't know the question.
Or, "Life's a bitch. Get used to it."
Thanks.
"Suicide is the easy way out."
If it's so easy, why am I still here?
And my favorite: "God loves you. Life is the most precious gift from God. You will break God's heart if you throw His gift away."
God has a heart? That's news to me.
People on boards are very, very shallow.
The Final Forum has a long list of topic, including: Random Rants, Bullied, Divorce, Disease, So Tired, Hate This Life, Bleak, Bequests, Attempts.
Already I like this board.
I start with Random Rants.
”
”
Julie Anne Peters (By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead)
“
Holding hands, hugging, or just sitting companionably together is an important way to continue to communicate.
”
”
Nancy L. Mace (The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Other Dementias, and Memory Loss (A Johns Hopkins Press Health Book))
“
She almost burst out laughing. He’d uttered the word talk like it was a communicable disease.
”
”
Lorelei James (Caged (Mastered, #4))
“
For one thing, that Kitty was addicted to amphetamines for twenty-six years without her husband’s knowledge suggests a certain lack of communication or awareness in the marriage. Was
”
”
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
“
When considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net, but one of the major impediments to this basic and effective malaria control is that many people, regardless of education level or country of origin, in malaria endemic zones don't install and use one, not that they can't get one, but because they don't think the mosquito net 'looks nice.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. ...
”
”
T.S. Eliot
“
Communicable meant a person could give it to another person. You could get Lyme disease, for instance, but you couldn’t give it to somebody else. Communicable diseases were the diseases that created crises.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Premonition: A Pandemic Story)
“
...you have to understand who you are talking to and whether or not they are using the word in any proper context of its definition. Whether this is its primary literal meaning or any of the metaphorical constructs that we humans are fond of using.
”
”
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
“
But you can see it, Harriet, a look in his eyes, an alertness, as if somewhere behind the disease, behind the scar tissue, behind the fog of disassociation, Bernard is all there, he's just lost his ability to communicate. Like somebody turned off his volume. You're certain he can see everything that is transpiring with crystal clarity, and he can't do a goddamn thing about it.
”
”
Jonathan Evison (This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!)
“
Maybe all illness results from a failure of communication between mind and body. It is certainly true of such quick disease as a knockout.
”
”
Norman Mailer (The Fight)
“
It is in the nature of paradox that "equations" based on it do not work out. Where paradox contaminates human relations, disease appears.
”
”
Paul Watzlawick (Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes)
“
Raising awareness versus raising alarm;
the public can't be better informed if the information isn't better.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
Depression, we are told over and over again, is a brain disease, a chemical imbalance that can be adjusted by antidepressant medication. In an informational brochure issued to inform the public about depression, the US National Institute for Mental Health tells people that 'depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain' and adds that 'important neurotransmitters - chemicals that brain cells use to communicate - appear to be out of balance'. This view is so widespread that it was even proffered by the editors of PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine in their summary that accompanied our article. 'Depression,' they wrote, 'is a serious medical illness caused by imbalances in the brain chemicals that regulate mood', and they went on to say that antidepressants are supposed to work by correcting these imbalances.
The editors wrote their comment on chemical imbalances as if it were an established fact, and this is also how it is presented by drug companies. Actually, it is not. Instead, even its proponents have to admit that it is a controversial hypothesis that has not yet been proven. Not only is the chemical-imbalance hypothesis unproven, but I will argue that it is about as close as a theory gets in science to being dis-proven by the evidence.
”
”
Irving Kirsch (The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth)
“
From personal experience, I know for sure that the number one thing that saddens the dead more than our grief — is not being conscious of their existence around us. They do want you to talk to them as if they were still in a physical body. They do want you to play their favorite music, keep their pictures out, and continue living as if they never went away. However, time and "corruption" have blurred the lines between the living and the dead, between man and Nature, and between the physical and the etheric. There was a time when man could communicate with animals, plants, the ether, and the dead. To do so requires one to access higher levels of consciousness, and this knowledge has been hidden from us. Why? Because then the plants would tell us how to cure ourselves. The animals would show us their feelings, and the dead would tell us that good acts do matter. In all, we would come to know that we are all one. And most importantly, we would be alerted of threats and opportunities, good and evil, truth vs. fiction. We would have eyes working for humanity from every angle, and this threatens "the corrupt". Secret societies exist to hide these truths, and to make sure lies are preserved from generation to generation.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
DSM-5 is not 'the bible of psychiatry' but a practical manual for everyday work. Psychiatric diagnosis is primarily a way of communicating. That function is essential but pragmatic—categories of illness can be useful without necessarily being 'true.' The DSM system is a rough-and-ready classification that brings some degree of order to chaos. It describes categories of disorder that are poorly understood and that will be replaced with time. Moreover, current diagnoses are syndromes that mask the presence of true diseases. They are symptomatic variants of broader processes or arbitrary cut-off points on a continuum.
