Daily Status Quotes

Alone has quite a different meaning; alone has beauty. To be alone means something entirely different. And you must be alone. When man frees himself from the social structure of greed, envy, ambition, arrogance, achievement, status—when he frees himself from those, then he is completely alone. That is quite a different thing. Then there is great beauty, the feeling of great energy.

Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.

At the core of many of his stories was a distinction between success and excellence. Success was “having”: money, awards, status. Excellence was “being”: living your values, having them guide your daily life. Pursue excellence, Coach would say, and success will follow.

Don’t judge centering prayer on the basis of how many thoughts come or how much peace you enjoy. The only way to judge this prayer is by its long-range fruits: whether in daily life you enjoy greater peace, humility and charity. Having come to deep interior silence, you begin to relate to others beyond the superficial aspects of social status, race, nationality, religion, and personal characteristics. (OM, 114)

It seems logical to suppose that history's pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. Of course, we're taught that it's not polite to say so in public. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. We're told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opportunities. Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.

The hyping of disabled athletes into superhuman status by Channel 4 only deepens our wounds, inflicted by continual assaults on our daily lives. It truly seems that the only acceptable disabled person is a Paralympian – and then only for a few weeks.

ATTACHMENT Attachment to status, power, wealth or comforts gives rise to ego. It is ego that separates man from God.

The inquisitive nature of youth should carry over into our adult lives. Challenging the status quo and enticing curiosity should be a daily practice of adult life.

Love is not a nebulous idea. It's not a vague notion of warm and fuzzy. Its the real daily interactions of sharing our lives with someone, caring for them, and having them care for us in return. Love is what we do, day in day out, not what we profess in our status updates.

Bullying is about judging. It’s about establishing who is more worthy or important. The more powerful kids judge the less powerful kids. They judge them to be less valuable human beings, and they rub their faces in it on a daily basis. Like the boys in Sheri Levy’s study, they get a boost in self-esteem. It’s not that bullies are low in self-esteem, but judging and demanding others can give them a self-esteeem rush. Bullies also gain social status from their actions. Others may look up to them and judge them to be cool, powerful, or funny. Or may fear them. Either way, they’ve upped their standing.

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don’t signal competence if you don’t take risks for it—there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power.

It takes a long time for white guys to appreciate that they are breakable. They do not live from birth with the daily fear that they might be attacked or detained or killed. Their bodies are not constant targets of power. Their bodies are power, so they throw those bodies up and down mountains and stairs and out of airplanes and into pointless online yelling matches for fun. They just presume they will survive.

The two psycho-analytic theories were in a different class. They were simply non testable, irrefutable. There was no conceivable human behav­iour which could contradict them. This does not mean that Freud and Adler were not seeing certain things correctly: I personally do not doubt that much of what they say is of considerable importance, and may well play its part one day in a psychological science which is testable. But it does mean that those ‘clinical observations’ which analysts naively believe confirm their theory cannot do this any more than the daily confirmations which astrologers find in their practice. And as for Freud’s epic of the Ego, the Super-ego, and the Id, no substantially stronger claim to scientific status can be made for it than for Homer’s collected stories from Olympus. These theories describe some facts, but in the manner of myths. They contain most interesting psychological suggestions, but not in a testable form.

Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. “For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.” This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances—the postwar housing shortage, say—profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

ARE YOU CONTENT WITH THE STATUS QUO, OR ARE YOU WILLING TO TAKE RISKS TO GAIN HIGHER LEVELS OF ACHIEVEMENT?

A leader who loves the status quo soon becomes a follower.

TRUE PROGRESS A greedy person is attached to comforts that he gets from others, wealth and status. He lives a life of servitude. To remain happy with minimum comforts is true progress.

the participants in the public debate risk being driven less by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, many seek the uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional experience. These attitudes reflect in part the complexity of defining an identity in the age of social media.

Protecting the status quo against our internal convictions is obviously a luxury of the privileged, because the underdogs and outliers and marginalized have no choice but to experience the daily wilderness

We can’t overcome workaholism if we love money and status too much. We can’t overcome bitterness or slander if we love our reputation too much. It is not just willpower but a reordering of our desires that will bring wisdom.

The bigger threat to Google wouldn’t be measured in dollars, but in the philosophical challenge. Could it be that social networking, rather than algorithmic exploitation of the web’s intelligence, would assume the central role in people’s online lives? Even if that were not the case, Facebook made it clear that every facet of the Internet would benefit from the power of personal connection. Google had been chasing a future forged out of algorithms and science fiction chronicles. Did the key to the future lay in party photos and daily status reports?

The critical transition period which has been missed is MATRESCENCE, the time of mother-becoming,’ writes Raphael. ‘During this process, this rite of passage, changes occur in a woman’s physical state, in her status within the group, in her emotional life, in her focus of daily activity, in

By the time a society attains Type II status thousands of years into the future, it becomes immortal. Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization. Since it will have long mastered the weather, ice ages can be avoided or altered. Meteors and comets can be also be deflected. Even if their sun goes supernova, the people will be able to flee to another star system, or perhaps prevent their star from exploding. (For example, if their sun turns into a red giant, they might be able swing asteroids around their planet in a slingshot effect in order to move their planet farther from the sun.)

Until you awaken to the fact that sensuality is not a sex ‘thing’ or a menu on ‘how to sin your best in life’ but it’s actually an active and daily intoxicating relationship with the divine/God, you’ll never survive the status quo. You’ll always find yourself trapped in unfulfilling relationships and a mediocre life.

Respect isn’t a right. We aren’t entitled to it, and we can never earn it by demanding it. It’s something we earn because of our character—and by giving it to others. If we want to be respected, we have to show ourselves to be worthy of it, not by our status, possessions, or accomplishments, but by honesty, integrity, and responsibility.

For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function. There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life. For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable and shapeless. The “rootless” individual, the outcast - for absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows - sees no society. He sees only demoniac forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light and half in darkness, but never predictable. They decide about his life and livelihood without the possibility of interference on his part, indeed without the possibility of understanding them. He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing a game of which he does not know the rules.

How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religious belief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he does take his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stamp upon his experience, and he belongs to a culture, which is a league founded on exclusive principles.

Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it. People often adopt short-term goals that they strive to achieve but not necessarily to exceed. They are likely to reduce their efforts when they have reached an immediate goal, with results that sometimes violate economic logic. New York cabdrivers, for example, may have a target income for the month or the year, but the goal that controls their effort is typically a daily target of earnings. Of course, the daily goal is much easier to achieve (and exceed) on some days than on others. On rainy days, a New York cab never remains free for long, and the driver quickly achieves his target; not so in pleasant weather, when cabs often waste time cruising the streets looking for fares. Economic logic implies that cabdrivers should work many hours on rainy days and treat themselves to some leisure on mild days, when they can “buy” leisure at a lower price. The logic of loss aversion suggests the opposite: drivers who have a fixed daily target will work many more hours when the pickings are slim and go home early when rain-drenched customers are begging to be taken somewhere.

Each of us has been made “a little lower than the angels.” What an incomprehensible compliment! But it’s not only a compliment; it’s also a responsibility, for our special status equalizes us with other people in the eyes of God. The Lord has exalted not only me or some special group; God has exalted everyone. It’s the people of Burkina Faso and Niger and Guyana and Haiti. It’s people who never learned to read and write or who live on fifty cents a day. All human beings have been made a little lower than the angels, and we have a responsibility to treat them accordingly.

To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires energy, actual physical energy, and also it demands psychological energy. By the energy is destroyed, is wasted when one is in conflict. So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict, there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy. Then you can proceed tearing the house that you have built throughout the centuries and that has no meaning at all. You know, to destroy is to create. We must destroy, not the buildings, not the social or economic system, - this comes about daily – but the psychological, the unconscious and the rationally, individually, deeply and superficially. We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless, because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see and understand ambition, authority, and you begin to see when authority is necessary and at what level. Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge, no authority of capacity; no authority that function assumes and which becomes status. To understand all authority – of the gurus, of the Masters, and others – requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a muddy brain, not a dull brain.

There is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good in persisting in a new state.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 4.42 When people say change is good, they’re usually trying to reassure someone (or themselves). Because instinctively we view change as bad—or at least we’re suspicious of it. The Stoics want you to do away with those labels altogether. Change isn’t good. The status quo isn’t bad. They just are. Remember, events are objective. It’s only our opinion that says something is good or bad (and thus worth fighting against or fighting for). A better attitude? To decide to make the most of everything. But to do that you must first cease fighting.

