Do Summaries Have Quotes

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author." [As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website.]

Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.

I have a colleague who often tells people, “Look, allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. You would be better off being dependent on heroin. As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it’s there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.” As a matter of fact, it is no accident that the most common disturbance that passive dependent people manifest beyond their relationships to others is dependency on drugs and alcohol. Theirs is the “addictive personality.” They are addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up, and when people are not available to be sucked and gobbled, they often turn to the bottle or the needle or the pill as a people-substitute. In summary, dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another.

… I do not feel that life is a downhill run. Nor do I think of it as an arc that rises steadily until it reaches its apogee, tapers, and arches back to earth. The fate we choose is inscribed in multiple flights. Some follow the gravity of rise and fall, while others - those of the spirit for example - may never head downward, but climb steadily to the end, where they just drop cliff-like into the dark. Consequently, there is no right time for last words, no point of demarcation for our adieux. There is no designated moment to set down the summary thoughts of a mind still counting. Whether you begin to die at the beginning … or whether you burn brightly to the end, you can’t wait forever to pass to others what you have learned…

In summary, parents matter, schools matter and life experiences matter, but they don't make a difference in shaping who we are. DNA is the only thing that makes a substantial systematic difference, accounting for 50 per cent of the variance in psychological traits. The rest comes down to chance environmental experiences that do not have long-term effects.

No one is born with confidence. People who radiate confidence have conquered fear and worry. They’ve done so through action as action does cure fear. Hesitation only increases fear so take action promptly and be decisive. To conquer your fear do the following: Isolate your fear and determine exactly what you are afraid of. Identify the action that can overcome the fear.

To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we have to have three spaces opened up within us - and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the summary work of spirituality - and it is indeed work. Yes, it is also the work of “a Power greater than ourselves,” and it will lead to a great luminosity and depth of seeing. That is why true faith is one of the most holistic and free actions a human can perform. It leads to such broad and deep perception that most traditions would just call it “light.” Remember, Jesus said that we also are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14), as well as saying it about himself (John 8:12). Strange that we see light in him but do not imitate him in seeing the same light in ourselves. Such luminous seeing is quite the opposite of the closed-minded, dead-hearted, body-denying thing that much religion has been allowed to become. As you surely have heard before, “Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell and come out enlightened.” The innocuous mental belief systems of much religion are probably the major cause of atheism in the world today, because people see that religion has not generally created people who are that different, more caring, or less prejudiced than other people. In fact, they are often worse because they think they have God on their small side. I wish I did not have to say this, but religion either produces the very best people or the very worst. Jesus makes this point in many settings and stories. Mere mental belief systems split people apart, whereas actual faith puts all our parts (body, heart, and head) on notice and on call. Honestly, it takes major surgery and much of one’s life to get head, heart, and body to put down their defenses, their false programs for happiness, and their many forms of resistance to what is right in front of them. This is the meat and muscle of the whole conversion process.

Summary of the Science of Getting Rich There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought. Man can form things in his thought, and by impressing his thought upon formless substance can cause the thing he thinks about to be created. In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; otherwise he cannot be in harmony with the Formless Intelligence, which is always creative and never competitive in spirit. Man may come into full harmony with the Formless Substance by entertaining a lively and sincere gratitude for the blessings it bestows upon him. Gratitude unifies the mind of man with the intelligence of Substance, so that man’s thoughts are received by the Formless. Man can remain upon the creative plane only by uniting himself with the Formless Intelligence through a deep and continuous feeling of gratitude. Man must form a clear and definite mental image of the things he wishes to have, to do, or to become; and he must hold this mental image in his thoughts, while being deeply grateful to the Supreme that all his desires are granted to him. The man who wishes to get rich must spend his leisure hours in contemplating his Vision, and in earnest thanksgiving that the reality is being given to him. Too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of frequent contemplation of the mental image, coupled with unwavering faith and devout gratitude. This is the process by which the impression is given to the Formless, and the creative forces set in motion. The creative energy works through the established channels of natural growth, and of the industrial and social order. All that is included in his mental image will surely be brought to the man who follows the instructions given above, and whose faith does not waver. What he wants will come to him through the ways of established trade and commerce. In order to receive his own when it shall come to him, man must be active; and this activity can only consist in more than filling his present place. He must keep in mind the Purpose to get rich through the realization of his mental image. And he must do, every day, all that can be done that day, taking care to do each act in a successful manner. He must give to every man a use value in excess of the cash value he receives, so that each transaction makes for more life; and he must so hold the Advancing Thought that the impression of increase will be communicated to all with whom he comes in contact. The men and women who practice the foregoing instructions will certainly get rich; and the riches they receive will be in exact proportion to the definiteness of their vision, the fixity of their purpose, the steadiness of their faith, and the depth of their gratitude.

My favorite summary of the concept of defining your own responsibility for the problems of others was given in a joke, current several years ago. After being surrounded by 10,000 hostile Indians, the Lone Ranger turned to Tonto and remarked, “I guess this is it, Kimo Sabe. It looks like we have had it,” whereupon Tonto, surveying the impending disaster, turned and replied, “What do you mean we, white man?

When people bait on your stupidity.  They know that you are stupid enough to believe everything they say. You will follow and do whatever they want you to do, And you do follow, thinking you are smart and clever one ,the brightest candle in the room. You think you are in charge and you're leading. only to find out you are being used. You have no clue ,on what is really going on. In summary that is politics and cult life.

Your identity does not have to be cohesive. Your story doesn’t have to flow. You don’t have to be neatly packaged in a way that other people understand. You have to stop living for your synopsis, the summary we try to piece together in our minds when we imagine people explaining us or evaluating who we are. It doesn’t have to make sense. You’re allowed to be great at a lot of things that don’t necessarily relate to one another. You’re not limited to just one purpose, one talent, one love. You can have a variety of jobs, each of them meaningful at the time you have them. You can be good at a lot of things without lacking in others. You do not have to be a novel; you can be a book of stories.

As I wander along the hundreds of pristine spines, time unspools around me, the current slowing. I have nowhere to be. Nothing to do but peruse summaries and pull quotes on dust jackets, skimming some last pages and leaving others unread. Again and again, I ask, What about this one, Mom? Would you like this? And then, Would I like this? Because that matters too.

What is the one-sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting” (Larry Page, University of Michigan Commencement Address, May 2009).

All organizations have habits and cultures. The question is whether they are designed deliberately, or allowed to form without guidance. Dysfunctional cultures tend to come from the latter. Organizational

If you're working in an organization which has an unhealthy culture, you will have almost a constant flow of cortisol and this will cause stress. You won't feel safe and therefore will therefore be unable to do your best work.

To be right, a person must do one of two things: either he must learn to have God in his work and hold fast to him there, or he must give up his work altogether. Since, however, man cannot live without activities that are both human and various, we must learn to keep God in everything we do, and whatever the job or place, keep on with him, letting nothing stand in our way. It would be difficult to find a better summary of the Gita’s message anywhere

As we look twenty years to the future, we can confidently expect to produce and consume far more than we do today. We’ll have to trust nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize production

It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, “A bit early to say.” (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, “I seem to have cancer today.”) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask... It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body. But it’s not really possible to adopt a stance of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don’t really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five. Quite rightly, some take me up on it. I recently had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my niece’s wedding, in my old hometown and former university in Oxford. This depressed me for more than one reason, and an especially close friend inquired, “Is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?” As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too. And yet I had absolutely invited the question. Telling someone else, with deliberate realism, that once I’d had a few more scans and treatments I might be told by the doctors that things from now on could be mainly a matter of “management,” I again had the wind knocked out of me when she said, “Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.” How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said myself. But again there was the unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self–centered and even solipsistic.

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both.

Actively and aggressively re-contact people who have been high volume customers in the past, and give them rational reasons to begin doing business with your company again. They have the potential to once again become high-value current customers. Give them every encouragement possible.