”
”
Joel Paris
“
Q. Which is my favorite country?
A. The United States of America. Not because I'm chauvinistic or xenophobic, but because I believe that we alone have it all, even if not to perfection. The U.S. has the widest possible diversity of spectacular scenery and depth of natural resources; relatively clean air and water; a fascinatingly heterogeneous population living in relative harmony; safe streets; few deadly communicable diseases; a functioning democracy; a superlative Constitution; equal opportunity in most spheres of life; an increasing tolerance of different races, religions, and sexual preferences; equal justice under the law; a free and vibrant press; a world-class culture in books,films, theater, museums, dance, and popular music; the cuisines of every nation; an increasing attention to health and good diet; an abiding entrepreneurial spirit; and peace at home.
”
”
Albert Podell (Around the World in 50 Years: My Adventure to Every Country on Earth)
“
Members are indoctrinated to believe that the Training Routines will help them be more effective in their lives—earn more money, be better communicators, get better jobs. Later they are told that by performing these routines they will help clear the planet of poverty, crime, disease—indeed, of all of humanity’s problems. At the highest level, members are told that they can control matter, energy, space, and time. The truth is, they are the ones being controlled.
”
”
Steven Hassan
“
Although I strongly believe in individual rights and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, I also recognize that public health and public safety are extremely important in our society. Certain communicable diseases have been largely eradicated by immunization policies in this country. We should not allow those diseases to return by forgoing safety immunization programs for philosophical, religious or other reasons when we have the means to eradicate them.
”
”
Ben Carson
“
Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions—because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.
”
”
Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
“
Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.
There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety.
The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone.
Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.
”
”
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
“
If David had been diagnosed with diabetes at a young age, members of his family, school, and church would have undoubtedly mobilized support. His caregivers would have communicated his need for dietary changes, exercise, and/or insulin. This was not the case when David exhibited the earliest signs of depression. The myth persists that mental illness is a character flaw. It is my hope that one day disorders of the brain will be treated with as much care, compassion, and tenacity as diseases of any other organs in our bodies.
”
”
Sheila Hamilton (All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness)
“
when we talk about the occult, we need to understand what we are meaning to communicate and try to grasp what the individual might hear. You see, the occult to many religious persons can mean anything from benign supernatural or magical things to malignant forces that corrupt or seek to destroy us.
”
”
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
“
This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the “unmelodious” clamor of city life replacing the “rhythmical” sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded “local horrors” into national news. These nervous diseases became an epidemic among “the ultracompetitive businessman and the socially active woman.
”
”
Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
“
President Obama gave voice to exactly this sentiment in the speech he delivered as the first American president to visit Hiroshima, on May 27, 2016: “Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines,” said Obama. “The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” Our
”
”
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
That's bullshit, buddy. And you know it.
The trouble was, he DIDN'T know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could TALK about how he didn't want to be a gunslinger, how he didn't want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had ENJOYED blowing the electronic menagerie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland's gun was his own private handheld thunderstorm. He had ENJOYED kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part--the being scared part--actually seemed to add to the enjoyment.
All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland's illness was a communicable disease.
”
”
Stephen King (The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, #3))
“
When a communicable disease threatens a population, you immunize certain vectors first—usually babies and old people, as they are most susceptible to infection. Then nurses and doctors, teachers and bus drivers, as they are most likely to spread a contagion through wide social interaction, even if they do not succumb to the disease themselves. The same type of strategy could help you change culture. To make a population more resilient to extremism, for example, you would first identify which people are susceptible to weaponized messaging, determine the traits that make them vulnerable to the contagion narrative, and then target them with an inoculating counter-narrative in an effort to change their behaviour. In theory, of course, the same strategy could be used in reverse to foster extremism.
”
”
Christopher Wylie (Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America)
“
But what lies ahead for those who are young now? I can say with confidence that their future will depend more on science and technology than any previous generation’s has done. They need to know about science more than any before them because it is part of their daily lives in an unprecedented way.
Without speculating too wildly, there are trends we can see and emerging problems that we know must be dealt with, now and into the future. Among the problems I count global warming, finding space and resources for the massive increase in the Earth’s human population, rapid extinction of other species, the need to develop renewable energy sources, the degradation of the oceans, deforestation and epidemic diseases—just to name a few.
There are also the great inventions of the future, which will revolutionise the ways we live, work, eat, communicate and travel. There is such enormous scope for innovation in every area of life. This is exciting. We could be mining rare metals on the Moon, establishing a human outpost on Mars and finding cures and treatments for conditions which currently offer no hope. The huge questions of existence still remain unanswered—how did life begin on Earth? What is consciousness? Is there anyone out there or are we alone in the universe? These are questions for the next generation to work on.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
There is a tendency for people affected by this epidemic to police each other or prescribe what the most important gestures would be for dealing with this experience of loss. I resent that. At the same time, I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death of their lovers, friends, and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets. I worry because of the urgency of the situations, because of seeing death coming in from the edges of abstraction where those with the luxury of time have cast it. I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.
But, bottom line, this is my own feelings of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication. You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.