After all, a kiss between real lovers is not some type of contract, a neatly defined moment of pleasure, something obtained by greedy conquest, or any kind of clear saying of how it is. It is a grief-drenched hatching of two hearts into some ecstatic never-before-seen bird whose new uncategorizable form, unrecognized by the status quo, gives the slip to Death's sure rational deal. For love is a delicious and always messy extension of life that unfrantically outgrows mortality's rigid insistence on precise and efficient definition. Having all the answers means you haven't really ecstatically kissed or lived, thereby declaring the world defined and already finished. Loving all the questions on the other hand is a vitality that makes any length of life worth living. Loving doesn't mean you know all the notes and that you have to play all the notes, it just means you have to play the few notes you have long and beautifully. Like the sight of a truly beautiful young woman, smooth and gliding, melting hearts at even a distant glimpse, that no words, no matter how capable, can truly describe; a woman whose beauty is only really known by those who take a perch on the vista of time to watch the years of life speak out their long ornate sentences of grooves as they slowly stretch into her smoothness, wrinkling her as she glides struggling, decade by decade, her gait mitigated by a long trail of heavy loads, joys, losses, and suffering whose joint-aching years of traveling into a mastery of her own artistry of living, becomes even more than beauty something about which though we are even now no more capable of addressing than before, our admiration as original Earth-loving human beings should nonetheless never remain silent. And for that beauty we should never sing about, but only sing directly to it. Straightforward, cold, and inornate description in the presence of such living evidence of the flowering speech of the Holy in the Seed would be death of both the beauty and the speaker. Even if we always fail when we speak, we must be willing to fail magnificently, for even an eloquent failure, if in the service of life, feeds the Divine. Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path? If we can find the hearts, tongues, and brightness of our original souls, broken or not, then no matter from what mess we might have sprung today, we would be like those old-time speakers of life; every one of us would have it in our nature to feel obligated by such true living beauty as to know we have to say something in its presence if only for our utter feeling of awe. For, finally learning to approach something respectfully with love, slowly with the courtesy of an ornate indirectness, not describing what we see but praising the magnificence of her half-smiles of grief and persistent radiance rolling up from the weight-bearing thumping of her fine, well-oiled dusty old feet shuffling toward the dawn reeds at the edge of her part of the lake to fetch a head-balanced little clay jar of water to cook the family breakfast, we would know why the powerful Father Sun himself hurries to get his daily glimpse of her, only rising early because she does.

From the daily battles against the employers and their allies, the workers gradually learn the deeper meaning of this struggle. At first they pursue only the immediate purpose of improving the status of the producers within the existing social order, but gradually they lay bare the root of the evil—monopoly economy and its political and social accompaniments. For the attainment of such an understanding the everyday struggles are better educative material than the finest theoretical discussions. Nothing can so impress the mind and soul of the worker as this enduring battle for daily bread, nothing makes him so receptive to the teachings of Socialism as the incessant struggle for the necessities of life.

Unlike ancient Israel, America is not a covenant nation. God has made no promise to our physical ancestors that guarantees our national status. If Israel had to fulfill the conditions for divine blessing, even though God had covenanted with them as His chosen people, America certainly has no inviolable claim on the blessing of God. As long as unbelief and disobedience to the Word of God color the soul of our nation, we simply cannot expect the blessing of God. Israel didn’t get it in her unbelief. But for those of us who are Christians, the covenant blessings do apply. “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). All the promises of salvation, mercy, forgiveness of sins, and spiritual prosperity are ours to claim as long as we remain faithful to God. That is why the spiritual state of the church in our nation is the key to the blessing of the nation as a whole. If God is going to bless America, it will not be for the sake of the nation itself. He blesses the nation, and has always done so, for the sake of His people. If we who are called by His name are not fulfilling the conditions for divine blessing, there is no hope whatsoever for the rest of the nation. On the other hand, if the church is fit to receive God’s blessing, the whole nation will be the beneficiary of that, because the Word of God will be proclaimed with power, God will add to His church, and spiritual blessings of all kinds will result. And those are the truest blessings of all.

In every quarter of the city, as in every community in Israel, there are armed civilian patrols that include students. Daily, before schools open in the morning, they are examined by parents for bombs. Arab students were asked to participate on the campus of the Hebrew University but refused. In my opinion it was a mistake to ask that they be part of such patrols. They are trying to avoid a charge of “collaboration.” The status of the Israeli Arabs is ambiguous anyway. They do and do not enjoy equal rights. They cause great uneasiness. More than once I have been told that the Palestine Liberation Organization would like to provoke riots in the Old City and the authorities fear that explosions like the one the other night in which six adolescents were killed may provoke them.

For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function. There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life. For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable and shapeless. The “rootless” individual, the outcast - for absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows - sees no society. He sees only demoniac forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light and half in darkness, but never predictable. They decide about his life and livelihood without the possibility of interference on his part, indeed without the possibility of understanding them. He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing a game of which he does not know the rules.

For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function. There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life. For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable and shapeless. The “rootless” individual, the outcast - for absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows - sees no society. He sees only demoniac forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light and half in darkness, but never predictable. They decide about his life and livelihood without the possibility of interference on his part, indeed without the possibility of his understanding them. He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing a game of which he does not know the rules.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: no man who has ever voted against abortion could handle being pregnant. Not one of those ham-faced assemblages of fear, misogyny and idiocy could handle having their skin, muscle and bones torn apart by an unborn child. Not one of them would undergo three months of daily vomiting, existential terror, occasional bleeding, constant nausea and unshakeable fatigue, followed by another six months of aching joints, short breath, decreased mobility, near-incontinence, fear and exhaustion for the sake of something that may not even survive. Not one of them could give up their status, their ability to work, their financial security, their freedom of thought and movement, their whole previous way of life, in order to grow something in their bodies that they never even wanted – it is hard enough when you do want it.

There is an old question, rarely voiced these days, but nevertheless running as an undercurrent beneath the squabbles and misunderstandings that occur in households, workplaces and universities on a daily basis. ‘What do women want?’ has been asked in a bewildered, almost exasperated, tone since women first began to say they wanted more. Yet the answer seems to us to be simple and entirely self-evident. Women want what all sentient human beings want. They want to develop their own talents and put them to good use, to earn and control their own money so they can be truly independent and make free choices. They want to gain status and respect as they prove to be worth of it. To love and to be loved as free and equal adults, to be allowed their human flaws and foibles and not to be unfairly judged for them, and to be forgiven when they fail, behave badly or have trouble coping. To be the subject and not the object. They want, in short, what men want.

Courageous Leadership Simply Means I’ve Developed: 1. Convictions that are stronger than my fears. 2. Vision that is clearer than my doubts. 3. Spiritual sensitivity that is louder than popular opinion. 4. Self-esteem that is deeper than self-protection. 5. Appreciation for discipline that is greater than my desire for leisure. 6. Dissatisfaction that is more forceful than the status quo. 7. Poise that is more unshakeable than panic. 8. Risk taking that is stronger than safety seeking. 9. Right actions that are more robust than rationalization. 10. A desire to see potential reached more than to see people appeased. You don’t have to be great to become a person of courage. You just need to want to reach your potential and to be willing to trade what seems good in the moment for what’s best for your potential. That’s something you can do regardless of your level of natural talent. —Talent Is Never Enough MAKE A SMALL DECISION TODAY THAT WILL INCREASE YOUR CONFIDENCE AND LEADERSHIP COURAGE.

Luther is credited with being among the first to clearly recognize the biblical teaching that justified Christians are both sinners and saints. He used the Latin expression, “simul iustus et peccator.” This is an essential part of the doctrine of justification because it relates to imputation. In imputation, Christ’s righteousness is credited to our accounts with God. In God’s sight, we become what we are not. We are sinners, but through Christ, we are accounted righteous. But even after justification, we still sin and we are still sinners. Not as far as our status with God goes, but as we live out our daily experience on this earth. This is important to note because later on in church history, the doctrine of justification comes under attack in Protestantism and it is revised heavily in an unbiblical direction. As a result, simul iustus et peccator also comes under attack. However, Luther saw that this was a crucial part of the biblical doctrine of justification. By God’s grace he recovered it for us.

