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For a century, the human response to stress and danger has been defined as “fight or flight.” A 2000 UCLA study by several psychologists noted that this research was based largely on studies of male rats and male human beings. But studying women led them to a third, often deployed option: gather for solidarity, support, advice. They noted that “behaviorally, females’ responses are more marked by a pattern of ‘tend-and-befriend.’ Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.
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Rebecca Solnit (The Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms)
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Being a mother still happens if you don't stay home with your kids. It still happens if you get a job and go to work. It happens if you are an Army Ranger and you're deployed overseas and your kid is rating with your parents. Still a mother. Still not a job. Working or staying home, one is still a mother.
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Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes)
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A critical analysis of the present global constellation-one which offers no clear solution, no “practical” advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: “Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?” One should gather the courage to answer: “YES, precisely that!” There are situations when the only true “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his ‘Existentialism and Humanism’, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the war and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it.
An obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying.
There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism; Lenin’s advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was “Learn, learn, and learn.” This was evoked all the time and displayed on the school walls. The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, “A wife!” while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, “I’d like to have both!” Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No-he explains: “So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress and my mistress that I am going to my wife. . .” “And then, what do you do?” “I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!”
Is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe in 1914? He withdrew to a lonely place in Switzerland, where he “learned, learned, and learned,” reading Hegel’s logic. And this is what we should do today when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic images of violence. We need to “learn, learn, and learn” what causes this violence.
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Slavoj Žižek (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections)
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Women need to be in a couple, for a single woman doesn’t have as much value in the eyes of the world as a woman who belongs to a man. We imagine single women who don’t have children to be selfish and bitter, while their sisters who are married and mothers have the freedom to bestow their generosity and natural kindness. A great deal of energy is deployed in persuading a woman that being in a relationship with a man is the most advantageous thing available to her – and much of the time she allows herself to be convinced, for the spectre of the crazy cat lady looms ominously over the life a single woman.
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Pauline Harmange (I Hate Men)
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Across ideological differences, the femjnists have realized that a hierarchical ranking of human faculties and the identification of women with a degraded conception of corporeal reality has been instrumental, historically, to the consolidation of patriarchal power and the male exploration of female labor. Thus, analyses
of sexuality, procreation, and mothering have been at the center of feminist theory
and women's history. In particular, feminists have uncovered and denounced the strategies and the violence by means of which male-centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the female body, demonstrating that women's bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power techniques and power relations.
and power-relations
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Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation)
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Vera had held this body when it was moments old, had washed, fed, clothed it, and on her best days she couldn't look at her daughter without swelling with self-regard for having given birth to someone so worthy of love. Now that body had grown beyond the jurisdiction of her protection. Though it was rarely deployed in Vera's emotional vocabulary, she could think of no better word than wonder to describe the startling closeness of just standing here beside her child. Forget Lydia's poor choices. Forget the demons Vera could only guess at. The very fact Lydia was alive gave her mother the faith to believe she had done this one thing right.
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Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
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More lives were taken on purpose in the war on Nicaraguan “subversion” than have been saved by all the missionaries in Calcutta even by accident. Yet this brute utilitarian calculus is never employed against Mother Teresa, even by the sort of sophists who would deploy its moral and physical equivalent in her favor. So: silence on the death squads and on the Duvaliers and noisy complaint against the Sandinistas, and the whole act baptized as an apolitical intervention by someone whose kingdom is not of this world.
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Christopher Hitchens (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice)
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This is the story of one deployment of one medical officer—a mother and the wife of a Marine—who also happened to be a Navy psychologist. She was deployed to Iraq to care for the Marines and the medical personnel.
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Heidi Squier Kraft (Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital)
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Staying at home with your children is an incredible choice to make. And it's awesome and admirable if you make it. Go you. Being a mother still happens if you don't stay at home with your kids. It still happens if you get a job and go to work. It happens if you are an Army Ranger and you're deployed overseas and your kid is staying with your parents. Still a mother. Still not a job. Working or staying home, one is still a mother. One is not better than the other. Both choices are worthy of the same amount of respect.