”
”
David Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration)
“
In a world groaning beneath the weight of sin (Romans 8:22), we rejoice in hope that Christ came not just to save us eternally and restore us to God but to restore all things. Every injustice wrought by sin’s evil effects will be brought to account. Every evil thought, deed, and disease will answer for what it did to humanity, God’s beloved image bearers. And ultimately Satan, the Accuser, will answer for it as well (Revelation 20). But we’ll get to that at the end of this book.
”
”
Phylicia D. Masonheimer (Every Woman a Theologian: Know What You Believe. Live It Confidently. Communicate It Graciously.)
“
Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions – because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.
”
”
Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
“
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
“
The idea of denominator neglect helps explain why different ways of communicating risks vary so much in their effects. You read that “a vaccine that protects children from a fatal disease carries a 0.001% risk of permanent disability.” The risk appears small. Now consider another description of the same risk: “One of 100,000 vaccinated children will be permanently disabled.” The second statement does something to your mind that the first does not: it calls up the image of an individual child who is permanently disabled by a vaccine; the 999,999 safely vaccinated children have faded into the background.
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
So if depression isn’t a disease, then what is it? As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, depression is a symptom, a vague surface sign at best that doesn’t tell you anything about its root cause. Consider, for a moment, that your toe hurts. Any number of things can cause a toe to hurt, from physically injuring it to a bunion, blister, or tumor growing inside. The hurting is a sign that something is wrong with the toe, simple as that. Likewise, depression is the hurting; it’s an adaptive response, intelligently communicated by the body, to something not being right within, often because things are also off in our environment.
”
”
Kelly Brogan (A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives)
“
Beyond being a promising anticancer agent,1 sulforaphane may also help protect your brain2 and your eyesight,3 reduce nasal allergy inflammation,4 manage type 2 diabetes,5 and was recently found to successfully help treat autism. A placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trial of boys with autism found that about two to three cruciferous vegetable servings’ worth6 of sulforaphane a day improves social interaction, abnormal behavior, and verbal communication within a matter of weeks. The researchers, primarily from Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University, suggest that the effect might be due to sulforaphane’s role as a “detoxicant.”7
”
”
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
“
Arthur Kleinman explains, “We learn how to identify and react to pain, how to label and communicate dysfunction” (Klienman, **). He explains that every reaction and normative behavior is based on a set of culturally defined ideals, especially in explanation of illness and disease. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson agree that autobiography is a subjective act based on historical and cultural frameworks (Smith and Watson, **). This truth is evident in symptoms, as Klienman point s out. He explains, “The meanings of symptoms are standardized ‘truths’ in a local cultural system, inasmuch as the groups’ categories are projected onto the world, then called natural because they are found there
”
”
Shan
“
Man, and the other animals whom he has afflicted with his malady or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The Bison, the wild Hog, the Wolf, are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence or from mature old age. But the domestic Hog, the Sheep, the Cow, the Dog, are subject to an incredible variety of distempers, and, like the corruptors of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon their miseries. The super-eminence of man is, like Satan’s, the super-eminence of pain; and the majority of his species doomed to poverty, disease and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals.
”
”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“
When I was growing up it was still acceptable—not to me but in social terms—to say that one was not interested in science and did not see the point in bothering with it. This is no longer the case. Let me be clear. I am not promoting the idea that all young people should grow up to be scientists. I do not see that as an ideal situation, as the world needs people with a wide variety of skills. But I am advocating that all young people should be familiar with and confident around scientific subjects, whatever they choose to do. They need to be scientifically literate, and inspired to engage with developments in science and technology in order to learn more.
A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my
mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that
technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it.
I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space.
This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos.
And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.
So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely
conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.
This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains.
Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.
”
”
Tom Shippey (J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century)
“
We were smothered in advice. We were told the food to take, otherwise we would starve; what lines of communications to leave open; secret methods of getting our stuff out. And the hardest thing in the world to explain was that all we wanted to do was to report what Russian people were like, and what they wore, and how they acted, what the farmers talked about, and what they were doing about rebuilding the destroyed parts of their country. This was the hardest thing in the world to explain. We found that thousands of people were suffering from acute Moscowitis—a state which permits the belief of any absurdity and the shoving away of any facts. Eventually, of course, we found that the Russians are suffering from Washingtonitis, the same disease. We discovered that just as we are growing horns and tails on the Russians, so the Russians are growing horns and tails on us.
”
”
John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal)
“
The research is still in its infancy, as we have seen, but, in early March 2020, Nature Communications published a model study that followed the link all the way from shelf to sickbed in one case: malaria, one of those beneath-the-radar diseases, affecting some 230 million and killing 400,000 per year, the vast majority in rainforest biomes. Deforestation is a boost for the mosquito vectors. More sunlight reaches the soil where the larvae develop; when biodiversity retreats, fewer animals prey on them. Nigeria suffers most from malaria due to deforestation. It is largely caused by the export of timber and cocoa. Such commodities end up in the north: consumers with the greatest malaria footprint are the cocoa-guzzling Dutch and Belgians, Swiss and Germans. 'In this unequal value chain, ecosystem degradation and malaria risk are borne by low-income producers' - or, in plainer terms: the Europeans get the chocolate and the profits, the Africans the mosquitos.