I would note how much this universal desire for reputation, honors, and preferences, which consumes us all, exercises and compares talents and strengths, how much it excites and multiplies the passions, and—by making all men competitors, rivals, or rather, enemies—how many reverses, successes, and catastrophes of every type it daily causes this ardor to be talked about, this frenzy to distinguish ourselves that almost always keeps us outside ourselves, to which we owe what is best and worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers—that is, a multitude of bad things as against a small number of good ones. Finally, I would prove that if one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of glory and fortune while the crowd grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former value the things they enjoy only to the extend that the latter are deprived of them, and that, without any change in their status, they would cease to be happy if the people ceased to be miserable.

The Five Causes We practice gratitude daily, remembering that the human heart cannot hold gratitude and negative emotions at the same time. From gratitude, joy and all other virtues are born. We practice forgiving those that have harmed us as a mode of healing ourselves. We reach out to those we have harmed, either personally or by handwritten letter, offering apology and reconciliation. We practice kindness and honesty in word and deed toward all, and especially toward our romantic partner. Kindness and honesty must always remain unified, for one without the other leads to harmful behavior. We practice humility. We never treat any others as servants or beneath us, regardless of their social or economic status. We show respect to all, and are considerate of the consequences of our actions on others. We practice our ethics in our business. Our career is a major forum for our practice of transformation, so we infuse our highest ideals into our work and workplace, always looking for win-win opportunities. We hold firm that the end never justifies the means, and teach our ethics by example.

As we go forward in life, we come more and more to realize the wisdom of being obedient, not because we are afraid of the law, but because we recognize the importance, wisdom, and necessity of law in civilized life. Freedom within the law is indispensable if your life is to be rich and radiant. Liberty is a prized possession, which should be jealously guarded, but it may be jeopardized by disobedience. We should not assume that liberty and license are synonymous. Sometimes we find people of all ages who resent regulations, restraints, or prohibitions of any kind. They seem to assume that rebellious disregard for rules or laws indicates emancipation and independence. In a foolish attempt to demonstrate their freedom they lose it, forgetting that real liberty can only be enjoyed by obedience to law. Consider for a moment our traffic laws, with their daily toll of suffering, loss, and death. It must be evident to all that these laws are enacted and enforced for the good and protection of people and property. Is it not, therefore, foolhardy to endanger oneself and others simply to show one's independence or importance. Of course, we may disregard the traffic laws, drive on the wrong side of the street, exceed speed limits, go through red lights, just for the satisfaction of showing off and doing as we please, but if we continue to act in such an irresponsible manner, we must eventually pay a price all out of proportion to any momentary satisfaction. . . . Speaking of the duty of parents to children, [John] Locke said, "Liberty and indulgence can do no good to children; their want of judgment makes them stand in need of restraint." . . . Any person is stupid who thinks he can defy the law with impunity. They who obey the law find it to be a safeguard and protection, a guarantee against privilege and favoritism; it applies to all, regardless of rank, station, or status. When properly administered, its rewards and punishments are inflexible. They are at once a warning, a promise, and a safeguard. If they whose duty it is to enforce the law were whimsical or capricious, or if the laws were not administered and enforced with undeviating justice and equity, there would be confusion, defiance, and rebellion. With the average, normal person, force will not become necessary, but sometimes, for the safety of society, drastic measures must be employed.

We had heard rumours of what people referred to as a ‘phantom accounting system’, also called zappers and phantom ware. This phenomenon was unheard of in South Africa at the time. The more formal term used to describe this kind of criminal financial-management software is a ‘sales-suppression system’. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in which South Africa has observer status, issued a guide on these systems in 2013.10 On the surface, the technology seems like a supposedly normal accounting system, used mainly by retailers. It has all the expected features: it records stock, sales, invoices, receipts and taxes. It can print daily, weekly and monthly accounting records. Yet the software has a feature that can blank out certain sales and receipts. You can set it to suppress, for instance, every fourth sale, or random sales of a particular value, whichever you prefer. The effect is that, on paper, your stock, sales and receipts would balance for tax purposes. All you would have to do is click on a secret place on the screen, or type a particular code on the keyboard, and the unrecorded sales and receipts would reflect. One would then be able to take this money out of the company’s takings for the day, week or month, and people would be none the wiser.

A magical potion is available to us today. That potion is called acceptance. We are asked to accept many things: ourselves, as we are; our feelings, needs, desires, choices, and current status of being. Other people, as they are. The status of our relationships with them. Problems. Blessings. Financial status. Where we live. Our work, our tasks, our level of performance at these tasks. Resistance will not move us forward, nor will it eliminate the undesirable. But even our resistance may need to be accepted. Even resistance yields to and is changed by acceptance. Acceptance is the magic that makes change possible. It is not forever; it is for the present moment. Acceptance is the magic that makes our present circumstances good. It brings peace and contentment and opens the door to growth, change, and moving forward. It shines the light of positive energy on all that we have and are. Within the framework of acceptance, we figure out what we need to do to take care of ourselves. Acceptance empowers the positive and tells God we have surrendered to the Plan. We have mastered today's lesson, and are ready to move on. Today, I will accept. I will relinquish my need to be in resistance to myself and my environment. I will surrender. I will cultivate contentment and gratitude. I will move forward in joy by accepting where I am today.

I have taken a different approach. One that I hope is more easily accessible to the reader’s emotional imagination, though less analytically systematic. I have summoned back into life again—through my own translations from a selection of popular Chinese novel sand poems—some of the imagined worlds in which Chinese have passed their daily reality during the last two hundred years. I have tried to convey something of what it felt like to be a Chinese, living in Chinese society, in different settings of status, age, and gender, and how this has changed over time. For reasons of method, I have looked at a small number of organically coherent emotional spaces, contained in individual works or parts of works, and considered them in detail. ... It would be pretending to more wisdom than I have to claim that the selection I have made is the result of a rigorous intellectual winnowing process from a harvest of widespread reading in late-imperial and modern Chinese literature. Honesty compels the admission that it is more the outcome of chance, serendipity, and whatever happened to catch my imagination, for reasons that I am probably in no position to do more than guess at. ... In so far as there has been a guiding principle behind my choices it has been the desire to show as much as the constraints of space allow of the contrasts among those in different social position, different periods, and different ideologies.

The Greater Washington area is now home to over sixteen hundred foundations of different kinds; the hordes of gunslinging grantsmen who try to maintain a façade of scholarly disinterest are functionally as much a part of the ecosystem of the town as the lobbyists on K Street. A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC) with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or he claimed — which, if true, is a sad commentary on the status of most elected officials), but also because he would no longer be limited to a senator's $174,000 statuatory annual salary. ¶ By the 1980s, the present Washington model of 'Beltwayland' was largely established. Contrary to widespread belief, Ronald Reagan did not revolutionize Washington; he merely consolidated and extended pre-existing trends. By the first term of his presidency, the place even had its first openly partisan daily newspaper, the Washington Times, whose every news item, feature, and op-ed was single-mindedly devoted to harping on some conservative bugaboo or other. The Times was the first shot in a later barrage of openly partisan media. Some old practices lingered on, to be sure: Congress retained at least an intermittent bipartisanship until Newt Gingrich's speakership ended it for all time.

In this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power.

One great question underlies our existence,” the Dalai Lama had said before the trip. “What is the purpose of life? After much consideration, I believe that the purpose of life is to find happiness. “It does not matter whether one is a Buddhist like me, or a Christian like the Archbishop, or any other religion, or no religion at all. From the moment of birth, every human being wants to discover happiness and avoid suffering. No differences in our culture or our education or our religion affect this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire joy and contentment. But so often these feelings are fleeting and hard to find, like a butterfly that lands on us and then flutters away. “The ultimate source of happiness is within us. Not money, not power, not status. Some of my friends are billionaires, but they are very unhappy people. Power and money fail to bring inner peace. Outward attainment will not bring real inner joyfulness. We must look inside. “Sadly, many of the things that undermine our joy and happiness we create ourselves. Often it comes from the negative tendencies of the mind, emotional reactivity, or from our inability to appreciate and utilize the resources that exist within us. The suffering from a natural disaster we cannot control, but the suffering from our daily disasters we can. We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.