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Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes)
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Being a mother still happens if you don’t stay home with your kids. It still happens if you get a job and go to work. It happens if you are an Army Ranger and you’re deployed overseas and your kid is staying with your parents. Still a mother. Still not a job. Working or staying home, one is still a mother. One is not better than the other. Both choices are worthy of the same amount of respect.
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Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person)
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The grandparents are raising the children because the biological parents have skipped off—for whatever reason, not always meth. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have often meant that both parents in a military family get deployed at once, and they leave their children with their grandparents. Layoffs of single working mothers lead a lot of families to decide to become multigenerational again. A wave of bipolar disorders and addiction to video games and gambling has also taken a toll on families.
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Rinker Buck (The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey)
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My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner—financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy—so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared.When he retired, he reached new levels of preparedness, so his car contained bottled water, hand wipes, a roadside emergency kit with flares, books on tape, a coin dispenser, and two hand towels to use as makeshift bibs so he and my mother could drive and eat without making a mess.
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Jancee Dunn
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We found out that Chris would be deploying very soon after Bubba was due. I was so thrilled about being a mother that doing it on my own for six months or so didn’t scare me. The fact that Chris wouldn’t be there to share his early days weighed on my heart, but otherwise I was confident and ready.
Right? You may suspect where this is going.
I planned to stay out on maternity leave as long as possible, then get some help once I had to go back to work.
I remained on the job until a couple of weeks before my due date. I was as big as a house and twice as hungry. Bubba-Chris’s nickname for our son-would move around every so often. Like most moms-to-be, I wanted to share the sensation with my husband. And like many fathers-to-be, Chris was just a little nervous about that.
“He’s moving,” I’d tell Chris. “Want to feel?”
“No, no, I’m good.”
Here’s a guy who is totally calm under fire, who can deal with all sorts of difficult physical situations, to say nothing of severe wounds-but put a pregnant belly in front of him and he turns to timid mush.
Men.
“I don’t know what that thing is,” he said, trying to explain his squeamishness. “When the baby’s born, that’s my baby.”
There’s a reason women are the ones who have the babies. Though I will admit that seeing my stomach move and poke out on its own did remind me of the movie Alien.
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Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
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The black conservatives claim that the decline of values such as patience, deferred gratification, and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth. And certainly these sad realities must be candidly confronted. But nowhere in their writings do the new black conservatives examine the pervasiveness of sexual and military images used by the mass media and deployed by the advertising industry in order to entice and titillate consumers. Black conservatives thus overlook the degree to which market forces of advanced capitalist processes thrive on sexual and military images.
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Cornel West (Race Matters)
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Security had changed at the hotel as well, with armed SWAT teams deployed in the stairwells. Our family and closest friends were already in the suite, everyone smiling, kids racing around the room, and yet the atmosphere was still strangely muted, as if the reality of what was about to happen hadn’t yet settled in their minds. My mother-in-law, in particular, made no pretense of being relaxed; through the din, I noticed her sitting on the couch, her eyes fixed on the television, her expression one of disbelief. I tried to imagine what she must be thinking, having grown up just a few miles away during a time when there were still many Chicago neighborhoods that Blacks could not even safely enter; a time when office work was out of reach for most Blacks, and her father, unable to get a union card from white-controlled trade unions, had been forced to make do as an itinerant tradesman; a time when the thought of a Black U.S. president would have seemed as far-fetched as a pig taking flight. I took a seat next to her on the couch. “You okay?” I asked. Marian shrugged and kept staring at the television. She said, “This is kind of too much.” “I know.” I took her hand and squeezed it, the two of us sitting in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then suddenly a shot of my face flashed up on the TV screen and ABC News announced that I would be the forty-fourth president of the United States.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”
A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders.
In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.