[WAIT—IT WON’T LET ME REDACT THESE LITTLE SUBHEADING THINGS? THAT’S SUPER ANNOYING!] [FINE, I’LL JUST GIVE YOU MY SUMMARY.] [SO, WHOEVER WROTE THIS WAS ALL BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-STELLARLUNE-SOMETHING-SOMETHING-LEGACY. BUT SERIOUSLY, NO ONE WANTS TO READ ABOUT THE CREEPY STUFF MY MOM DID BEFORE SHE GOT PREGNANT WITH ME! (AND WE’RE ALL SUPER SICK OF HEARING ABOUT MY “LEGACY,” AMIRITE?) SO, LET’S JUST LEAVE IT AT THIS: MY MOM IS EVIL. SHE THINKS SHE’S WAY SMARTER THAN SHE IS. AND NOTHING SHE DID IS GOING TO AFFECT MY GENERAL AWESOMENESS, OKAY?] A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY: [WOW, HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH SUCH A CLEVER TITLE?!] [AND YEAH, I HAVE A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY. NOT SURE WHY ANYONE CARES. BUT IT DOES COME IN HANDY DURING MIDTERMS AND FINALS.] AHEAD OF THE GAME: [BASICALLY: I’M A GENIUS. I SKIPPED LEVEL ONE AT FOXFIRE. YES, YOU SHOULD BE IMPRESSED.] UNREASONABLY HIGH STANDARDS: [GOTTA ADMIT, I WAS TEMPTED TO LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE, SINCE WHOEVER WROTE IT ACTUALLY GOT THINGS PRETTY MUCH RIGHT. I GUESS EVEN THE COUNCIL KNOWS MY DAD’S A JERK WHO FREAKS OUT ALL THE TIME BECAUSE I’M NOT A LITTLE MINI-HIM. WHO KNEW?] A POWERFUL EMPATH: [UGH, THAT’S THE BEST YOU COULD DO FOR THIS SUBHEADING???] [HOW ABOUT “LORD OF THE FEELS”? OR “TRUST THE EMPATH”! OR “HE KNOWS WHAT YOU’RE FEELING—AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF”?] [OOO! I’VE GOT IT! “HE KNOWS FOSTER BETTER THAN YOU DO! BETTER THAN SHE EVEN KNOWS HERSELF!”] [THOUGH… KEEPING IT REAL? THE FOSTER OBLIVION CAN BE KINDA NOT COOL SOMETIMES.] THE HEART OF THE MATTER: [I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GUYS NAMED A SECTION OF MY FILE AFTER MY FATHER’S SUPER-BORING BOOK—AND THEN RAMBLED ON FOR TWO PAGES ABOUT HIS SUPER-BORING THEORY!!!!!] [YOU DON’T NEED TWO PAGES ON IT. YOU DON’T EVEN NEED TWO SENTENCES. HERE’S ALLLLLL YOU NEED TO KNOW—BESIDES THE FACT THAT HE’S TOTALLY NOT THE FIRST PERSON TO COME UP WITH THIS (JUST THE ONE WHO LOVES TO TAKE CREDIT): OUR HEADS AND OUR HEARTS SOMETIMES FEEL DIFFERENT EMOTIONS, AND WHAT’S IN OUR HEARTS IS PROBABLY STRONGER.] [THAT’S IT!] [WELL… OKAY… I GUESS HE ALSO GOES ON A BIT ABOUT HOW EMPATHS PROBABLY ONLY READ THE EMOTIONS FROM THE HEAD.] [AND THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT HEART EMOTIONS BEING PURER BECAUSE NO ONE CAN CONTROL THEM.] [BUT THAT’S IT.] [AND DON’T TELL LORD BORINGPANTS I READ HIS DUMB BOOK! I MOSTLY SKIMMED.] PRANKSTER AND TROUBLEMAKER: [100 PERCENT ACCURATE. ALSO, I’M LEAVING YOUR LITTLE ATTACHED DETENTION RECORD BECAUSE IT’S THE GREATEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!!!!]

That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists... You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

What you describe is parasitism, not love. When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in your relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love. Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other. We all-each and every one of us-even if we try to pretend to others and to ourselves that we don't have dependency needs and feelings, all of us have desires to be babied, to be nurtured without effort on our parts, to be cared for by persons stronger than us who have our interests truly at heart. No matter how strong we are, no matter how caring and responsible and adult, if we look clearly into ourselves we will find the wish to be taken care of for a change. Each one of us, no matter how old and mature, looks for and would like to have in his or her life a satisfying mother figure and father figure. But for most of us these desires or feelings do not rule our lives; they are not the predominant theme of our existence. When they do rule our lives and dictate the quality of our existence, then we have something more than just dependency needs or feelings; we are dependent. Specifically, one whose life is ruled and dictated by dependency needs suffers from a psychiatric disorder to which we ascribe the diagnostic name "passive dependent personality disorder." It is perhaps the most common of all psychiatric disorders. People with this disorder, passive dependent people, are so busy seeking to be loved that they have no energy left to love…..This rapid changeability is characteristic of passive dependent individuals. It is as if it does not matter whom they are dependent upon as long as there is just someone. It does not matter what their identity is as long as there is someone to give it to them. Consequently their relationships, although seemingly dramatic in their intensity, are actually extremely shallow. Because of the strength of their sense of inner emptiness and the hunger to fill it, passive dependent people will brook no delay in gratifying their need for others. If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and you cannot be a person worthy of love when your primary goal in life is to passively be loved. Passive dependency has its genesis in lack of love. The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents' failure to fulfill their needs for affection, attention and care during their childhood. It was mentioned in the first section that children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deep seated feeling that they are lovable and valuable and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves. Children growing up in an atmosphere in which love and care are lacking or given with gross inconsistency enter adulthood with no such sense of inner security. Rather, they have an inner sense of insecurity, a feeling of "I don't have enough" and a sense that the world is unpredictable and ungiving, as well as a sense of themselves as being questionably lovable and valuable. It is no wonder, then, that they feel the need to scramble for love, care and attention wherever they can find it, and once having found it, cling to it with a desperation that leads them to unloving, manipulative, Machiavellian behavior that destroys the very relationships they seek to preserve. In summary, dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.

Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we can. Or so most participants in world history’s most insatiably consumerist society, the United States, continue implicitly to claim through their actions, considering the number of self-identified American Christians in the early twenty-first century who seem bent on acquiring ever more and better stuff, including those who espouse the “prosperity Gospel” within American religious hyperpluralism.190 Tocqueville’s summary description of Americans in the early 1830s has proven a prophetic understatement: “people want to do as well as possible in this world without giving up their chances in the next.

In concluding this discussion of the basic fallacies in Communism we should perhaps make a summary comment on the most significant fallacy of them all. This is the Communist doctrine that problems can be solved by eliminating the institution from which the problems emanate. Even Marx and Engels may have been unaware that this was what they were doing, but the student will note how completely this approach dominates every problem they undertook to solve.

What we feel and how we feel is far more important than what we think and how we think. Feeling is the stuff of which our consciousness is made, the atmosphere in which all our thinking and all our conduct is bathed. All the motives which govern and drive our lives are emotional. Love and hate, anger and fear, curiosity and joy are the springs of all that is most noble and most detestable in the history of men and nations. The opening sentence of a sermon is an opportunity. A good introduction arrests me. It handcuffs me and drags me before the sermon, where I stand and hear a Word that makes me both tremble and rejoice. The best sermon introductions also engage the listener immediately. It’s a rare sermon, however, that suffers because of a good introduction. Mysteries beg for answers. People’s natural curiosity will entice them to stay tuned until the puzzle is solved. Any sentence that points out incongruity, contradiction, paradox, or irony will do. Talk about what people care about. Begin writing an introduction by asking, “Will my listeners care about this?” (Not, “Why should they care about this?”) Stepping into the pulpit calmly and scanning the congregation to the count of five can have a remarkable effect on preacher and congregation alike. It is as if you are saying, “I’m about to preach the Word of God. I want all of you settled. I’m not going to begin, in fact, until I have your complete attention.” No sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. The getting of that sentence is the hardest, most exacting, and most fruitful labor of study. We tend to use generalities for compelling reasons. Specifics often take research and extra thought, precious commodities to a pastor. Generalities are safe. We can’t help but use generalities when we can’t remember details of a story or when we want anonymity for someone. Still, the more specific their language, the better speakers communicate. I used to balk at spending a large amount of time on a story, because I wanted to get to the point. Now I realize the story gets the point across better than my declarative statements. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Limits—that is, form—challenge the mind, forcing creativity. Needless words weaken our offense. Listening to some speakers, you have to sift hundreds of gallons of water to get one speck of gold. If the sermon is so complicated that it needs a summary, its problems run deeper than the conclusion. The last sentence of a sermon already has authority; when the last sentence is Scripture, this is even more true. No matter what our tone or approach, we are wise to craft the conclusion carefully. In fact, given the crisis and opportunity that the conclusion presents—remember, it will likely be people’s lasting memory of the message—it’s probably a good practice to write out the conclusion, regardless of how much of the rest of the sermon is written. It is you who preaches Christ. And you will preach Christ a little differently than any other preacher. Not to do so is to deny your God-given uniqueness. Aim for clarity first. Beauty and eloquence should be added to make things even more clear, not more impressive. I’ll have not praise nor time for those who suppose that writing comes by some divine gift, some madness, some overflow of feeling. I’m especially grim on Christians who enter the field blithely unprepared and literarily innocent of any hard work—as though the substance of their message forgives the failure of its form.