”
”
Andreas Malm (Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century)
“
But Homo sapiens’ dependency on social communication and education is as much of a curse as it is a gift. On the flip side of the coin, it is education’s fault that religious myths and fake news propagate so easily in human societies. From the earliest age, our brains trustfully absorb the tales we are told, whether they are true or false. In a social context, our brains lower their guard; we stop acting like budding scientists and become mindless lemmings. This can be good—as when we trust the knowledge of our science teachers, and thus avoid having to replicate every experiment since Galileo’s time! But it can also be detrimental, as when we collectively propagate an unreliable piece of “wisdom” inherited from our forebears. It is on this basis that doctors foolishly practiced bloodletting and cupping therapies for centuries, without ever testing their actual impact. (In case you are wondering, both are actually harmful in the vast majority of diseases.)
”
”
Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
“
These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. Myelin acts like rubber insulation on wires and prevents the signal from petering out: in whales, giraffes, and other stretched creatures, a sheathed neuron can send a signal multiple yards with little loss of fidelity. (In contrast, diseases that fray myelin, like multiple sclerosis, destroy communication between different nodes in the brain.) In sum, you can think about the gray matter as a patchwork of chips that analyze different types of information, and about the white matter as cables that transmit information between those chips. (And before we go further, I should point out that “gray” and “white” are misnomers. Gray matter looks pinkish-tan inside a living skull, while white matter, which makes up the bulk of the brain, looks pale pink. The white and gray colors appear only after you soak the brain in preservatives. Preservatives also harden the brain, which is normally tapioca-soft. This explains why the brain you might have dissected in biology class way back when didn’t disintegrate between your fingers.)
”
”
Sam Kean (The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery)
“
A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
Red: Maintaining health, bodily strength, physical energy, sex, passion, courage, protection, and defensive magic. This is the color of the element of fire. Throughout the world, red is associated with life and death, for this is the color of blood spilled in both childbirth and injury. Pink: Love, friendship, compassion, relaxation. Pink candles can be burned during rituals designed to improve self-love. They’re ideal for weddings and for all forms of emotional union. Orange: Attraction, energy. Burn to attract specific influences or objects. Yellow: Intellect, confidence, divination, communication, eloquence, travel, movement. Yellow is the color of the element of air. Burn yellow candles during rituals designed to heighten your visualization abilities. Before studying for any purpose, program a yellow candle to stimulate your conscious mind. Light the candle and let it burn while you study. Green: Money, prosperity, employment, fertility, healing, growth. Green is the color of the element of earth. It’s also the color of the fertility of the earth, for it echoes the tint of chlorophyll. Burn when looking for a job or seeking a needed raise. Blue: Healing, peace, psychism, patience, happiness. Blue is the color of the element of water. This is also the realm of the ocean and of all water, of sleep, and of twilight. If you have trouble sleeping, charge a small blue candle with a visualization of yourself sleeping through the night. Burn for a few moments before you get into bed, then extinguish its flame. Blue candles can also be charged and burned to awaken the psychic mind. Purple: Power, healing severe diseases, spirituality, meditation, religion. Purple candles can be burned to enhance all spiritual activities, to increase your magical power, and as a part of intense healing rituals in combination with blue candles. White: Protection, purification, all purposes. White contains all colors. It’s linked with the moon. White candles are specifically burned during purification and protection rituals. If you’re to keep but one candle on hand for magical purposes, choose a white one. Before use, charge it with personal power and it’ll work for all positive purposes. Black: Banishing negativity, absorbing negativity. Black is the absence of color. In magic, it’s also representative of outer space. Despite what you may have heard, black candles are burned for positive purposes, such as casting out baneful energies or to absorb illnesses and nasty habits. Brown: Burned for spells involving animals, usually in combination with other colors. A brown candle and a red candle for animal protection, brown and blue for healing, and so on.
”
”
Scott Cunningham (Earth, Air, Fire & Water: More Techniques of Natural Magic (Llewellyn's Practical Magick Series))
“
As the future draws ever closer – with speedy travel, immediate communication and almost-instant trade – the historical past can seem more remote, like another world, rapidly receding. And whilst we may be increasingly aware of cultures other than our own, the genuine understanding that allows us to connect through what we share, and also to respect our differences, does not always come naturally. But at a time when misunderstanding can easily escalate, it is vitally important that we seize opportunities to learn – both from our global neighbours and from our collective past. If we consider an age of unexpectedly changing political landscapes, with regions of cosmopolitanism alongside those of parochialism, when developments bring a better quality of life to many, yet the world remains vulnerable to serious threats such as disease, poverty, changing climate, violence and oppression, we might well recognise this as our own age. It is equally true of the 10th century, on which this book focuses. The centuries surrounding the second millennium saw enormous dynamism on the global stage. Influential rules such as those of the great Maya civilisation of mesoamerica and the prosperous Tang dynasty in China were on the decline, while Vikings rampaged across north-western Europe, and the Byzantine Empire entered its second-wave of expansion. Muslim civilisation was thriving, with the establishment of no fewer than three Islamic caliphates.