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Michael Lind (The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite)
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August 18, 2006
It was so nice to talk to you tonight. I always wind up in a better mood after talking to you. Somehow you always manage to brighten my life even when in a hell hole like this. You are the greatest woman ever, and I will never understand how I got so lucky to have been blessed with you. I appreciate all you do. You are the strongest person I know, and I admire you, and respect you. I am always extremely proud of you. I know with all that has happened with Marc and Biggles, you have gone out of your way to try to make everyone feel better. Even though I know that is your worst nightmare. I don’t know many people who could be there, and put themselves through the pain just to make someone you don’t even know more comfortable. You are an angel sent by God. Now you have given me two more angels. Remember Satan was once an angel of God, so Bubba is an angel, but just which side is sometimes debatable. Just joking. I know he can be very trying sometimes, and you have kept your cool way better than I ever could have. Our kids are so lucky to have you as their mother. So am I.
I cannot wait to get back into your arms. Talking about it tonight felt so good. Knowing that this whole thing is coming to an end. I dream about the day I step off that plane to see you. Hope you have no plans for the rest of your life, because you’re gonna be a little busy. I miss you so much!!!
I loved talking to Bubba tonight. I love hearing him tell me he loves me, but I also don’t want to force him to say it. I know inside that he loves me. He just gets a little busy with everything going on around him. I can’t wait to play with him and chase him around the house. I was also thinking, all this time I’ve been wanting to talk to Bubba because he can talk back to me, but I want Angel to hear my voice, too. I want her to be a little familiar with me if at least my voice.
Anyway, I love you with all my heart, and can’t wait to see you again. I am gonna smother you like crazy. You’ll be begging me to go on another deployment so you can get a little break. Too bad. You’re stuck with me now. I love you, sexy!
XOXOXOXOXOXOOX
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Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
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Oh God, what do we do?"
"Do?" Levi said, looking oddly triumphant, like his plans for the night had finally materialized, Like he had been hoping for some disaster like this to happen so he didn't have to be bored anymore. Like even a dying girl in his bathtub was better than calling his mother to confirm that his grandfather actually was dead, and that what he had heard on the answering machine wasn't a mere auditory hallucination. "We save her, of course.
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Matthew J. Hefti (A Hard And Heavy Thing)
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When deployed in rap vernacular, the word villain feels slightly anachronistic, particularly when prefaced by the adjective mother-fuckin’. It’s a little old-timey. But there simply wasn’t a word that better described N.W.A’s public aspirations with such accuracy. I suppose gangsta is the only other word that came close, a modifier so flexible it could even be used to describe how rappers operated their cars. If you lowered the seat and tilted your body toward the vehicle’s passenger side, the posture was referred to as the “gangsta lean.” Spawned in 1972 by forgotten R&B wunderkind William DeVaughn, “gangsta lean” is an amazingly evocative term, particularly to those who did not initially know what it meant. But once you unpacked the definition, it merely outlined a villainous way to drive your jalopy to White Castle, operating from the position that appearing villainous was an important way to appear at all possible times. This was very, very important to the members of N.W.A. It was the only thing they seemed to worry about. Everything they attempted had to possess criminal undertones. I can only assume they spent hours trying to deduce villainous ways to microwave popcorn (and if they’d succeeded, there would absolutely be a song about it, assumedly titled “Pop Goes the Corn Killa” or “45 Seconds to Bitch Snack”).
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Chuck Klosterman (I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined))
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Of all the kingdoms, the one I least want to fight is the Eastland Territories. The Summerlanders, brutal as they are, fight for life and land, but the Eastlanders fight from a place of greed, a place of sheer privilege and perceived domination. Their sovereign, the Prince of the East, is more like a mythical figure than a true leader. Father always assured me he exists, a man who somehow steals life and magick from others to grant himself immortality and power his own dark desires. A man made of shadows, souls, and sin. The Eastland armies have never invaded the Northlands, though, and I can’t imagine why the prince would deploy them here now. Hurt flashes across Mother’s face.
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Charissa Weaks (The Witch Collector (Witch Walker #1))
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Yet, forget ICOs for a moment. When it comes to the mother lode of deployable capital, the real heavyweight title belongs to sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). These investment behemoths hold an estimated $8.5 trillion in assets. That’s trillion, with a “T.
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
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The embryo’s DNA differs markedly from the mother’s, and yet in the great majority of cases the mother’s body recognizes that this microscopic new person is not a foreign attacker, so her body doesn’t deploy its defense mechanisms to kill the baby. No one really knows how this works or what mechanisms are involved, but the mother’s tolerance for her baby’s body is recognized in the medical community as one of the great wonders of pregnancy.