I have used the theologians and their treatment of apocalypse as a model of what we might expect to find not only in more literary treatments of the same radical fiction, but in the literary treatment of radical fictions in general. The assumptions I have made in doing so I shall try to examine next time. Meanwhile it may be useful to have some kind of summary account of what I've been saying. The main object: is the critical business of making sense of some of the radical ways of making sense of the world. Apocalypse and the related themes are strikingly long-lived; and that is the first thing to say tbout them, although the second is that they change. The Johannine acquires the characteristics of the Sibylline Apocalypse, and develops other subsidiary fictions which, in the course of time, change the laws we prescribe to nature, and specifically to time. Men of all kinds act, as well as reflect, as if this apparently random collocation of opinion and predictions were true. When it appears that it cannot be so, they act as if it were true in a different sense. Had it been otherwise, Virgil could not have been altissimo poeta in a Christian tradition; the Knight Faithful and True could not have appeared in the opening stanzas of "The Faerie Queene". And what is far more puzzling, the City of Apocalypse could not have appeared as a modern Babylon, together with the 'shipmen and merchants who were made rich by her' and by the 'inexplicable splendour' of her 'fine linen, and purple and scarlet,' in The Waste Land, where we see all these things, as in Revelation, 'come to nought.' Nor is this a matter of literary allusion merely. The Emperor of the Last Days turns up as a Flemish or an Italian peasant, as Queen Elizabeth or as Hitler; the Joachite transition as a Brazilian revolution, or as the Tudor settlement, or as the Third Reich. The apocalyptic types--empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe--are fed by history and underlie our ways of making sense of the world from where we stand, in the middest.

One of the best-kept secrets in all of health care — understood by few doctors — is that the peer reviewers, medical journal editors, and guideline writers, who are assumed to be performing due diligence to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the data reported from company-sponsored studies, do not have access to the real data from these trials. The published reports that doctors accept as fully vetted scientific evidence can be more accurately described as unverified data summaries prepared largely by or for the sponsoring drug companies.

In summary, listen to your “gut feeling,” especially in potentially dangerous situations. If you are a woman and have been asked out on a date or approached by a man who causes a sense something is wrong -don’t do it! If you are with your family and are driving or walking through a neighborhood and you sense something is wrong, don’t go there. If you are in a business deal and you sense your contact is deceiving you, listen to your intuition. Practice listening to this lightning fast retrieval of data, learn how to analyze it for accuracy and how to appropriately act on it. It could save your life.

How Should You Listen? Carl Rogers, one of the twentieth century’s great psychotherapists, knew something about listening. He wrote, “The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.”159 He knew that listening could transform people. On that, Rogers commented, “Some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people, and that you have never seen such results. The chances are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described.” He suggested that his readers conduct a short experiment when they next found themselves in a dispute: “Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: ‘Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.’” I have found this technique very useful, in my private life and in my practice. I routinely summarize what people have said to me, and ask them if I have understood properly. Sometimes they accept my summary. Sometimes I am offered a small correction. Now and then I am wrong completely. All of that is good to know.

Note: I won’t be considering any theologically based Judeo-Christian views about these subjects beyond this broad summary here. As far as I can tell, most of the theological discussions center around omniscience—if God’s all-knowingness includes knowing the future, how can we ever freely, willingly choose between two options (let alone be judged for our choice)? Amid the numerous takes on this, one answer is that God is outside of time, such that past, present, and future are meaningless concepts (implying, among other things, that God could never relax by going to a movie and being pleasantly surprised by a plot turn—He always knows that the butler didn’t do it). Another answer is one of the limited God, something explored by Aquinas—God cannot sin, cannot make a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, cannot make a square circle (or, as another example that I’ve seen offered by a surprising number of male but not female theologians, even God cannot make a married bachelor). In other words, God cannot do everything, He can just do whatever is possible, and foreseeing whether someone will choose good or evil is not knowable, even for Him. Related to this all, Sam Harris mordantly notes that even if we each have a soul, we sure didn’t get to pick it.

Howe's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and receive mercy. The ministry recommended the same plan to Gage, and this is what the tories call making their peace, "a peace which passeth all understanding" indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. Ye men of Pennsylvania, do reason upon these things! Were the back counties to give up their arms, they would fall an easy prey to the Indians, who are all armed: this perhaps is what some Tories would not be sorry for. Were the home counties to deliver up their arms, they would be exposed to the resentment of the back counties who would then have it in their power to chastise their defection at pleasure. And were any one state to give up its arms, that state must be garrisoned by all Howe's army of Britons and Hessians to preserve it from the anger of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.

But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The Bed-Post; Its Significance—Security Essential to Idea of Sleep—Night Felt as Infinite—Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on. He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind—Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil—Is Modesty Natural?—Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc." None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try.

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words-to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves-that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that ‘beauty born of murmuring sound’ will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.

There are several primary advantages to this process of summary. The first advantage is that I genuinely come to understand what the person is saying. Of this, Rogers notes, “Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But if you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. If you really understand a person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.” More salutary words have rarely been written.

According to Shaivism, anupaya may also be reached by entering into the infinite blissfulness of the Self through the powerful experiences of sensual pleasures. This practice is designed to help the practitioner reach the highest levels by accelerating their progress through the sakta and sambhava upayas. These carefully guarded doctrines of Tantric sadhana are the basis for certain practices, like the use of the five makaras (hrdaya) mentioned earlier. The experience of a powerful sensual pleasure quickly removes a person’s dullness or indifference. It awakens in them the hidden nature and source of blissfulness and starts its inner vibration. Abhinavagupta says that only those people who are awakened to their own inner vitality can truly be said to have a heart (hrdaya). They are known as sahrdaya (connoisseurs). Those uninfluenced by this type of experiences are said to be heartless. In his words: “It is explained thus—The heart of a person, shedding of its attitude of indifference while listening to the sweet sounds of a song or while feeling the delightful touch of something like sandalpaste, immediately starts a wonderful vibratory movement. (This) is called ananda-sakti and because of its presence the person concerned is considered to have a heart (in their body) (Tantraloka, III.209-10). People who do not become one (with such blissful experiences), and who do not feel their physical body being merged into it, are said to be heartless because their consciousness itself remains immersed (in the gross body) (ibid., III.24).” The philosopher Jayaratha addresses this topic as well when he quotes a verse from a work by an author named Parasastabhutipada: “The worship to be performed by advanced aspirants consists of strengthening their position in the basic state of (infinite and blissful pure consciousness), on the occasions of the experiences of all such delightful objects which are to be seen here as having sweet and beautiful forms (Tantraloka, II.219).” These authors are pointing out that if people participate in pleasurable experiences with that special sharp alertness known as avadhana, they will become oblivious to the limitations of their usual body-consciousness and their pure consciousness will be fully illumined. According to Vijnanabhairava: “A Shiva yogin, having directed his attention to the inner bliss which arises on the occasion of some immense joy, or on seeing a close relative after a long time, should immerse his mind in that bliss and become one with it (Vijnanabhairava, 71). A yogin should fix his mind on each phenomenon which brings satisfaction (because) his own state of infinite bliss arises therein (ibid., 74).” In summary, Kashmir Shaivism is a philosophy that embraces life in its totality. Unlike puritanical systems it does not shy away from the pleasant and aesthetically pleasing aspects of life as somehow being unspiritual or contaminated. On the contrary, great importance has been placed on the aesthetic quality of spiritual practice in Kashmir Shaivism. In fact, recognizing and celebrating the aesthetic aspect of the Absolute is one of the central principles of this philosophy. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. 124–125.

In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.” Atheism, while making some great arguments and growing in popularity, hasn’t provided an alternative “myth” or set of ethics. While I do consider myself an Atheist, I acknowledge some of the strong values that come with religions like Christianity. In the absence of a reality to replace the myth, people seem to gravitate to another myth, such as government. In order to eliminate false beliefs in myths - we must replace them - either with another myth (less than ideal) - or a reality. I hope that science and philosophy can fill the void where unhealthy believes have been fostered at present. I hope that one day authoritarian government, violent religions, and other irrational beliefs can be replaced with an objective system of ethics.