In Kafka’s works the family table locks the child into a site where Father presides; it offers one of the prime occasions for paternity to enthrone itself, conducting prescriptive raids on the child’s bearing—invading his plate, entering and altering his body, adjusting his manner of being. The table becomes the metonymy for all law, the place where sovereign exceptionalism asserts itself: Father does not have to obey his own law, he can pick his teeth or clean his ears while the eaters submit to the severity of his rule. The children, in Kafka at least, and in the simulacrum of home in which many others were grown, are consistently downgraded to the status of unshakable refugees, parasites, those who quiver under the thickness of anxiety while laws, like platters, are passed and forced down one’s delicate throat. Give us this day our daily dread: it is difficult to imagine the Kafka family going out to eat, though that is what it would have taken for the death grip of mealtime to loosen, let go. At home, at the table, little Franz Kafka was eaten alive. By the time of the famous “Letter to Father,” he was vaporized. He says so himself: A good deal of the damage done to the young psyche occurred at table. The neighborhood restaurant might have rerouted the oppressive domesticity of home rule—it might have introduced a hiatus or suspensive regime change that would allow for hunger’s pacing. Part of a spectacle of public generality, the theater of ingestion—possibly also of incorporation—the restaurant causes the hold on the child to slacken, if only because there are witnesses and waiters whose work consists in diminishing the intensities of paternal law and the sacrificial rites that underlie their daily distribution—the daily apportionment of dread.

In combat, focus comes pretty easily because the battle is right in front of your face. You have no choice but to focus. But sometimes, in day-to-day life, you can lose track of the long-term goal. It fades from your vision. It slips from your mind. Wrong. I want that long-term goal to be so embedded in my mind, that I never lose sight of it. Ever. The little tasks and projects and short-term goals that you tackle need to lead toward strategic victory – winning the long war. But we want results now. We want the shortcut to the winner’s podium. We need the instant gratification. And when we don’t get the short-term glory, sometimes we lose sight of those long-term goals. They fade. We lose focus. So we stop the daily tasks and disciplines that allow us to achieve those goals. And a day slips by. Then another day. And a day turns into a week and a week into a year. And you look up in six weeks or six months or six years … And you’ve made no progress. Maybe you even went backwards. You lost sight of the long-term goal. And it faded. It faded from memory and the passion dried up and you began to rationalize: Maybe I can’t. Maybe I don’t really want to. Maybe this goal isn’t for me. And so you give up. You let it go. And you settle for a status quo. For the easy road. No. Don’t do that. Embed that long-term goal in your mind. Burn it into your soul. Think about it, write about it, talk about it. Hang it up on your wall. But most important: Do something about it. Every single day. So I trained. And I prepared. And I did everything I could to be ready for that day. When I became a leader I took pains to prepare my men in the same way: brutally and without mercy so we could fight brutally and without mercy. And then that day came. We met the enemy on the battlefield. We fought, and we won.

For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9

The traditional hospital practice of excluding parents ignored the importance of attachment relationships as regulators of the child’s emotions, behaviour and physiology. The child’s biological status would be vastly different under the circumstances of parental presence or absence. Her neurochemical output, the electrical activity in her brain’s emotional centres, her heart rate, blood pressure and the serum levels of the various hormones related to stress would all vary significantly. Life is possible only within certain well-defined limits, internal or external. We can no more survive, say, high sugar levels in our bloodstream than we can withstand high levels of radiation emanating from a nuclear explosion. The role of self-regulation, whether emotional or physical, may be likened to that of a thermostat ensuring that the temperature in a home remains constant despite the extremes of weather conditions outside. When the environment becomes too cold, the heating system is switched on. If the air becomes overheated, the air conditioner begins to work. In the animal kingdom, self-regulation is illustrated by the capacity of the warm-blooded creature to exist in a broad range of environments. It can survive more extreme variations of hot and cold without either chilling or overheating than can a coldblooded species. The latter is restricted to a much narrower range of habitats because it does not have the capacity to self-regulate the internal environment. Children and infant animals have virtually no capacity for biological self-regulation; their internal biological states—heart rates, hormone levels, nervous system activity — depend completely on their relationships with caregiving grown-ups. Emotions such as love, fear or anger serve the needs of protecting the self while maintaining essential relationships with parents and other caregivers. Psychological stress is whatever threatens the young creature’s perception of a safe relationship with the adults, because any disruption in the relationship will cause turbulence in the internal milieu. Emotional and social relationships remain important biological influences beyond childhood. “Independent self-regulation may not exist even in adulthood,” Dr. Myron Hofer, then of the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, wrote in 1984. “Social interactions may continue to play an important role in the everyday regulation of internal biologic systems throughout life.” Our biological response to environmental challenge is profoundly influenced by the context and by the set of relationships that connect us with other human beings. As one prominent researcher has expressed it most aptly, “Adaptation does not occur wholly within the individual.” Human beings as a species did not evolve as solitary creatures but as social animals whose survival was contingent on powerful emotional connections with family and tribe. Social and emotional connections are an integral part of our neurological and chemical makeup. We all know this from the daily experience of dramatic physiological shifts in our bodies as we interact with others. “You’ve burnt the toast again,” evokes markedly different bodily responses from us, depending on whether it is shouted in anger or said with a smile. When one considers our evolutionary history and the scientific evidence at hand, it is absurd even to imagine that health and disease could ever be understood in isolation from our psychoemotional networks. “The basic premise is that, like other social animals, human physiologic homeostasis and ultimate health status are influenced not only by the physical environment but also by the social environment.” From such a biopsychosocial perspective, individual biology, psychological functioning and interpersonal and social relationships work together, each influencing the other.

Some prejudices and fallacies of the human mind are understandable on a theoretical basis, but practically impossible to implement. As matters now stand, I have little choice but to recognize myself as possessing a personal state of conscious awareness and presupposing that my active state of mental awareness constitutes a personal identity. Acknowledgement of my ignorance begins with the opening admission that the concept of a self delineates the most that I will ever understand in life. Although it might be a spectacular illusion to perceive the self as the unchanging nucleus at the center of my being, from a human evolutionary standpoint and to develop and carryout strategies necessary for personal survival it is a useful illusion. Belief in a self allows a person to integrate streams of information and resolve conflicts between competing values and goals. Absence of a self-identity and devoid of the specific goal of seeking personal self-realization, would not only jeopardize human survival on a daily bases, but it would render life utterly meaningless, making a person’s ontological existence a triviality. Lacking a philosophical status of fundamental ontological event, human life would be a windowless absurdity. A person must perceive oneself as an actual entity in physical Minkowski space, not merely as a philosophical concept in order to engage in the necessary activities to perpetuate personal existence and import meaning to personal efforts. Accordingly, I elect to perceive the self as an actual entity, not as a mere abstraction, composed of a single, definite set of well-defined ontological criteria. Self-perception guides future behavioral choices, frame intellectual inquires, and the evolution of the self represents the ultimate level of personal achievement in pursuit of my goal of attaining self-realization.

MAY 20 WE HAVE GENUINE friendship when it is based on true human feeling, a feeling of closeness in which there is a sense of sharing and connectedness. I would call this type of friendship genuine because it is not affected by the increase or decrease of the individual’s wealth, status, or power. The factor that sustains that friendship is whether or not the two people have mutual feelings of love and affection.

In this sense (although the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice would, despite Oslo and subsequent agreements, reaffirm Israel's status as occupying power with all the responsibilities for the occupied population that are specified in the key documents of international humanitarian law), the Oslo agreements were designed in part to relieve Israel of many of the burdens of occupation-- as well as the need to police a restive population on a daily basis.

Some people argue that economics is an exception to this general story. Economics, they say, provides a much more analytically precise and tightly integrated body of theory—a theory that is explicitly linked to a small set of generally accepted assumptions about human beings’ motivations and decision-making procedures, and that has been rigorously tested against quantified empirical evidence. Among all the social sciences, economics alone, these boosters contend, has a defensible claim to true scientific status. Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of the social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives. Yet we should be suspicious of its bold claims to scientific status. Modern neoclassical economic theory is firmly grounded in the kind of mechanistic worldview (described in “Complexities”) that sees the economy as a machine, and to explain the operation of this machine it imports many of the concepts of nineteenth-century classical physics. So it stresses the natural tendency of the economy to find a stable equilibrium and the possibility of isolating the effect of changes in different economic factors (like changes in interest rates) on economic performance.25 As well, to achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries. Because it’s insensitive to broad social forces, modern economic theory is also surprisingly insensitive to its own tight relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a product of capitalism—a specific, historically rooted economic system—and it only makes sense in the context of capitalism.26

Kingdom Professionals do not define success in terms of money, job or status. They do not seek to maximize their income or their security or their status, or to advance their careers. Instead they seek to maximize their impact on the people and places to which God has called them. They measure success by their contribution to what God is up to in their neck of His woods. They see themselves as successful to the extent they are doing what God has called them to do, in the place to which He has led them, in such a manner that their giftedness can be well utilized. Nothing less will suffice; not the shallowness of status, not the ephemeral illusions of wealth, not the corrosive effects of power. What matters to Kingdom Professionals is that there is congruence between their daily lives and the further in-breaking of God’s Kingdom where they live and work.64

In the two years since I left Egypt, things haven’t gotten better. Thousands of people have been incarcerated for the most trivial reasons. Hundreds have been tortured on a daily basis in police stations. Others have been killed. You would think that there would be some sort of stability on the surface at least. You know, the kind of fake stability military dictatorships have. But even economically the army was running the country into the ground. They were basically milking the shit out of it, changing laws, basking in the corruption that is protected by their military status. Every day, people woke up to a new business taken by the army.