”
”
Shainool Jiwa (The Fatimids: 1. The Rise of a Muslim Empire (20171218))
“
12:6 We might be doing things differently but we are drawing from the same source. God energizes each and everyone for their particular purpose. 12:7 Every expression of the spirit is given to bring that which God accomplished in Christ 1into full focus. (The word, 1sumphero, means to co-bear, bring together.) 12:8 To one is given a word that clears the air; and wisdom prevails; to another a word of knowledge, where something that could not be known in any other way comes to light! The same spirit is the source. 12:9 Yet another person is inspired with a gift of faith in the same spirit and another with gifts of healing of specific diseases in the same spirit. 12:10 And to another the working of mighty acts of miracles, and to another enlightened speech (prophecy); to another the ability to discern the difference between God’s spirit and a foreign spirit; to someone else the ability to communicate in many different languages; another has a gift to interpret these languages. 12:11 All these various gifts are inspired by the same spirit who individually works in every person as he desires. (See 1 Cor 14:1) 12:12 The many members of the same body does not divide the oneness of the individual. The various gifts and workings of the spirit of Christ find a beautiful similitude taken from the mutual dependence of the numerous parts of the human body. All the parts unite harmoniously into one whole. The spirit of Christ is one spirit; although his workings in each one of us may seem different they do not distract from his oneness in us.
”
”
François Du Toit (The Mirror Bible)
“
«It's not easy to believe.»
«I» she told him, «I can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.»
«Really?»
«I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in "War of the Worlds". I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kind of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.»
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
“
The Blue Mind Rx Statement
Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans.
The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being.
In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters.
Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history.
Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more.
Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety.
We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points:
•Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies.
•Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits.
•All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy.
•Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both.
•Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support.
•Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.
”
”
Wallace J. Nichols (Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do)
“
Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.
Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.
[M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.
“[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.
[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.
[W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible.
[T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!
There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect.
Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors.
The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran".
[M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.
[T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.
”
”
Isaac Asimov
“
The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,
”
”
Sondra Barrett (Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body's Inner Intelligence)
“
Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.
”
”
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
“
I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
“
I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."
"Really?"
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in this universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.
Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
“
Now, with all seven of these chakras revolving in the right direction with no blockages whatsoever, your kundalini would not be able to help itself from rising into that state of bliss, which it perceives above. Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.
”
”
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
“
But I had no need to suppose anything of the sort, she might well have disdained the use of her eyes to ascertain what her instinct must have adequately enough detected, for, throughout her service with me and my parents, fear, prudence, alertness and cunning had finally taught her that instinctive and almost divinatory knowledge of us that the sailor has of the sea, the quarry of the hunter, and if not the doctor then often the patient of the disease. All the knowledge she was in the habit of acquiring would have astounded anyone for as good a reason as the advanced state of certain areas of knowledge among the ancients, given the almost negligible means of information at their disposal (hers were no less so: a handful of chance remarks forming barely a twentieth part of our conversation at dinner, gleaned in passing by the butler and inaccurately transmitted to the staff quarters). Even her mistakes resulted, like theirs, like the fables in which Plato believed, from a false conception of the world and from preconceived ideas rather than from an inadequacy of material resources... But if the drawbacks of her position as a servant had not prevented her from acquiring the learning indispensable to the art which was its ultimate goal – the art of confounding us by communicating the results of her discoveries – the constraints on her time had been even more effective; here hindrance had not merely been content not to paralyse her enthusiasm, it had powerfully fired it. And of course Françoise neglected no auxiliary stimulant, like diction and attitude for instance. While she never believed anything we said to her when we wanted her to believe it, and since she accepted beyond a shadow of doubt the absurdest things anyone of her own status told her which might at the same time offend our views, in the same way that her manner of listening to our assertions pointed to her incredulity, so the tone she used to report (indirection enabling her to fling the most offensive insults at us with impunity) a cook’s account of threatening her employers and forcing any number of concessions out of them by treating them like dirt in public, indicated that she treated the story as gospel truth. Françoise even went so far as to add: ‘If I’d been the mistress, I’d have been very put out, I can tell you.’ However much, despite our initial dislike of the lady on the fourth floor, we might shrug our shoulders at this unedifying tale as if it were an unlikely fable, its teller knew just how to invest her tone with all the trenchant punch of the most unshakeable and infuriating confidence in what she was saying.