The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers' vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood. The authors also share an attitude: they do not hide the passion and relish that drive them to tell us about their subjects. They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn't capture it. They write as if they have something important to show. And that, we shall see, is a key ingredient in the sense of style.

One other thing. And this really matters for readers of this book. According to official Myers–Briggs documents, the test can ‘give you an insight into what kinds of work you might enjoy and be successful doing’. So if you are, like me, classified as ‘INTJ’ (your dominant traits are being introverted, intuitive and having a preference for thinking and judging), the best-fit occupations include management consultant, IT professional and engineer.30 Would a change to one of these careers make me more fulfilled? Unlikely, according to respected US psychologist David Pittenger, because there is ‘no evidence to show a positive relation between MBTI type and success within an occupation…nor is there any data to suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types’. Then why is the MBTI so popular? Its success, he argues, is primarily due to ‘the beguiling nature of the horoscope-like summaries of personality and steady marketing’.31 Personality tests have their uses, even if they do not reveal any scientific ‘truth’ about us. If we are in a state of confusion they can be a great emotional comfort, offering a clear diagnosis of why our current job may not be right, and suggesting others that might suit us better. They also raise interesting hypotheses that aid self-reflection: until I took the MBTI, I had certainly never considered that IT could offer me a bright future (by the way, I apparently have the wrong personality type to be a writer). Yet we should be wary about relying on them as a magic pill that enables us suddenly to hit upon a dream career. That is why wise career counsellors treat such tests with caution, using them as only one of many ways of exploring who you are. Human personality does not neatly reduce into sixteen or any other definitive number of categories: we are far more complex creatures than psychometric tests can ever reveal. And as we will shortly learn, there is compelling evidence that we are much more likely to find fulfilling work by conducting career experiments in the real world than by filling out any number of questionnaires.32

I'm going to get lecture-y for a second and add that I think the entire idea of tops and bottems, especially when coming from straight people who fetishize gay people, is an attempt to place some sort of hetero world over gay people. "Oh your're a bottom, so you're the woman." Gay guys who are strictly tops or bottoms tend to embrace this idea, too. Being a top only means you're "manly" or whatever because not being manly is considered bad by like adults and TV and stuff. Gay guys can buy into that crap just as easy as straight people. Whenever you see masc for masc on Grindr or whatever, what you're seeing is someone saying," I don't want people to think I'm like a woman, and I don;t want people to think that you're like a woman because people will think less of us." Sure people have preference but these ideas of masculine and feminine are kind of meaningless. I wear make-up. I think I'm pretty manly! We're all told this crap all the time, but you can reject it. Instead you're enforcing the idea that there is masculine and there is feminine, and that masculine is, for some unexplained reason, better. Finally, and this should probably be clear after the last bit, but you cant tell a top or a bottom or what a person's preferences are just by looking at him! Big, harry, muscled men love taking it up the ass. Trust me, I know. And slim, make-up wearing types, we love to f@$%. And in my case, get f@$%ed, too. Like I said, versatility is the best. So, in summary, it's wrong to assume all gay guys are having anal sex all the time. And it's ridiculous and offensive and stereotyping and hurtful to think that those who are penetrated are girly and those who penetrate are manly, something you've been doing. ... You're email is more like a mean joke you tell your friends, and I think that is because secretly you hate the way you're always being told what a girl should be like. And when you see a gay guy blurring the gender lines a little, like me, you're jealous of him. You want to put him in his place. You want to say, "he's not a man." Because if you can't blur those gender lines without being told you're gross or wrong, then you want to make sure that anyone who does cross those gender lines gets punished the way you would. But you shouldn't be punishing gay guys. You should be braking down the barriers that keep you from being who YOU want to be!

In Jesus, God deals with our bastardisations. The incarnation was the Creator's means of giving us a multisensory, no-holds-barred, tangible experience of the divine nature. God condescended to the limits of our means of knowing reality and truth. We struggle to put our flesh into words, but God's word--God's self-expression--became flesh and dwelled with us, for us. This is nothing short of an act of love, an act of revelation, and act of transferring the fullness of one's self into a vulnerable form so that it can be felt by another. God chooses to step into the range of our grasp, allowing our awareness of the divine to move from abstract imagination to relational discovery. Such a step certainly doesn't remove the mystery of who or what God is. Questions remain. But it does allow us to enter into that mystery with the whole of our beings. We don't have to stop being human to embrace the mystery of God. By God's invitation, we can poke our doubting and enquiring digits into the opened side of the incomprehensible made manifest. As we do so, we can know what God is like; God is like Jesus, and, to use Pastor Brian Zahnd's oft-quoted summary, God has *always* been like Jesus.

You’re afraid you have no talent. You’re afraid you’ll be rejected or criticized or ridiculed or misunderstood or—worst of all—ignored. You’re afraid there’s no market for your creativity, and therefore no point in pursuing it. You’re afraid somebody else already did it better. You’re afraid everybody else already did it better. You’re afraid somebody will steal your ideas, so it’s safer to keep them hidden forever in the dark. You’re afraid you won’t be taken seriously. You’re afraid your work isn’t politically, emotionally, or artistically important enough to change anyone’s life. You’re afraid your dreams are embarrassing. You’re afraid that someday you’ll look back on your creative endeavors as having been a giant waste of time, effort, and money. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of discipline. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of work space, or financial freedom, or empty hours in which to focus on invention or exploration. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of training or degree. You’re afraid you’re too fat. (I don’t know what this has to do with creativity, exactly, but experience has taught me that most of us are afraid we’re too fat, so let’s just put that on the anxiety list, for good measure.) You’re afraid of being exposed as a hack, or a fool, or a dilettante, or a narcissist. You’re afraid of upsetting your family with what you may reveal. You’re afraid of what your peers and coworkers will say if you express your personal truth aloud. You’re afraid of unleashing your innermost demons, and you really don’t want to encounter your innermost demons. You’re afraid your best work is behind you. You’re afraid you never had any best work to begin with. You’re afraid you neglected your creativity for so long that now you can never get it back. You’re afraid you’re too old to start. You’re afraid you’re too young to start. You’re afraid because something went well in your life once, so obviously nothing can ever go well again. You’re afraid because nothing has ever gone well in your life, so why bother trying? You’re afraid of being a one-hit wonder. You’re afraid of being a no-hit wonder . . . Listen, I don’t have all day here, so I’m not going to keep listing fears. It’s a bottomless list, anyhow, and a depressing one. I’ll just wrap up my summary this way: SCARY, SCARY, SCARY. Everything is so goddamn scary. Defending Your Weakness Please understand that the only reason I can speak so authoritatively about fear is that I know it so intimately.

Why are there no queens in the deck?” I asked rather suddenly. “It seems odd.” Suzanne Brantôme, on my left, and Mimi La Salle, on my right, smiled knowingly, and I felt foolish. But Marguerite did not smile. “You have by now read The Book of the City of Ladies, have you not, Anna?” “I have.” “Then you should tell us why the deck has no queens.” “Because…,” I began, but I hesitated, for my mind was racing far ahead of my voice. I wished so very much to please the duchess with my answer. “There has been so little recognition of the contributions of women in every walk of life?” I finally offered, with a woeful lack of confidence in my answer. But Marguerite bade me go on with a subtle nod. “Men have looked down upon our sex,” I said. “They have withheld education and caused us great suffering. They do not see women as fit rulers and…” I stopped and thought about my summary of Christine de Pizan’s work. When I began again, it was slowly, as if the words were falling together into an idea as they were spoken. “So why would men place queens in a deck of cards? It might signify their importance in the world.” Marguerite looked at me with affection and approval. “I have thought the same thoughts many times, as have my ladies at these tables. We all know very well there are no kingdoms without queens.” We sat silent for a moment as we pondered the wisdom of that idea. “Mayhap someday soon there will be queens in the playing cards,” I said hopefully. “If it is left to the men to decide, we shall first see the Second Coming of Christ!” Lady Brantôme declared. Everyone laughed at that. Mimi,

One can do only so much to control one's life,' Ernestine said, and with that, a summary statement as philosophically potent as any she cared to make, she returned the wallet to her handbag, thanked me for lunch, and, gathering herself almost visibly back into that orderly, ordinary existence that rigorously distanced itself from delusionary thinking, whether white or black or in between, she left the car. Instead of my then heading home, I drove crosstown to the cemetery and, after parking on the street, walked in through the gate, and not quite knowing what was happening, standing in the falling darkness beside the uneven earth mound roughly heaped over Coleman's coffin, I was completely seized by his story, by its end and by its beginning, and, then and there, I began this book. I began by wondering what it had been like when Coleman had told Faunia the truth about that beginning--assuming that he ever had; assuming, that is, that he had to have. Assuming that what he could not outright say to me on the day he burst in all but shouting, "Write my story, damn you!" and what he could not say to me when he had to abandon (because of the secret, I now realized) writing the story himself, he could not in the end resist confessing to her, to the college cleaning woman who'd become his comrade-in-arms, the first and last person since Ellie Magee for whom he could strip down and turn around so as to expose, protruding from his naked back, the mechanical key by which he had wound himself up to set off on his great escapade. Ellie, before her Steena, and finally Faunia. The only woman never to know his secret is the woman he spent his life with, his wife. Why Faunia?