So here is what I tell young Scouts or young adventurers who ask me what the key is to living a fulfilled life. I keep it pretty simple. I call them the five Fs. Family. Friends. Faith. Fun. Follow your dreams. None of them requires a degree, and all of them are within our reach. Just make them your priority, write them on your bathroom mirror, let them seep into your subconscious over time, and soon they will be like a compass guiding you to make the right decisions for your life. When faced with big decisions, just ask yourself: ‘Will this choice or that one support or detract from the five Fs in my life?’ Family - sometimes like fudge: mostly sweet but with a few nuts! - but still they are our closest and dearest, and, like friendships, when we invest time and love in our families, we all get stronger. Having good Friends to enjoy the adventures of life with, and to share the struggles we inevitably have to bear, is a wonderful blessing. Never underestimate how much good friends mean. Faith matters. Jesus Christ has been the most incredible anchor and secret strength in my life - and it is so important to have a good guide through every jungle. (Go and do an Alpha Course to explore the notion of what faith is and isn’t) Fun. Life should be an adventure. And you are allowed to have fun, you know! Make sure you get your daily dose of it. Yes, I mean daily! And finally, Follow your dreams. Cherish them. They are God-given, dropped like pearls into the depths of your being. They provide powerful, life-changing purpose: beware the man with a dream who also has the courage to go out there and make it happen. These five Fs will sustain and nurture you, and I have learnt that if you make them your priority, you have a great shot at living a wild, fun, exciting, rich, empowered and fulfilling life. And, finally, remember that the ultimate success in the game of life can never come from money amassed, power or status attained, or from fame and recognition gained. All of those things are pretty hollow. Trust me. Our real success is measured by how we touch and enrich people’s lives - the difference we can make to those who would least expect it, to those the world looks over. That is a far, far better measure of a human life, and a great goal to aspire to, as we follow the five Fs along the way.

I suddenly remember what my mom used to repeat to me on a daily basis when I was in high school: nothing good can come from staying out past 11:00 p.m. or going on Craigslist. But where else could I test this idea with real results? I could post a Facebook status about it, but all people would do is comment with an LOL or smiley face emojis. I could call up my closest friends, but I’d probably be interrupting them in the middle of clinking glasses of some fancy vintage of Merlot with their SigNif to celebrate the end of a long workweek. But Kerri thought it sounded good, and she’s my voice of reason, even if she does have a 102-degree fever. “What section, Moose?” I say. Moose sits there, stuffed and still, not trying to stop me, so I proceed. Women looking for women. That seemed like a good home for this sort of thing. I open up a new post and I begin typing.

By current estimates, at least 50 per cent of North Americans do not consume the daily recommended amounts of magnesium. Changes in farming practices over the years are partly to blame. The magnesium content of vegetables, a rich source of the mineral, has declined by 80 to 90 per cent over the last hundred years. As far back as the 1930s, the alarm was being raised about the growing scarcity of magnesium and other minerals in food. The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them. The processing of food further depletes already scare magnesium, and ultra-processed foods that make up such a high proportion of modern diets in North America are seriously lacking in magnesium. To add to the problem, the mineral is depleted by many widely used prescription medications. But a major factor impacting magnesium status is the significant and rapid loss of the mineral from the body due to stress. All types of stress - workplace stress, exam stress, emotional stress, exposure to excessive noise, the stress of extreme physical activity or chronic pain, the stress of fighting infections - are known to be a serious drain on magnesium resources. The interaction of magnesium with stress works in two ways: while stress depletes magnesium, the deficiency itself increases anxiety and enhances uncontrolled hormonal response to stress. This creates a vicious feedback loop whereby stress depletes magnesium, but the ensuing magnesium deficiency further exacerbates stress.

Find a business that’s starting a revolution. A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics: It’s creating a product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing technology in a novel way that the competition can’t make or even understand. This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily. There should be an existing large market. The novel technology can deliver on the company vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platforms, and systems that support it. Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to their customers’ needs. It’s thinking about a problem or a customer need in a way you’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense once you hear it.

For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.”4 This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances—the postwar housing shortage, say—profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do. During rent strikes, tenants believed they had a moral obligation to one another.5 If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things. Some residents described themselves as “just passing through,” even if they had been passing through nearly all their life.

A daily stand-up can get frustrating — it can seem like nothing’s moving. Teams usually do better with a Status Event two or three times per week instead of a daily scrum.

The 8 Forms of Wealth learning model is based upon eight hidden (because they are not so commonly considered) habits that I energetically urge you to embrace: Growth: The Daily Self-Improvement Habit. This habit is based on the insight that humans are happiest and genuinely wealthiest when we are steadily realizing our personal gifts and primal talents. The regular pursuit of personal growth is one of your most valuable assets. Wellness: The Steadily Optimize Your Health Habit. This habit is founded on your deep understanding that peak mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual vitality and living a long life filled with energy, wellness, and joyfulness are mission-essential to you being honestly rich. Family: The Happy Family, Happy Life Habit. This habit is built on the knowledge that having all the money and material success in the world is worthless if you are all alone. So enrich the connections with the ones you love. And fill your life with fantastic friends who upgrade your happiness. Craft: The Work as a Platform for Purpose Habit. This habit is grounded in the consistent practice of seeing your work as a noble pursuit and an opportunity not only to make more of your genius real, but also to make our world a better place. Mastery is a currency worth investing in. Money: The Prosperity as Fuel for Freedom Habit. This habit is driven by the principle that financial abundance is not only far from evil but also a necessity for living in a way that is generous, fascinating, and original. Community: The You Become Your Social Network Habit. This habit is structured around the scientific fact that a human being’s thinking, feeling, behaving, and producing are profoundly influenced by their associations, conversations, and mentors. To lead a great life, fill your circle with great people. Adventure: The Joy Comes from Exploring Not Possessing Habit. This habit is formulated around the reality that what creates vast joy is not material goods but magical moments doing things that flood us with feelings of gratefulness, wonder, and awe. Enrich your days with these and your life will rise into a whole new universe of inspiration. Service: The Life Is Short So Be Very Helpful Habit. This habit is founded on the time-honored understanding that the main aim of a life richly lived is to make the lives of others better. As you lose yourself in a cause that is bigger than you, you will not only find your greatest self but will illuminate the world in the process. And discover treasures far beyond the limits of cash, possessions, and public status.

we can identify four concerns underlying the major developments in fashion: status, sex, power, and personality. Clothing is a status symbol, and history is replete with rules and laws designed to ensure that the social status of individuals is reflected in what they wear. Dress is also a sex symbol—social conventions and laws have ensured that clothing establishes whether one is male or female, sexually innocent or experienced, married or single, chaste or promiscuous. Attire is a uniform of power: it has helped define national belonging as much as any territorial border; it has differentiated ethnic groups and tribes as much as any language or cultural ritual; it has shaped religious sects as much as any scripture; and it has both established and challenged racial hierarchies. Finally, fashion is a medium for the expression of individual personality. We assemble our wardrobes and daily ensembles to reflect a distinctive point of view and confirm a distinctive sense of self.

When we are going about our daily lives, we often don’t see the broken bits that are so obvious to those around us. We are navigating our world, thinking everything is status quo until something or someone points it out to us. Or we crash.

Love is not a nebulous idea. It’s not a vague notion of warm and fuzzies. It’s the real, daily interactions of sharing our lives with someone, caring for them, and having them care for us in return. Love is what we do, day in day out. Not what we profess in our status updates.