But above all, just as writers, when their hands are tied by the tyranny of a monarch or of poetic convention, by the strict rules of prosody or state religion, often achieve a power of concentration they would not have done under a system of political freedom or literary anarchy, so Françoise, by not being free to respond to us in an explicit manner, spoke like Tiresias and would have written like Tacitus.5 She knew how to contain everything she could not express directly in a sentence we could not denounce without casting aspersions on ourselves, in less than a sentence in fact, in a silence, in the way she placed an object.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way)
“
The Quarantine Act of New York (enacted August 12, 2009) “Under the auspices of the NY Department of Public Health, in conjunction with the CDC and the World Health Organization, the Special Officer Corps is hereby empowered to carry out the confinement of anyone infected with a communicable disease or any other infectious agent making him hazardous to others. This confinement authority is limited to people unable or unwilling to conduct themselves so as not to expose others to danger and to situations when the health department determines that a substantial threat to public health exists (CGS § 19a-221(b)). The law defines “communicable disease” as a disease or condition which may be passed or carried, directly or indirectly, by an infectious agent from one person or animal to another (CGS § 19a-221(a); Public Health Code § 19a-36-A1 (f)).
”
”
Ben Mezrich (Q)
“
An excellent current day example of online executive presence is Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony to the Senate Health Committee on Tuesday May 12th, 2020. Providing his testimony virtually, Dr. Fauci was well groomed and dressed in a coat and tie, just as he would on a normal work day. His suit clearly was not a $8000 Brioni. Rather, it reflected a senior government official with a simpler taste who is more focused on the weightier issues of public health currently afflicting the US and the world. As the face of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his suit not only signals deference to the institution he leads, but reflects a keen awareness for how his appearance could be perceived by everyone online.
Even from home, the message in his persona was “I know my job, I’m prepared, and I take it seriously.” Rhetorically, imagine if he had appeared in a bathrobe looking like he had just gotten out of bed.
”
”
Cindy Ann Peterson (My Style, My Way: Top Experts Reveal How to Create Yours Today)
“
Chronic inflammation is at the root of nearly all “non-communicable” diseases, i.e. diseases that aren’t caused by infectious bacteria or viruses.
”
”
Robert Wayfair (The Brain Heart Link: End Anxiety, Depression, Panic Attacks, Control Anger, Negative Thinking And Master Your Emotions)
“
Many in the West have long proffered that the brain is the center of consciousness. But in traditional Islamic thought – as in other traditions – the heart is viewed as the center of our being. The Quran, for example, speaks of wayward people who have hearts with which they do not understand (7:179). Also the Quran mentions people who mocked the prophet and were entirely insincere in listening to his message, so God placed over their hearts a covering that they may not understand it and in their ears [He placed] acute deafness (6:25). Their inability to understand is a deviation from the spiritual function of a sound heart, just as their ears have been afflicted with a spiritual deafness. So we understand from this that the center of the intellect, the center of human consciousness and conscience, is actually the heart and not the brain. Only recently have we discovered that there are over 40,000 neurons in the heart. In other words, there are cells in the heart that are communicating with the brain. While the brain sends messages to the heart, the heart also sends messages to the brain.
”
”
Hamza Yusuf (Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart)
“
I anticipate diagnostic AI will exceed all but the best doctors in the next twenty years. This trend will be felt first in fields like radiology, where computer-vision algorithms are already more accurate than good radiologists for certain types of MRI and CT scans. In the story “Contactless Love,” we see that by 2041 radiologists’ jobs will be mostly taken over by AI. Alongside radiology, we will also see AI excel in pathology and diagnostic ophthalmology. Diagnostic AI for general practitioners will emerge later, one disease at a time, gradually covering all diagnoses. Because human lives are at stake, AI will first serve as a tool within doctors’ disposal or will be deployed only in situations where a human doctor is unavailable. But over time, when trained on more data, AI will become so good that most doctors will be routinely rubber-stamping AI diagnoses, while the human doctors themselves are transformed into something akin to compassionate caregivers and medical communicators.
”
”
Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
“
The end product of all that evolution is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature. We are also adapted to be physically active endurance athletes who regularly walk and run long distances and who frequently climb, dig, and carry things. We evolved to eat a diverse diet that includes fruits, tubers, wild game, seeds, nuts, and other foods that tend to be low in sugar, simple carbohydrates, and salt but high in protein, complex carbohydrates, fiber, and vitamins. Humans are also marvelously adapted to make and use tools, to communicate effectively, to cooperate intensively, to innovate, and to use culture to cope with a wide range of challenges. These extraordinary cultural capacities enabled Homo sapiens to spread rapidly across the planet and then, paradoxically, cease being hunter-gatherers.
”
”
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease)
“
Communicable diseases were the diseases that created crises.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Premonition: A Pandemic Story)
“
Communicable diseases were the diseases that created crises. In an adjective she’d found a vessel for her life purpose.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Premonition: A Pandemic Story)
“
It was not until 1986 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began to draft laws requiring immigrants to be tested for and found free of HIV. This legislation was sponsored in the Senate by Senator Jesse Helms and was approved - unanimously - in June 1987. "This Senate action was extraordinary," notes a legal opinion, "in that it assumed a responsibility, previously entrusted to the HHS, to determine which communicable diseases would be grounds for excluding aliens.