Variations on a tired, old theme Here’s another example of addict manipulation that plagues parents. The phone rings. It’s the addict. He says he has a job. You’re thrilled. But you’re also apprehensive. Because you know he hasn’t simply called to tell you good news. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Then comes the zinger you knew would be coming. The request. He says everybody at this company wears business suits and ties, none of which he has. He says if you can’t wire him $1800 right away, he won’t be able to take the job. The implications are clear. Suddenly, you’ve become the deciding factor as to whether or not the addict will be able to take the job. Have a future. Have a life. You’ve got that old, familiar sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. This is not the child you gladly would have financed in any way possible to get him started in life. This is the child who has been strung out on drugs for years and has shown absolutely no interest in such things as having a conventional job. He has also, if you remember correctly, come to you quite a few times with variations on this same tired, old story. One variation called for a car so he could get to work. (Why is it that addicts are always being offered jobs in the middle of nowhere that can’t be reached by public transportation?) Another variation called for the money to purchase a round-trip airline ticket to interview for a job three thousand miles away. Being presented with what amounts to a no-choice request, the question is: Are you going to contribute in what you know is probably another scam, or are you going to say sorry and hang up? To step out of the role of banker/victim/rescuer, you have to quit the job of banker/victim/rescuer. You have to change the coda. You have to forget all the stipulations there are to being a parent. You have to harden your heart and tell yourself parenthood no longer applies to you—not while your child is addicted. Not an easy thing to do. P.S. You know in your heart there is no job starting on Monday. But even if there is, it’s hardly your responsibility if the addict goes well dressed, badly dressed, or undressed. Facing the unfaceable: The situation may never change In summary, you had a child and that child became an addict. Your love for the child didn’t vanish. But you’ve had to wean yourself away from the person your child has become through his or her drugs and/ or alcohol abuse. Your journey with the addicted child has led you through various stages of pain, grief, and despair and into new phases of strength, acceptance, and healing. There’s a good chance that you might not be as healthy-minded as you are today had it not been for the tribulations with the addict. But you’ll never know. The one thing you do know is that you wouldn’t volunteer to go through it again, even with all the awareness you’ve gained. You would never have sacrificed your child just so that you could become a better, stronger person. But this is the way it has turned out. You’re doing okay with it, almost twenty-four hours a day. It’s just the odd few minutes that are hard to get through, like the ones in the middle of the night when you awaken to find that the grief hasn’t really gone away—it’s just under smart, new management. Or when you’re walking along a street or in a mall and you see someone who reminds you of your addicted child, but isn’t a substance abuser, and you feel that void in your heart. You ache for what might have been with your child, the happy life, the fulfilled career. And you ache for the events that never took place—the high school graduation, the engagement party, the wedding, the grandkids. These are the celebrations of life that you’ll probably never get to enjoy. Although you never know. DON’T LET    YOUR KIDS  KILL  YOU  A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children PART 2

Weaknesses in claims about self-esteem have been evident for a long time. In California in the late 1980s, the state governor set up a special taskforce to examine politician John Vasconcellos’s claim that boosting young people’s self-esteem would prevent a range of societal problems (see chapter 1). One of its briefs was to review the relevant literature and assess whether there was support for this new approach. An author of the resulting report wrote in the introduction that ‘one of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume … is how low the associations between self-esteem and its [presumed] consequences are in research to date.’1 Unfortunately, this early expression of concern was largely ignored. Carol Craig reviews more recent warnings about the self-esteem movement in an online article ‘A short history of self-esteem’, citing the research of five professors of psychology. Craig’s article and related documents are worth reading if you are interested in exploring this issue in depth.2 The following is my summary of her key conclusions about self-esteem:        •   There is no evidence that self-image enhancing techniques, aimed at boosting self-esteem directly, foster improvements in objectively measured ‘performance’.        •   Many people who consider themselves to have high self-esteem tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities, as assessed by objective tests of their performance, and may be insulted and threatened whenever anyone asserts otherwise.        •   Low self-esteem is not a risk factor for educational problems, or problems such as violence, bullying, delinquency, racism, drug-taking or alcohol abuse.        •   Obsession with self-esteem has contributed to an ‘epidemic of depression’ and is undermining the life skills and resilience of young people.        •   Attempts to boost self-esteem are encouraging narcissism and a sense of entitlement.        •   The pursuit of self-esteem has considerable costs and may undermine the wellbeing of both individuals and societies. Some of these findings were brought to wider public attention in an article entitled ‘The trouble with self-esteem’, written by psychologist Lauren Slater, which appeared in The New York Times in 2002.3 Related articles, far too many to mention individually in this book, have emerged, alongside many books in which authors express their concerns about various aspects of the myth of self-esteem.4 There is particular concern about what we are doing to our children.

ASSERTIVE The Assertive type believes time is money; every wasted minute is a wasted dollar. Their self-image is linked to how many things they can get accomplished in a period of time. For them, getting the solution perfect isn’t as important as getting it done. Assertives are fiery people who love winning above all else, often at the expense of others. Their colleagues and counterparts never question where they stand because they are always direct and candid. They have an aggressive communication style and they don’t worry about future interactions. Their view of business relationships is based on respect, nothing more and nothing less. Most of all, the Assertive wants to be heard. And not only do they want to be heard, but they don’t actually have the ability to listen to you until they know that you’ve heard them. They focus on their own goals rather than people. And they tell rather than ask. When you’re dealing with Assertive types, it’s best to focus on what they have to say, because once they are convinced you understand them, then and only then will they listen for your point of view. To an Assertive, every silence is an opportunity to speak more. Mirrors are a wonderful tool with this type. So are calibrated questions, labels, and summaries. The most important thing to get from an Assertive will be a “that’s right” that may come in the form of a “that’s it exactly” or “you hit it on the head.” When it comes to reciprocity, this type is of the “give an inch/take a mile” mentality. They will have figured they deserve whatever you have given them so they will be oblivious to expectations of owing something in return. They will actually simply be looking for the opportunity to receive more. If they have given some kind of concession, they are surely counting the seconds until they get something in return. If you are an Assertive, be particularly conscious of your tone. You will not intend to be overly harsh but you will often come off that way. Intentionally soften your tone and work to make it more pleasant. Use calibrated questions and labels with your counterpart since that will also make you more approachable and increase the chances for collaboration. We’ve seen how each of these groups views the importance of time differently (time = preparation; time = relationship; time = money). They also have completely different interpretations of silence. I’m definitely an Assertive, and at a conference this Accommodator type told me that he blew up a deal. I thought, What did you do, scream at the other guy and leave? Because that’s me blowing up a deal. But it turned out that he went silent; for an Accommodator type, silence is anger. For Analysts, though, silence means they want to think. And Assertive types interpret your silence as either you don’t have anything to say or you want them to talk. I’m one, so I know: the only time I’m silent is when I’ve run out of things to say. The funny thing is when these cross over. When an Analyst pauses to think, their Accommodator counterpart gets nervous and an Assertive one starts talking, thereby annoying the Analyst, who thinks to herself, Every time I try to think you take that as an opportunity to talk some more. Won’t you ever shut up?