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Steve Laufmann (Your Designed Body)
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As a mother, I found these school shootings devastating. With decades of mass shootings, we’ve now learned that there is no benefit for first responders to delay entry into a facility. Previously, they had assumed that a shooter had some agenda and that by not entering, police could convince them to stop their violence. After Columbine, police were trained in a new tactic: immediate action rapid deployment.8 Speed, in other words, could have saved those children. It is worth noting that years later, conventional wisdom has begun to change again. The new understanding is that students could know what to do if there was an active shooter if it was explained to them but that formal active shooter drills are less beneficial than once thought. The trauma to students, especially younger ones, outweighs any benefit they may gain.9
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Juliette Kayyem (The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters)
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It has nothing to do with a lack of skills or errors in deployment – sometimes mother nature just takes over.
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Mark Becker (The Darkest Skies)
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(again, deploying that mother of all skill sets in NLP, calibration),
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John Grinder (The Origins Of Neuro Linguistic Programming)
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The nineteenth century supported this differentiation with two popular though seemingly inconsistent propositions; women already have all the power they can use, and outside the home, women are ill-equipped to exercise any power at all. [...] In fact, Victorian ideologues did not scruple to deploy both arguments together; they merged into one, just as they merged in men’s unconscious into the covert but very real fear of woman. In their anxiety over the transformations haunting their century, men — and women — regressed to primitive, childlike ways of seeing the mother, the source of nourishment, as the source of mortal perils as well.
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Peter Gay (The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred)
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I tried to make myself feel better by asking, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” The answer always came back the same: “We’ll go bankrupt, I’ll lose everybody’s money including my mother’s, I’ll have to lay off all the people who have been working so hard in a very bad economy, all of the customers who trusted me will be screwed, and my reputation will be ruined.” Funny, asking that question never made me feel any better. Then one day I asked myself a different question: “What would I do if we went bankrupt?” The answer that I came up with surprised me: “I’d buy our software, Opsware, which runs in Loudcloud, out of bankruptcy and start a software company.” Opsware was the software that we’d written to automate all the tasks of running the cloud: provisioning servers and networking equipment, deploying applications, recovering the environment in case of disaster, and so forth. Then I asked myself another question: “Is there a way to do that without going bankrupt?
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Captain Kobzar, who had every reason to expect a leisurely refitting of the K-129, was also surprised by the abruptness of the orders. The order to embark on a new mission six months before schedule was completely out of keeping with the Soviet navy’s deployment routine for the missile boats. The sub had been in port only six weeks. What new mission could be so urgent that the normal home port call had to be drastically curtailed? Could replacements be found for the key crew members spread throughout Mother Russia on leave—most of them thousands of miles and many days’ travel away? Even if the furloughed crewmen could be contacted, most would never have time to arrange travel and return for sailing on such short notice.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)
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Each of the Gods at the center of these diverse cosmogonies is not just a creator, but the creator, and in a unique way. It is not a question of these different Gods being responsible for different parts of the cosmos, or having different discrete functions in an integrated system. Rather, each such Creator is responsible for the cosmos as a whole, but through a different concept, in each case, of what creation is. Each cosmogony is thus its own science of being, or ontology. Note also that it is no obstacle that Isis, for example, occurs in the fourth ‘generation’, so to speak, of the Gods, according to the most common accounts; She can still be understood as the Creator, eternally arranging the conditions for Her own cosmic emergence. Nothing about the generational or familial relations among the Gods has much effect upon Their ability to operate in this fashion as ultimate Creator. Some Egyptian theological texts deploy specific terminology to explicitly render a God self-creating, such as the epithet kamutef, literally ‘bull of his mother’, that is, having conceived themselves, or in a feminine version, ‘mother who became a daughter’, but even in the absence of such terminology it is simply a pragmatic expectation in Egyptian theological texts that insofar as a God occupies the center of attention even momentarily, that God is rendered supreme.
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Edward P. Butler (The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World)