Every day is a chance to outsmart yesterday's version of yourself. So, why settle for the status quo when you can upgrade your brain's software with a daily dose of enlightenment? Dive into the pool of knowledge like a playful dolphin, flipping and frolicking through new ideas and insights. With each discovery, you're not just learning; you're leveling up your life game.

Given Emily [Dickinson]'s unwillingness to function more actively in a social context, she doesn't seem to fit the stereotype of a feminist in action. You might wonder why she is included among the five empowered women in this book. It is important to remember that not all feminists are activists, and I am including Emily as an opportunity to expand what it means to be a feminist. In her daily life, she was shy to the point of being a recluse, while in her writing, she revealed herself with a level of honestly that took enormous bravery. Her life is an example of the richness that can be found when one follows one's deep inner voice rather than conforming to societal pressures. This is a quality that Emily shares with other feminists who stayed on their own path despite the pressures of the status quo. Her life and her words make a unique contribution to the chorus of women's voices. They remind us that there is room for all of us in our uniqueness. There is no one kind of feminist. There are times in life when we may withdraw or set firm boundaries to protect our inner life and experience. The purpose of this is often to gain the strength and knowledge we need to communicate on a deeper and more honest level.

For if a man with gold rings and fine clothes comes into your assembly, and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes…, have you not made distinctions among yourselves…? James 2:1-4 This passage is a pretty clear indictment of favoring the rich. But it also discourages making other distinctions. Most of us are guilty of this in one way or another. We feel more comfortable with our “own kind,” whether we share economic status, ethnicity or political views. But if we stick with those who do not challenge us, who make us feel “normal” and “comfortable,” we might start to believe that everyone should be like us. God made a more diverse world than that. He is present in all people. By opening our hearts to God’s activity in those who differ from us, we open ourselves to him. What’s more, we acknowledge a gospel truth—that all human beings are our neighbors. Loving God, open my heart to your presence in people who are different from me.

In truth, we all have four wives in our lives. Our fourth wife is our body. No matter how much time and effort we lavish in makes it look good from outside, it will leave us when we die. Our third wife is our possession, status and wealth, when we die they will go to others. Our second wife is our family and friends and when we die no matter how much they have been there for us, the furthest they can stay by us is up to the grave. And our first wife is our soul, our internal personality, which often get neglected in pursuit of wealth, power and pleasure of the world. However, our soul is the only thing that will follow us whenever we go, but we focus least on it.

There is no simple way to determine when and where to get help. Many factors come into play, including the child’s age, family’s financial status, insurance, knowledge of resources, religious affiliation, availability of services in community, and so on. Parents may seek outside assistance for their adopted child when other factors such as a divorce, job loss, or other stresses compound the family needs. Parents are generally in the best position to determine when to get help, but advice from relatives, family physicians, teachers, and others in a position to know the family should be carefully considered. Services for children with special needs are provided by a variety of professionals. A physician—pediatrician or the family practitioner—is usually the place to begin. Families may be referred to a neurologist for a thorough assessment and diagnosis of neurological functioning (related to cognitive or learning disabilities, seizure disorders or other central nervous system problems). For specific communication difficulties, families may consult with a speech and language therapist, while a physical therapist would develop a treatment plan to enhance motor development. A rehabilitation technologist or an occupational therapist prescribes adaptive aids or activities of daily living. Early childhood educators specializing in working with children with special needs may be called a variety of titles, including Head Start teachers, early childhood special education teacher, or early childhood specialist.

We are having an ongoing and critical conversation about race in America. The question on many minds, the question that is certainly on my mind, is how do we prevent racial injustices from happening? How do we protect young black children? How do we overcome so many of the institutional barriers that exacerbate racism and poverty? It’s a nice idea that we could simply follow a prescribed set of rules and make the world a better place for all. It’s a nice idea that racism is a finite problem for which there is a finite solution, and that respectability, perhaps, could have saved all the people who have lost their lives to the effects of racism. But we don’t live in that world and it’s dangerous to suggest that the targets of oppression are wholly responsible for ending that oppression. Respectability politics suggest that there’s a way for us to all be model (read: like white) citizens. We can always be better, but will we ever be ideal? Do we even want to be ideal, or is there a way for us to become more comfortably human? Take, for example, someone like Don Lemon. He is a black man, raised by a single mother, and now he is a successful news anchor for a major news network. His outlook seems driven by the notion that if he can make it, anyone can. This is the ethos espoused by people who believe in respectability politics. Because they have achieved success, because they have transcended, in some way, the effects of racism or other forms of discrimination, all people should be able to do the same. In truth, they have climbed a ladder and shattered a glass ceiling but are seemingly uninterested in extending that ladder as far as it needs to reach so that others may climb. They are uninterested in providing a detailed blueprint for how they achieved their success. They are unwilling to consider that until the institutional problems are solved, no blueprint for success can possibly exist. For real progress to be made, leaders like Lemon and Cosby need to at least acknowledge reality. Respectability politics are not the answer to ending racism. Racism doesn’t care about respectability, wealth, education, or status. Oprah Winfrey, one of the wealthiest people in the world and certainly the wealthiest black woman in the world, openly discusses the racism she continues to encounter in her daily life. In July 2013, while in Zurich to attend Tina Turner’s wedding, Winfrey was informed by a store clerk at the Trois Pommes boutique that the purse she was interested in was too expensive for her. We don’t need to cry for Oprah, prevented from buying an obscenely overpriced purse, but we can recognize the incident as one more reminder that racism is so pervasive and pernicious that we will never be respectable enough to outrun racism, not here in the United States, not anywhere in the world.

Sit Quietly This is the most important Zen practice.   It is the classroom for living a wise and kind life.   Sit anywhere and be quiet: on a couch, a bed, a bench, inside, outside, leaning against a tree, by a lake, at the ocean, in a garden, on an airplane, in your office chair, on the floor, in your car. Meditation cushions are okay too.   Sit at any time: morning, night, one minute, three years.   Wear what you've got on. Loosen your waist so that your belly can move with your breath.   Sit as relaxed as possible. Relax your muscles when starting and during sitting.   Sit with your back straight but not stiff. Keep your head upright with your ears level.   Respect all medical conditions. Only take a posture you can. All postures are okay.   Do what you can do.   Keep your eyes slightly opened and out of focus. Closing them will make you sleepy and sometimes busy. Opening them wide will keep you busy.   Breathe naturally through your nose. Enjoy breathing. Feel your breath. Watch your breath. Become your breath.   Be like a cat purring. Follow your breath like ocean waves coming in and out.   When you get distracted, come back to the simplest and most basic experience of being alive, your breathing.   That's it. No belief. No program. No dogma.   You do not have to be Buddhist. You can be of any faith, religion, race, nationality, gender, relationship status, or capacity.   Just sit quietly, connect with your breath, and pay attention to what happens. You will learn things.   Do it when you want. You decide how much is enough for you. If you do it daily, it will get into your bones.   Please enjoy sitting quietly!   The only way to learn sitting quietly is to do it.

Santiago de Cuba has the Antonio Maceo Airport (MUCU/SCU), which was home to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Shown in the photo is a Cuban Mig 21 inside the VT-45 hanger. Santiago de Cuba had 12 of these Russian built fighters situated at the San Antonio de los Baños Airfield in Cuba. Now the airport is essentially a turboprop hub, however it can also accommodate mid-sized jet aircraft. There are about twenty international flights each week, but most arrivals are by domestic airlines. The eastern location and the international status of MUCU/SCU has spurred the interest of foreign airlines as a promising future destination. All in all, Cuba now has ten international airports, capable of serving long-range commercial flights. Follow the daily blogs by Captain Hank Bracker posted exclusively on Facebook, Goodreads & Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage. He also has frequent Tweets and weekend commentaries headed “From the Bridge.” His dual award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” is available from Amazon.com and other leading book vendors. Soon to come are his books “Seawater One” & “Surpressed I Rise (Revised Edition).