The Cornell Method The Cornell method is probably the best-known and most widely used note taking method out there. It is a brilliantly simple method that is characterized by how it divides the page you use. To use the Cornell method, first take a page of lined paper. There will usually be a margin on the left of the page. From this margin, measure roughly 6cm in and then draw a line down the page from top to bottom. Next, draw a line across the page six lines up from the bottom of the sheet. (The measurements are not set in stone, so feel free to modify them to your own taste.) This will divide the page into three areas: the section across the bottom, the now extended margin on the left of the page, and a section on the right. The right of the page will be where you will make your “normal notes.” The reduced area will have the effect of encouraging you to take fewer notes as there is simply less space to do so. The section along the bottom of the page is where you write a summary of everything on the page. This will be no more than a couple of sentences, and depending on how you prefer to work, this summary can be written perhaps at the end of the class, later that evening, or on another day. Writing this summary will solidify your understanding of your notes and help cut them down further. The section on the left of the page can be used in a few different ways. You may choose to use this area to write down the most important words, like names, dates, and essential ideas. Another way to use the left side of the page is to record your own reactions to the notes you are taking. This is a brilliant way to encourage active listening, as writing down your personal reactions ensures that you engage fully with the lesson. Don’t worry about writing anything smart or insightful in these reactions. Perhaps comment on how something relates back to another topic, how you find something interesting, or maybe you write a few question marks to denote that you find it confusing. Using the Cornell method is a straightforward technique for note taking, and can be adapted in various ways to fit your own preferences. It can be helpful for studying and testing yourself later on, too. One way to do this is to use the left hand area to write questions that correspond to the right side of the page. You can then test yourself by covering the right side of the page and attempting to answer the questions, slowly revealing the notes and “answers” on the right as you go. You can also test yourself by attempting to recite the summary at the bottom of the page.

Ask residents of Manhattan what functions the city provides for them, and they will give you an impressive list. Do this for all the various stakeholders in the city, and you will have a pretty good set of requirements for Manhattan. This would be a useful exercise for city planners or for anyone considering starting a business in the city. In summary, then, the fact that not all systems are requirements-driven does not diminish the value of analyzing requirements. Whether we carry out the analysis before or after the system exists, it still has great benefits.

Set an optimistic but reasonable goal and define it clearly. ■​Write it down. ■​Discuss your goal with a colleague (this makes it harder to wimp out). ■​Carry the written goal into the negotiation. SECTION II: SUMMARY Summarize and write out in just a couple of sentences the known facts that have led up to the negotiation. You’re going to have to have something to talk about beyond a self-serving assessment of what you want. And you had better be ready to respond with tactical empathy to your counterpart’s arguments; unless they’re incompetent, the other party will come prepared to argue an interpretation of the facts that favors them. Get on the same page at the outset. You have to clearly describe the lay of the land before you can think about acting in its confines. Why are you there? What do you want? What do they want? Why? You must be able to summarize a situation in a way that your counterpart will respond with a “That’s right.” If they don’t, you haven’t done it right.

The next archetype, the Empress, is the Catalyst of the Mind, that which acts upon the conscious mind to change it. The fourth being the Emperor, which is the Experience of the Mind, which is that material stored in the unconscious which creates its continuing bias. Am I correct with those statements? Ra I am Ra. Though far too rigid in your statements, you perceive correct relationships. There is a great deal of dynamic interrelationship in these first four archetypes. (79.36) Questioner Would the Hierophant then be somewhat of a governor or sorter of these effects so as to create the proper assimilation by the unconscious of that which comes through the conscious? Ra I am Ra. Although thoughtful, the supposition is incorrect in its heart. (79.37) Questioner What would be the Hierophant? Ra I am Ra. The Hierophant is the Significator of the Body[57] complex, its very nature. We may note that the characteristics of which you speak do have bearing upon the Significator of the Mind complex but are not the heart. The heart of the mind complex is that dynamic entity which absorbs, seeks, and attempts to learn. (79.38) Questioner Then is the Hierophant the link, you might say, between the mind and the body? Ra I am Ra. There is a strong relationship between the Significators of the mind, the body, and the spirit. Your statement is too broad. (79.39) Questioner Let me skip over the Hierophant for a minute because I’m really not understanding that at all, and just ask you if the Lovers represent the merging of the conscious and the unconscious, or a communication between conscious and unconscious? Ra I am Ra. Again, without being at all unperceptive, you miss the heart of this particular archetype which may be more properly called the Transformation of the Mind. (79.40) Questioner Transformation of the mind into what? Ra I am Ra. As you observe Archetype Six you may see the student of the mysteries being transformed by the need to choose betwixt the light and the dark in mind. (79.41) Questioner Would the Conqueror, or Chariot, then, represent the culmination of the action of the first six archetypes into a conquering of the mental processes, even possibly removing the veil? Ra I am Ra. This is most perceptive. The Archetype Seven is one difficult to enunciate. We may call it the Path, the Way, or the Great Way of the Mind. Its foundation is a reflection and substantial summary of Archetypes One through Six. One may also see the Way of the Mind as showing the kingdom or fruits of appropriate travel through the mind in that the mind continues to move as majestically through the material it conceives of as a chariot drawn by royal lions or steeds. At this time we would suggest one more full query, for this instrument is experiencing some distortions towards pain. (79.42) Questioner Then I will just ask for the one of the archetypes which I am least understanding at this point, if I can use that word at all. I am still very much in the dark, so to speak, with respect to the Hierophant and precisely what it is. Could you give me some other indication of what that is, please? Ra I am Ra. You have been most interested in the Significator which must needs become complex. The Hierophant is the original archetype of mind which has been made complex through the subtile movements of the conscious and unconscious.[58] The complexities of mind were evolved rather than the simple melding of experience from Potentiator to Matrix. The mind itself became an actor possessed of free will and, more especially, will. As the Significator of the mind, the Hierophant has the will to know, but what shall it do with its knowledge, and for what reasons does it seek? The potential[s] of a complex significator are manifold.

Tell her what you want to tell her then, Cass.” Cass gave Siena a quick summary of what she and Falco had discovered at the graveyard. The maid’s eyes got bigger and bigger as Cass relayed finding the open crypt door and the body, and then receiving the note. “But Signorina Cass, you might be in danger!” “That’s why we’re going to figure out who’s responsible,” Cass said, with more confidence than she felt. “Speaking of which…” Falco nodded at the costume bag, which Cass had completely forgotten. A silky garment, trimmed with lace and beaded elaborately, had fallen out during the scuffle. Siena looked down, and even in the flickering light, Cass could see that her pale skin went bright pink. The lady’s maid knelt to retrieve the outfit, a low-cut satin chemise. She pressed the clothing into Cass’s hands without meeting her eyes. Cass felt her own face get red. “It’s--it’s just a costume. We’re going to try to locate some of the dead girl’s patrons.” “You mean you’re going to masquerade as a…” The shy maid couldn’t choke out the rest. “Hired woman,” Cass confirmed, wondering if it would have been easier just to let Siena believe that she and Falco had met up for a tryst. She wasn’t sure which would have been more scandalizing. “I know it’s dangerous, but it’s more dangerous to do nothing while a madman plots against me. And Falco will be by my side the whole time. Please don’t tell my aunt.” Siena didn’t say anything for a minute. She looked back and forth from Cass to Falco. Finally, she nodded. And then, to Cass’s amazement, her red face lit up with a huge smile. “You’ll need me to do your hair, Signorina.” “Hair?” Cass wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. “What are you talking about?” “Your hair and your makeup.” Siena reached out to stroke Cass’s thick hair. “Otherwise, no one will believe you are anything other than a noblewoman. I’ll put the sides in braids, and twist the back into a knot.” Falco nodded approvingly at Siena. “Excellent idea. We want to make sure everyone can see that beautiful face tonight.” Cass thought her skin might turn permanently red if she continued blushing.

time. The trial balance is typically prepared at the end of a period, prior to preparing the primary financial statements. The purpose of the trial balance is to check that debits—in total—are equal to the total amount of credits. If debits do not equal credits, you know that an erroneous journal entry must have been posted. While a trial balance is a helpful check, it’s far from perfect, as there are numerous types of errors that a trial balance doesn’t catch. (For example, a trial balance wouldn’t alert you if the wrong asset account had been debited for a given transaction, as the error wouldn’t throw off the total amount of debits.) Chapter 8 Simple Summary For every transaction, a journal entry must be recorded that includes both a debit and a credit. Debits

How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can't slow down? They can't slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live

By saving the knowledge of the race. The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man; any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know. They will be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, will not be passed on. They will be lost through the generations. But, if we now prepare a giant summary of all knowledge, it will never be lost. Coming generations will build on it, and will not have to rediscover it for themselves. One millennium will do the work of thirty thousand.