”
”
Paul Farmer (Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor)
“
Healing on All Levels The body, mind, intellect, and the part of you that is immortal (soul, spirit, root light, etc.) all work together when all the chakras are aligned. Every chakra is working well at these times: you sense the state of your body, you communicate your creative ideas, you have the ability to meet obligations, your heart is open to receiving with appropriate boundaries, you are honest in your interactions, you look at your routines and practices of thinking clearly and critically, and you listen to the quiet place inside. What you feel, hear, tell, and line up when this happens, and in your life you will manifest what you want. You are in harmony with your body, mind, and central force that binds you with all of the universe's life and energy. You are able to manifest your dreams and focus on profoundly healing physical, intellectual, and emotional wounds through this, your connection to universal energy. It seems that in this fast-paced world, until something goes wrong, it is common not to focus on health. It seems normal to go on and on until you feel an ache or pain, and then you go to a doctor. Until the way you perform your daily activities is affected by a physical sign, it is easy to ignore how you feel. Part of Everyday Life Maintaining good health is an ongoing practice, not something to wait until you already have physical disease symptoms. As part of your ongoing self-care practice, chakra healing can be done regularly, and it will be a proactive and preventive way to take care of yourself and bring more joy to your life. Find at least one way of doing something for yourself every day. It may mean you get up fifteen minutes early to linger with a cup of green tea, or you may park your car in the fresh air to walk away from work. Find something to give you a healthy "me" time every day.
”
”
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
“
Heart Center. (Thoracic segment including hands, arms, and shoulders) Positive position seat. Relationship confidence, and sensitivity developed. Empathy, honesty, trust and love of self and of others. Kindness, openness and generosity. Adaptability and flexibility. To reach out and to accept. Positive aspects: self-love, compassion, trust, empathy, optimism, generosity, high levels of excitement and joyful excitement accessed and supported by the hara (abdominal segment) and the Speed Bump unhindered. With inner strength and creative compassion, understanding, compassion, wholeness balanced. You're wondering what you want. Healthy aggression when the second and third segments are supported. Negative aspects: Constant sorrow, guilt, indignity, desire, remorse, isolation, a heart of "blindness." Often accompanied by arms and hands holding down, rounding or locking shoulders blocking an expression reaching out or wanting. External Negative Aspects. Shoulders bent, stooped, or rounded, flat chest, general breathing problems, lung and skin diseases. Segment of the solar plexus/diaphragm. A central release point for all body stresses. The marionette's hand that tightens or loosens the cords, including legs, attached to the pelvis, waist, neck, arms, shoulders, mouth, ears, jaw, and head. The fulcrum or balance point of sympathetic high chest/parasympathetic abdominal response; the balance point with the (upper) caring, sincere, trustworthy, empathetic self with our "lower" rooted, erotic, arrogant, imaginative selves; They meet and balance, or complement each other as required or desired. Positive aspects: it supports the balance of brain hemispheres when eliminated. Capacity to communicate or regulate strong emotions, whether negative or positive, either instinctively or willingly; faith in improvement, concentration, desire to transcend physical and mental challenges, ability to resolve disputes, more in tune with emotions. Contentment and a sense of lightness, understanding, fulfillment and recognition of oneself. Firm digestion. Powerful, energetic performance. Physical symptoms: Fatigue, agitation, frustration, fatigue, muscle tension, stomach problems, digestive and lower back issues. Negative aspects: Defense, insecurity, a lot of boredom, chronic sadness. Less able to secure peace of mind from passion, or vice versa. Being stuck in emotions, fear, or anger, whether negative or positive (power hunger or zealotism). Expressive inhibition; sexuality with little or no joy; Selfishness, and unrefined emotionality. Physical Negative Aspects. Rigidity and rigidity. Little lung capacity. Distress of the heart. Body acid / alkaline acid imbalanced. Miserable circulatory system.
”
”
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
“
The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self. Given the limitations of drugs, I started to wonder if we could find more natural ways to help people deal with their post-traumatic responses
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
At the most basic level, scientists are discovering that nearly all of the chronic diseases that cause so much suffering and are steadily driving up the cost of health care all share mitochondrial dysfunction, excessive inflammation, high cortisol levels, and other markers of broken biochemistry. In a very real sense, we all have the same disease because all diseases begin with broken, incorrect biochemistry and disordered communication within and between our cells. For health to return, the chemistry must revert to normal, and communication within and between our cells must be restored. This is true for every disease.