Kemmer is not always played by pairs. Pairing seems to be the commonest custom, but in the kemmerhouses of towns and cities, groups may form and intercourse take place promiscuously among the males and females of the group. The furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage. It has no legal status, but socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution. The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage. I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner’s death: one can only vow kemmering once. Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from the mother, the “parent in the flesh” (Karh. amha). Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest between generations is strictly forbidden (In Karhide/Orgoreyn; but is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.). What else have I learned for certain? That seems to sum it up. There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value. Since coitus takes place only during the period of fertility, the chance of conception is high, as with all mammals that have an estrous cycle. In harsh conditions where infant mortality is great, a race survival value may be indicated. At present neither infant mortality nor the birthrate runs high in the civilized areas of Gethen. Tinibossol estimates a population of not over 100 million on the Three Continents, and considers it to have been stable for at least a millennium. Ritual and ethical absention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability. There are aspects of ambisexuality that we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely. The kemmer phenomenon fascinates all of us Investigators, of course. It fascinates us, but it rules the Gethenians, dominates them. The structure of their societies, the management of their industry, agriculture, commerce, the size of their settlements, the subjects of their stories, everything is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle. Everybody has his holiday once a month; no one, whatever his position, is obliged or forced to work when in kemmer. No one is barred from the kemmerhouse, however poor or strange. Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex. Consider:

her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.

Despite the refusal of the Obama Justice Department to prosecute anyone at the IRS, it is clear that what happened was an epic clampdown on any conservative voices speaking or advocating against the president’s disastrous policies and in favor of patriotism and adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law. Over the course of twenty-seven months leading up to the 2012 election, not a single Tea Party–type organization received tax-exempt status. Many were unable to operate; others disbanded because donors refused to fund them without the IRS seal of approval; some organizations and their donors were audited without justification; and many incurred legal fees and costs fighting the unlawful conduct by Lerner and other IRS employees. The IRS suppressed the entire Tea Party movement just in time to help Obama win reelection. And everyone in the administration involved in this outrageous conduct got away with it without being punished or prosecuted. Was it simply a case of retribution against the perceived “enemies” of the administration? No, this was much bigger than political payback. It was a systematic and concerted effort to squash the Tea Party movement—one of the most organic and powerful political movements in recent memory—during an election season. [See Appendix for select IRS documents uncovered by Judicial Watch.] This was about campaign politics. It was a scandal for the ages. President Obama obviously wanted this done even if he gave no direct orders for it. In 2015, he told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that “you don’t want all this money pouring through non-profits.” But there is no law preventing money from “pouring through non-profits” that they use to achieve their legal purposes and the objectives of their members. Who didn’t want this money pouring through nonprofits? Barack Obama. In the subsequent FOIA litigation filed by Judicial Watch, the IRS obstructed and lied to a federal judge and Judicial Watch in an effort to hide the truth about what Lois Lerner and other senior officials had done. The IRS, including its top political appointees like IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and General Counsel William J. Wilkins, have much to answer for over their contempt of court and of Congress. And the Department of Justice lawyers and officials enabling this cover-up in court need to be held accountable as well. If the Tea Party and other conservative groups had been fully active in the critical months leading up to the 2012 election, would Mitt Romney have been elected president? We will, of course, never know for certain. But we do know that President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service targeted right-leaning organizations applying for tax-exempt status and prevented them from entering the fray during that period. That is how you steal an election in plain sight. Accountability is not something we will get from the Obama administration. But Judicial Watch will continue its independent investigation and certainly any new presidential administration should take a fresh look at this IRS scandal.

couldn’t shake the idea this had to be a game. If I could just access the status screen, maybe I’d be able to work out what I needed to do to level up.

select log_id, log_date, owner, job_name from ALL_SCHEDULER_JOB_LOG where job_name like 'RMAN_B%' and log_date > sysdate-2; select log_id,log_date, owner, job_name, status, ADDITIONAL_INFO from ALL_SCHEDULER_JOB_LOG where log_id=113708;

How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religious belief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he does take his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stamp upon his experience, and he belongs to a culture, which is a league founded on exclusive principles.

Europeans who began moving into the Americas in the sixteenth century came from bread-eating cultures. Most Spaniards received almost three-quarters of their daily nutrition in the form of grain, either boiled or baked. And they also came from cultures that determined social status partly through the foods a person consumed. Peasants ate bread made of rye, millet, barley, spelt, or oats, and in hard times they, like the Native Americans, baked acorns or chestnuts. The wealthy elite, on the other hand, consumed wheat, the finer and whiter the better.

To display their higher status, professional men like clergy, lawyers and physicians had formerly worn voluminous, full-bottomed wigs – the big wigs of society – but by the late 1770s most gentlemen preferred smaller wigs, sometimes with pigtails or queues.

Unemployement not only diminishes the socioeconomic status of the affected society, but also broadens the platform for poverty.

I bless God daily for the bonds of affection that have held us together and brought us through the pestilence. To be loved and honored for who we are, and not what our status represents, is surely the lesson He wanted us to learn when he sent His son to live as a carpenter and not as a king. The future will be bright indeed when even the humblest are given the chance to prove their worth.

We have nothing to do with God’s gift of salvation and everything to do with the acceptance of it and the ongoing process of growing our faith. And yet in that there is choice and free will. The promise of eternity does not waver based on our poor decisions after salvation, but the keeping of our minds, bodies, and souls is a choice-by-choice partnership with Christ. My pastor, Jay Stewart, recently spoke something powerful and profound over us one Sunday that crystallizes this point: “What’s better—to be able to say, ‘I am forgiven and saved’ or ‘I have become like Christ?’” We can get technical about this and argue about how salvation is the most important thing, and on the core premise, I will agree. Nothing matters if we don’t first choose to follow Christ. But to rest on our status of heaven-bound rather than pursue holiness and sanctification (the process of becoming like Christ) exposes our desire for a lazy faith. God’s plan is not for us to accept salvation and sit with it. It is for us to share its miracle with the world.

Grain crops, such as wheat and oats, also became more plentiful after World War II, often running to surplus. It isn’t difficult to draw a line between grain surplus and the federal government’s emphasis on grains in the American diet. When the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) started recommending dietary standards in 1946, grains got the lion’s share of daily recommended servings and dairy enjoyed its status as an entire food group. Nuts were nowhere to be found.

Alienation is inevitable when our inner sense of value becomes status-driven, hinging on externally imposed standards of competitive achievement and acquisition, and a highly conditional acceptance — I should say "acceptability" — in others' eyes. With the erosion of the middle class in recent decades, people who judged themselves in terms of wordly success have sustained a perceived loss of worth. The promise of the middle-class dream has largely evaporated, to the distress and deep anger of many. But even people perched atop the economic pyramid can experience a devaluation of self, for the simple reason that materialistic values run counter to the need for meaning, for purpose beyond self-serving endeavors. There are no moral fingers to wag here. Objectively, it is the case that centering on the self's evanescent desires to the exclusion of communal needs results in a diminished connection to our deepest selves, which is to say the parts of us that generate and sustain true well-being. Whatever "wins" our personality can rack up, whatever momentary sense of security we gain through our various identities, however much we burnish our image or self-image with material gains — these are a flimsy replacement for the rewards (and challenges) of being alive to one's humanity. An investor dabbling daily in millions told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg, "I feel like I'm wasting my life. When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point on my return? My work feels totally meaningless." That loss of meaning, Duhigg says, afflicts "even professionals given to lofty self-images, like those in medicine and law." Why would this be? the author wondered. The answer: "Oppresive hours, political infighting, increased competition sparked by globalization, an 'always-on culture' bred by the internet — but also something that's hard for these professionals to put their finger on, an underlying sense that their work isn't worth the grueling effort they're putting into it." It's simple economics, really: artificial inflation (of self-concept, of identity, of material ambition) is bound to lead to a downturn or even a crash when the bubble inevitable burts.

We may claw and fight and work to own things, but those things can be taken away in a second. The same goes for other things we like to think are “ours” but are equally precarious: our status, our physical health or strength, our relationships. How can these really be ours if something other than us—fate, bad luck, death, and so on—can dispossess us of them without notice? So what do we own? Just our lives—and not for long.