The “feeling of being stared at” is the focus of a subset of distant-mental-interaction studies. This is a particularly interesting belief to investigate because it is related to one of the oldest known superstitions in the Western world, the “evil eye,” and to one of the oldest known blessings in the Eastern world, the darshan, or gaze of an enlightened master. Most ancient peoples feared the evil eye and took measures to deflect the attraction of the eye, often by wearing shiny or attractive amulets around the neck. Today, most fears about the evil eye have subsided, at least among educated peoples. And yet many people still report the “feeling of being stared at” from a distance. Is this visceral feeling what it appears to be—a distant mental influence of the nervous system—or can it be better understood in more prosaic ways? In the laboratory today, the question is studied by separating two people and monitoring the first person’s nervous system (usually electrodermal activity) while the second person stares at the first at random times over a one-way closed-circuit video system. The stared-at person has no idea when the starer is looking at him or her. Figure 9.2. Effect sizes for studies testing the “feeling of being stared at,” where 50 percent is chance expectation. Confidence intervals are 95 percent. Figure 9.2 shows the results for staring studies conducted over eight decades.34 Similar to William Braud’s electrodermal studies but conducted in a context that more closely matched common descriptions of “feeling stared at,” these studies resulted in an overall effect of 63 percent where chance expectation is 50 percent. This is remarkably robust for a phenomenon that—according to conventional scientific models—is not supposed to exist. The combined studies result in odds against chance of 3.8 million to 1. Summary Given the evidence for psi perception and mind-matter interaction effects discussed so far, we could have expected that experiments involving living systems would also be successful. The studies discussed here show that our expectations are confirmed. The implications for distant healing are clear. All the experiments discussed so far have been replicated in the laboratory dozens to hundreds of times. They demonstrate that some of the “psychic” experiences people report probably do involve genuine psi. Now we move outside the laboratory to examine a new type of experiment, one that explores mind-matter interaction effects apparently associated with the collective attention of groups.

There are things within our power, and there are things beyond our power. Within our power are our opinion, aim, desire, dislikes, and, in summary, whatever is our own. Beyond our power is property, reputation, duties, and, in summary, whatever is not ours. The things within our power are naturally free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent and restricted. So remember if you attribute freedom to things which are not naturally ours and take what belongs to others for yourself, you will be hindered, you will feel sorrow, you will be disturbed, you will then find fault with god and with men. But if you take only those things which are truly your own and view what belongs to others as it really is, then no one can control you, no one can restrict you; you will find fault with no one, you will accuse no one, you will do nothing against your own will; no one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you won’t suffer any harm.

vendor for that month and how much I earned on them. Let's go build one of these so you can see how to create a simple summary query using more than one table. First, go to the Create tab and choose the Query Wizard from the Queries section. This is still a simple query, so choose the Simple Query Wizard. Next, select the first table or query that has fields you want to include in your query. In this example that's going to be the Vendor 3 Data Table and I want MonthSale and YearSale. Switch the dropdown to the other table or query you want to use. In my case that'll be the Ebook Link Table. Select the fields you want from that table. I'm going to choose Title. Continue to do this until you have all of the fields you want selected.

The patient may decide Christianity itself is as faulty as its practitioners and give it up--as long as he doesn't become humble. "All you have to do," Screwtape instructs Wormwood, "is to keep out of his mind the question 'If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?'" (p. 8).

Chapter 3 Summary A key finding of prospect theory is loss aversion, the phenomenon whereby the emotional impact of a loss is greater than the corresponding impact of an equivalent gain. Loss aversion creates a preference for options associated with a lower chance of incurring a loss. It makes us risk averse. When we are in the gains, we have a tendency to quit too early in order to avoid the risk of giving those gains back. In other words, we like to quit while we’re ahead. When we are in the losses, we become risk seekers. We want to keep going, hoping we can avoid ever having to realize the loss. Daniel Kahneman has characterized this as sure-loss aversion. In other words, we like to stick when we’re behind. Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, and the usually part is specifically when you’re in the losses. Retail investors show this pattern of quitting when they’re ahead and sticking when they’re behind. Even expert investors don’t get their quitting decisions just right. They outperform on their buying decisions but underperform on their selling decisions. We naturally track and get feedback on the things we are doing. But once we quit something, we also quit keeping track of that course of action. This creates a problem with getting high-quality feedback, which in turn makes it hard to hone our quitting skills.

My bout with the Marquis was much like the others. Even more than usual I was hopelessly outclassed, but I stuck grimly to my place, refusing to back up, and took hit after hit, though my parrying was steadily improving. Of course I lost, but at least it wasn’t so easy a loss as I’d had when I first began to attend practice--and he didn’t insult me with obvious handicaps, such as never allowing his point to hit me. Bran and Savona finished a moment later, and Bran was just suggesting we exchange partners when the bells for third-gold rang, causing a general outcry. Some would stay, but most, I realized, were retreating to their various domiciles to bathe and dress for open Court. I turned away--and found Shevraeth beside me. “You’ve never sampled the delights of Petitioners’ Court,” he said. I thought of the Throne Room again, this time with Galdran there on the goldenwood throne, and the long lines of witnesses. I repressed a shiver. Some of my sudden tension must have exhibited itself in my countenance because he said, “It is no longer an opportunity for a single individual to practice summary justice such as you experienced on your single visit.” “I’m certain you don’t just sit around happily and play cards,” I muttered, looking down at the toes of my boots as we walked. “Sometimes we do, when there are no petitioners. Or we listen to music. But when there is business, we listen to the petitioners, accept whatever they offer in the way of proof, and promise a decision at a later date. That’s for the first two greens. The last is spent in discussing impressions of the evidence at hand; sometimes agreement is reached, and sometimes we decide that further investigation is required before a decision can be made.” This surprised me so much I looked up at him. There was no amusement, no mockery, no threat in the gray eyes. Just a slight question. I said, “You listen to the opinions of whoever comes to Court?” “Of course,” he said. “It means they want to be a part of government, even if their part is to be merely ornamental.” I remembered that dinner when Nee first brought up Elenet’s name, and how Shevraeth had lamented how most of those who wished to give him advice had the least amount worth hearing. “Why should I be there?” I asked. “I remember what you said about worthless advisers.” “Do you think any opinion you would have to offer would be worthless?” he countered. “It doesn’t matter what I think of my opinion,” I retorted, and then caught myself. “I mean to say, it is not me making the decisions.” “So what you seem to be implying is that I think your opinion worthless.” “Well, don’t you?” He sighed. “When have I said so?” “At the inn in Lumm, last year. And before that. About our letter to Galdran, and my opinion of courtiers.” “It wasn’t your opinion I pointed up, it was your ignorance,” he said. “You seem to have made truly admirable efforts to overcome that handicap. Why not share what you’ve learned?” I shrugged, then said, “Why don’t you have Elenet there?”--and hated myself for about as stupid a bit of pettiness as I’d ever uttered. But he took the words at face value. “An excellent suggestion, and one I acted on immediately after she arrived at Athanarel. She’s contributed some very fine insights. She’s another, by the way, who took her own education in hand. Three years ago about all she knew was how to paint fans.” I had talked myself into a corner, I realized--all through my own efforts. So I said, “All right, then. I’ll go get Mora to dig out that Court dress I ordered and be there to blister you all with my brilliance.” He bowed, lifted his gray-gloved hand in a casual salute, and walked off toward the Royal Wing. I retreated in quick order to get ready for the ordeal ahead.

The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

claSSIfIcatIon of the School The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

Chapter 3•The Positive School claSSIfIcatIon of the School The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

second variable, we find that Z = 2.103, p = .035. This value is larger than that obtained by the parametric test, p = .019.21 SUMMARY When analysts need to determine whether two groups have different means of a continuous variable, the t-test is the tool of choice. This situation arises, for example, when analysts compare measurements at two points in time or the responses of two different groups. There are three common t-tests, involving independent samples, dependent (paired) samples, and the one-sample t-test. T-tests are parametric tests, which means that variables in these tests must meet certain assumptions, notably that they are normally distributed. The requirement of normally distributed variables follows from how parametric tests make inferences. Specifically, t-tests have four assumptions: One variable is continuous, and the other variable is dichotomous. The two distributions have equal variances. The observations are independent. The two distributions are normally distributed. The assumption of homogeneous variances does not apply to dependent-samples and one-sample t-tests because both are based on only a single variable for testing significance. When assumptions of normality are not met, variable transformation may be used. The search for alternative ways for dealing with normality problems may lead analysts to consider nonparametric alternatives. The chief advantage of nonparametric tests is that they do not require continuous variables to be normally distributed. The chief disadvantage is that they yield higher levels of statistical significance, making it less likely that the null hypothesis may be rejected. A nonparametric alternative for the independent-samples t-test is the Mann-Whitney test, and the nonparametric alternative for the dependent-samples t-test is the Wilcoxon

It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers, and then to ask questions that will lead to the best possible insights.