”
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Terry Wahls (The Wahls Protocol : How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine)
“
Journalists fill very different social roles than those of scientists, and the press serves different roles than those of scientific institutions. Scientists and research institutions have motivations for communicating with the public that only partly overlap with those of journalists. From a scientist’s perspective, the function of media ought to be to disseminate scientific results accurately and in proportion to the strength of the evidence they have produced…
Journalists, on the other hand, work to avoid the appearance of working for a “special interest.” The news media aim to entertain; warn of dangers and failures; and report, explain, or comment on events. Preventing disease is not one of these goals…
Although desiring to only present factual information, a journalist with a deadline to deliver a story before the publication of a newspaper or the airing of television program may simply not have enough time to “get it right” because they interviewed the wrong people, missed important features, or were not able to follow up on sources. Long-form investigative journalism, such as Deer’s investigation of Wakefield’s conflicts of interest, can slowly fill these gaps.
”
”
Jonathan M. Berman (Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement)
“
The body comprises seven dynamically interconnected, networked systems that underlie all disease—155,000 diseases, in fact. What are these systems? 1. Assimilating nutrients, digestion, and the microbiome 2. Defense and repair (immune and inflammatory system) 3. Energy production (mitochondria) 4. Detoxification 5. Transportation (circulation and lymphatic system) 6. Communication (hormones, neurotransmitters, etc.) 7. The body’s structure (from cellular structures to the musculoskeletal system)
”
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Mark Hyman (Young Forever)
“
The rotten fruit…
The rotten fruit be of the same rotten spirit of the soul that has thrown themselves to the burning pit to be destroyed. As the rotten tree gives of the rotten sour fruits what can you possibly do with bad luck of bad food. The fortune of the futures for told in the roots of the trees that communicate with the earth. To give the language of Mother Earth power to speak to every living thing a purpose tomorrow. The rotten fruit be of the destruction of the planet that causes the confusion of the concern to whatever the wars are about. When you have a bad apple, you don’t leave it in the bunch. The rot spreads quickly. If you don’t separate them from the rest. As it starts the decomposition process of returning to the soil. See the rotten fruit have the purpose of the leaves, the trees as well as the roots. However, the rot be spread of the disease to the sickly of saplings it becomes of the poison ivy. I be lying if I said I didn’t think it was deserved. It just wasn’t of my doing. The rotten fruit is not of my core of character it be of yours though. Clearly, I can prove it. I will throw a pebble into the population of many people you have hurt. As the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree now does it. A lot to be said about rotten fruit don’t you think. Now you may speculate on what it all means.
”
”
Jennifer Breslinlin (The Poetry of Emotion)
“
Anti-vaccination movements are high-pressure, highly conformist organizations in which dissenting views are discouraged. To the extent that people reject science because they wish to present a self-image as critical and skeptical, it can be useful to communicate to them the inherently skeptical nature of science and to portray antiscientific thinking as an example of unthinking conformity (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017).
”
”
Steven Taylor (The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease)
“
In this more nuanced view, aging and the diseases that come with it are the result of multiple “hallmarks” of aging: • Genomic instability caused by DNA damage • Attrition of the protective chromosomal endcaps, the telomeres • Alterations to the epigenome that controls which genes are turned on and off • Loss of healthy protein maintenance, known as proteostasis • Deregulated nutrient sensing caused by metabolic changes • Mitochondrial dysfunction • Accumulation of senescent zombielike cells that inflame healthy cells • Exhaustion of stem cells • Altered intercellular communication and the production of inflammatory molecules Researchers began to cautiously agree: address these hallmarks, and you can slow down aging. Slow down aging, and you can forestall disease. Forestall disease, and you can push back death.
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David A. Sinclair (Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To)
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Jason Dawson (Darien Connors and the Necromancy of Eridu)
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...had recommended pediatrics as the most honest specialization, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick, and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concrete symptoms of real disease. After a certain age, however, adults either had the symptoms without the diseases or, what was worse, serious diseases with the symptoms of minor ones.
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Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
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As communicable disease spreads through social networks, Richard reasoned, you had to find ways to disrupt those networks.
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Michael Lewis (The Premonition: A Pandemic Story)
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In 2001 the entire cattle and sheep industry of Great Britain was thrown into chaos by the discovery of foot-and-mouth disease in Northumberland. Within nine months, 3.8 million animals had been slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease; and massive damage to agriculture was compounded by an estimated £10 billion of income lost by the tourist industry due to restrictions on travel in rural areas, and the concomitant discouragement of visitors to Great Britain in general. For a time, the army was required to manage the slaughter of herds suspected of infection, along with the disruption to transport, communications, villages and towns all across the country. All this was demanded, not by the threat of a potentially lethal disease, but by international regulations governing agricultural transport and exchange – for as Franklin points out, foot-and-mouth ‘is harmless to humans and rarely infects them’, while even to sheep it is rarely fatal, and usually ‘no more severe than the common cold’. It mainly causes problems in dairy herds, where (although once again seldom lethal) it reduces milk yield; hence its economic impact, which is massively compounded by the inability of affected countries to trade with countries where the virus is absent or at least quiescent. Sheep are therefore slaughtered during a foot-and-mouth outbreak only because they can transmit unprofitability to other agricultural sectors. Foot-and-mouth disease is ‘only lethal to domestic animals because it is economically intolerable to humans’.
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Philip Armstrong (Sheep (Animal))