So the Formula One driver has a dual status: he is both an automatic terminal of the most refined technical machinery, a technical operator, and he is the symbolic operator of crowd passions and the risk of death. The paradox is the same for the motor companies, caught as they are between investment and potlatch. Is all this a calculated — and hence rational — investment (marketing and advertising)? Have we here a mighty commercial operation, or is the company spending inordinate sums, far beyond what is commercially viable, to assuage a passion for prestige and charisma (there is also a manufacturers' world championship)? In this confrontation between manufacturers, isn't there an excessive upping of the stakes, a dizzying passion, a delirium? This is certainly the aspect which appeals, in the first instance, to the millions of viewers. In the end, the average TV viewer has doubtless never been aware that McLaren is a flagship for Honda. And I am not sure he or she is tempted to play the Formula One driver in ordinary life. The impact of Formula One lies, then, in the exceptional and mythic character of the event of the race and the figure of the driver, and not in the technical or commercial spin-offs. It is not clear why speed would be both severely limited and morally condemned in the public domain and, at the same time, celebrated in Formula One as never before, unless there is an effect of sublime compensation going on here. Formula One certainly serves to popularize the cult of the car and its use, but it does much more to maintain the passion for absolute difference — a fundamental illusion for all, and one which justifies all the excesses. In the end, however, hasn't it gone about as far as it can? Isn't it close to a final state, a final perfection, in which all the cars and drivers, given the colossal resources deployed, would, in a repetitive scenario, achieve the same maximum performance and produce the same pattern in each race? If Formula One were merely a rational, industrial performance, a test-bed for technical possibilities, we should have to predict that it would simply burn itself out. On the other hand, if Formula One is a spectacle, a collective, passionate (thoug h perfectly artificial) event, embracing the multiple screens of technological research, the living prosthesis of the driver, and the television screens into which the viewers project themselves, then it certainly has a very fine future. In a word, Formula One is a monster. Such a concentration of technology, money, ambition and prestige is a monster (as is the world of haute couture, which is equally abstract, and as far removed from real clothing as Formula One is from road traffic). Now, monsters are doomed to disappear, and we are afraid they might be disappearing. But we are not keen, either, to see them survive in a domesticated, routinized form. In an era of daily insignificance — including the insignificance of the car and all its constraints — we want at least to save the passion of a pure event, and exceptional beings who are permitted to do absolutely anything.

Bullying is about judging. It’s about establishing who is more worthy or important. The more powerful kids judge the less powerful kids. They judge them to be less valuable human beings, and they rub their faces in it on a daily basis. And it’s clear what the bullies get out of it. Like the boys in Sheri Levy’s study, they get a boost in self-esteem. It’s not that bullies are low in self-esteem, but judging and demeaning others can give them a self-esteem rush. Bullies also gain social status from their actions. Others may look up to them and judge them to be cool, powerful, or funny. Or may fear them. Either way, they’ve upped their standing. There’s a big dose of fixed-mindset thinking in the bullies: Some people are superior and some are inferior. And the bullies are the judges. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, was their perfect target. He had a chest deformity, he was short, he was a computer geek, and he was an outsider, not from Colorado. They judged him mercilessly. When we hear about acts of school violence, we usually think it’s only bad kids from bad homes who could ever take matters into their own hands. But it’s startling how quickly average, everyday kids with a fixed mindset think about violent revenge. In our study, the students with the growth mindset were not as prone to see the bullying as a reflection of who they were. Instead, they saw it as a psychological problem of the bullies, a way for the bullies to gain status or charge their self-esteem: “I’d think that the reason he is bothering me is probably that he has problems at home or at school with his grades.” Or “They need to get a life—not just feel good if they make me feel bad.” Their plan was often designed to educate the bullies: “I would really actually talk to them. I would ask them questions (why are they saying all of these things and why are they doing all of this to me).” Or “Confront the person and discuss the issue; I would feel like trying to help them see they are not funny.” The students with the growth mindset also strongly agreed that: “I would want to forgive them eventually” and “My number one goal would be to help them become better people.

For many people, the pursuit of money and status can supply them with plenty of motivation and focus. Such types would consider figuring out their calling in life a monumental waste of time and an antiquated notion. But in the long run this philosophy often yields the most impractical of results. We all know the effects of “hyperintention”: If we want and need desperately to sleep, we are less likely to fall asleep. If we absolutely must give the best talk possible at some conference, we become hyperanxious about the result, and the performance suffers. If we desperately need to find an intimate partner or make friends, we are more likely to push them away. If instead we relax and focus on other things, we are more likely to fall asleep or give a great talk or charm people. The most pleasurable things in life occur as a result of something not directly intended and expected. When we try to manufacture happy moments, they tend to disappoint us. The same goes for the dogged pursuit of money and success. Many of the most successful, famous, and wealthy individuals do not begin with an obsession with money and status. One prime example would be Steve Jobs, who amassed quite a fortune in his relatively short life. He actually cared very little for material possessions. His singular focus was on creating the best and most original designs, and when he did so, good fortune followed him.

high modernism ought to appeal greatly to the classes and strata who have most to gain—in status, power, and wealth—from its worldview. And indeed it is the ideology par excellence of the bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, planners, and engineers.29 The position accorded to them is not just one of rule and privilege but also one of responsibility for the great works of nation building and social transformation. Where this intelligentsia conceives of its mission as the dragging of a technically backward, unschooled, subsistence-oriented population into the twentieth century, its self-assigned cultural role as educator of its people becomes doubly grandiose. Having a historic mission of such breadth may provide a ruling intelligentsia with high morale, solidarity, and the willingness to make (and impose) sacrifices. This vision of a great future is often in sharp contrast to the disorder, misery, and unseemly scramble for petty advantage that the elites very likely see in their daily foreground. One might in fact speculate that the more intractable and resistant the real world faced by the planner, the greater the need for utopian plans to fill, as it were, the void that would otherwise invite despair.

The Reason for God, Timothy Keller argues that grace breaks decisively from the “performance narrative,” understood as the attempt to ground one’s status before God either partly or wholly in one’s performance in any number of moral or ritual areas.17 This performance narrative also rhythms contemporary society, crystallizing in what Michael Sandel calls the “tyranny of merit,” namely the assumption that the only factor limiting success is a lack of effort or ability and we can achieve anything if only we want it desperately enough. So both in terms of religion and in terms of daily life, we rate our success and our worthiness by our performance.

Unveiling the Mysteries of Vedic Astrology Course by Occult Science In astrology, a natal chart, known as a birth chart or horoscope, is subdivided into twelve parts, or "houses." Each house describes particular facets of a person's experiences and personality and represents various facets of life. Here is a list of the 12 astrological houses and what each one represents: 1st House (Ascendant or Rising Sign): This house represents who you are as a person—your identity, physical traits, and how you interact with the outside world. It relates to one's own plans, viewpoints, and early responses. 2nd House: Your money, wealth, financial status, and sense of self-worth are all related to the second house. It also has to do with your morals and what you value in life. 3rd House: Communication, sibling relationships, short journeys, and studies are all related to this home. It includes everyday interactions, education, and your immediate surroundings. 4th House: The roots, home, family, and emotional base are all represented by the fourth house. It's connected to your private life, the past, and your feeling of security. 5th House: Creativity, self-expression, romance, and kids are all connected to this house. Your interests, relationships, and sense of humor are all reflected. 6th House: The sixth house has to do with daily routines, work, health, and service. It defines your routines, duties, and methods for maintaining your physical health. 7th House (Descendant): Relationships, marriage, partnerships, and one-on-one conversations are all represented by this house. It shows your interpersonal relationships and the characteristics you look for in a mate. 8th House: Change, shared resources, passing on, and serious psychological experiences are all associated with the eighth house. It also discusses occultism, mysteries, death, and life. 9th House: Higher learning, philosophy, travel, spirituality, and much more are all represented by this house. It's connected to your values, aspirations, and educational goals. 10th House (Midheaven): The career, reputation, public life, and social status are all governed by the tenth house. It represents your aspirations, achievements, and societal status. 11th House: Friendships, social circles, hopes, and aspirations are all connected to this house. It deals with your goals, relationships, and external support system. 12th House: The twelfth house is symbolic of the hidden, secrets, privacy, and spiritual encounters. It is linked to limitations, concealments, and hidden facets of the world. Different planets will be set up in different houses in everyone's birth chart; these placements, along with the signs they are in, offer insights into different facets of their lives and personalities. Astrologers study these positions to provide unique interpretations and predictions. For More Details: Click Here

Sapionova, Sonnet 1195 They say, nobody is above the law, I say, I am. They say, nobody is above grammar, I say, I am. All are barred to break status quo, Yet I do on a daily basis. All are tamed to be rats without roar, Yet I write my own moralities. In a world run by do's and don'ts, Wield your backbone and find your way. Animals may need the crutch of custom, By the feet of humans new roads are paved. Question of should comes from principles, It must never be a matter of convenience. Sapient principles are living principles, Not those inherited through dead lineage. Sapiens is the question, sapiens is the answer. When all live as neanderthal, be the sapionova.

The most important thing in life is not to be a celebrity. It is to be able to celebrate life regardless of your status in society.