I recommend you do a detailed time study for yourself to see where you spend your time. Make an estimate of how many hours each week you take for the major activities of your life: work, school, rest, entertainment, hobbies, spouse, children, commuting, church, God, friends, and so on. Then, over a typical period of your life, take two weeks and do a detailed time study. Keep track of how you spend your time, using fifteen- to thirty-minute increments. After you have gathered the raw data, categorize them carefully into the major groups: rest, work/school, church/God, family, and recreation. Create subcategories as appropriate for anything that might consume multiple hours per week, like listing commuting under work or TV under recreation. Finally, with the summary in hand, make the difficult assessments about how you are using your time. Ask yourself: • Any surprises? Areas where I just couldn’t imagine I was wasting—er, uh, um, spending—so much of my time? • Is this where I want my time to go? • Am I putting as much time as I’d like into the areas I want as the priorities in my life? • How much time am I really spending with my spouse? Children? Friends? • Did I realize how much time I was spending at work? • If I wanted to spend more time on XYZ or ABC, in what areas would I consciously choose to spend less time?

Although the position of the executives may be high level, the levels of questions and quality of the conversations I have found are variable at best. Many of these meetings consist of an exchange of summary findings, reports, analytic data, rapid-fire question–answer segments, and perhaps a brief brainstorming session to decide on a solution. Sometimes, there is debate about the analysis, but this inevitably concludes with recommendations for a future course of action. Rarely do I encounter meaningful critical dialogue.

In summary, a good teacher does the following: - never tells a student anything that the teacher thinks is true - never allows himself to be the ultimate judge of his own students' success - teacher practice first, theory second (if he must teach theory at all) - does not come up with lists of knowledge that every student must know - doesn't teach anything unless he can easily explain the use of learning it - assigns no homework, unless that homework is to produce something - groups students according to their interests and abilities, not their ages - ensures that any reward to a student is intrinsic - teaches students things they may actually need to know after they leave school - helps students come up with their own explanations when they have made a mistake - never assumes that a student is listening to what he is saying - never assumes that students will do what he asks them to do if what he asked does not relate to a goal they truly hold - never allows pleasing the teacher to be the goal of the student - understands that students won't do what he tells them if they don't understand what is being asked of them - earns the respect of students by demonstrating abilities - motivate students to do better, and does not help them to do better - understands that his job is to get students to do something - understands that experience, not teachers, changes belief systems - confuses students - does not expect credit for good teaching

In summary, let me quote Professor McGee once again:           Judging from the Record, Standard Oil did not use predatory price discrimination to drive out competing refiners, nor did its pricing practice have that effect . . . I am convinced that Standard did not systematically, if ever, use local price cutting in retailing, or anywhere else, to reduce competition. To do so would have been foolish; and, whatever else has been said about them, the old Standard organization was seldom criticized for making less money when it could readily have made more. A

SECTION SUMMARY TO BE AN EFFECTIVE LEADER … Recognize that you have limited strengths. Do whatever it takes to discover what they are. Once you know, find a work environment that allows you to focus your energies on the few things you were created to do well. Don’t allow your time to get eaten up with responsibilities and projects that call for skills that fall outside your core competencies. That is a recipe for mediocrity. Embrace this truth: The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Narrow your focus to increase your productivity and expand your influence within your organization. Empower the leaders around you by delegating those responsibilities that fall outside your zone. Somebody is dying to pick up the ball you drop. Your weakness is his opportunity. Remember: Great leaders know when to follow. THE NEXT GENERATION CHALLENGE What defines success for you in your current employment situation? Is there alignment between your core competencies and those competencies necessary to succeed in your job? What would change about your current job description if you were given the freedom to focus on the two or three things you do best? What would need to change in your current employment situation in order for you to focus on the things that add the most value to your organization? Take some time to complete the exercises described on this page through this page.

Summary of Rule #3 Rules #1 and #2 laid the foundation for my new thinking on how people end up loving what they do. Rule #1 dismissed the passion hypothesis, which says that you have to first figure out your true calling and then find a job to match. Rule #2 replaced this idea with career capital theory, which argues that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable, and if you want these in your working life, you must first build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return. I call these skills “career capital,” and in Rule #2 I dived into the details of how to acquire it. The obvious next question is how to invest this capital once you have it. Rule #3 explored one answer to this question by arguing that gaining control over what you do and how you do it is incredibly important. This trait shows up so often in the lives of people who love what they do that I’ve taken to calling it the dream-job elixir. Investing your capital in control, however, turns out to be tricky. There are two traps that commonly snare people in their pursuit of this trait. The first control trap notes that it’s dangerous to try to gain more control without enough capital to back it up. The second control trap notes that once you have the capital to back up a bid for more control, you’re still not out of the woods. This capital makes you valuable enough to your employer that they will likely now fight to keep you on a more traditional path. They realize that gaining more control is good for you but not for their bottom line. The control traps put you in a difficult situation. Let’s say you have an idea for pursuing more control in your career and you’re encountering resistance. How can you tell if this resistance is useful (for example, it’s helping you avoid the first control trap) or something to ignore (for example, it’s the result of the second control trap)? To help navigate this control conundrum, I turned to Derek Sivers. Derek is a successful entrepreneur who has lived a life dedicated to control. I asked him his advice for sifting through potential control-boosting pursuits and he responded with a simple rule: “Do what people are willing to pay for.” This isn’t about making money (Derek, for example, is more or less indifferent to money, having given away to charity the millions he made from selling his first company). Instead, it’s about using money as a “neutral indicator of value”—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.

And in 1513, the Spanish government created a kind of Miranda rights–style document that was to be read (in Spanish—incomprehensible to the indigenous peoples!) to those about to be conquered. It was the summary of the Gospel as they understood it; it was their core message, their “good news,” the metanarrative that legitimized their white Christian supremacy: On the part of the King, Don Fernando, and of Doña Juana I, his daughter, Queen of Castille and Léon, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, all the men of the world at the time, were and are descendants, and all those who came after and before us…. Of all these nations God our Lord gave charge to one man, called St. Peter, that he should be Lord and Superior of all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole Human Race…. One of these Pontiffs, who succeeded that St. Peter as Lord of the world, in the dignity and seat which I have before mentioned, made donation of these isles and Tierra-firme to the aforesaid King and Queen and to their successors, our lords…. Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world…. But, if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command.

humans use to support human superiority is that supposedly only Homo sapiens have a conscious mind. Different from soul, the mind is a flow of subjective experiences such as emotions, pain, etc. The collection of these experiences is what makes up the stream of consciousness. Every subjective experience is made up of two basic characteristics: sensation and desire. Whereas a robot or computer craves nothing and feels nothing, so therefore cannot be said to have consciousness, humans have emotions. This is why we decide that working humans until they collapse from hunger or exhaustion is bad, but doing the same to a robot until its battery is depleted is okay.

why have humans managed to rise up and dominate the planet? Because in the last 20,000 years, we are the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers. Even species that do work in groups, such as bees, cannot reinvent their social system overnight by guillotining the queen and establishing a republic.

Section One Summary Here’s what you should take away from this section about on-page optimization:         On-page optimization is what you do on your website to influence SERPs on Google.         Doing proper keyword research is the first step to a successful SEO campaign.         Having proper meta tags is essential. Always include your keyword phrase(s) in your meta tags.         The proper meta tags include your title tag, description tag, keywords tag, and robots tag.         Choose your URL carefully. Your URL doesn’t have to have your keyword included but it helps when other sites link to your site. Avoid exact match domains.         How you format your page is important for optimization purposes.         Make sure you design your web pages so Google is forced to read your on-page content first.         Verify that your code is W3C compliant.         Don’t forget to include your keyword phrase(s) in , , and header tags. This signifies the importance of your content to Google.         Label each graphic with an alt tag that includes your keyword phrase.         Place your keyword(s) in the first twenty-five words on your web page and the last twenty-five words on your web page.         Eliminate Flash if it’s the main presentation of your website. Google does not view this favorably.         If you’re going to use JavaScript to enhance the overall visitor experience of your website, place the code in an external file.         Include a sitemap that’s easily accessible by Google. Submit an XML version of your sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.          Never underestimate the power of internal linking. A good internal linking structure can improve your SERPs.          Keyword development is one of the most important on-page optimization strategies.          Research keywords and competing websites to select ideal keywords.          Research the strength of competing websites before selecting your final keywords using Google PR and authority (ex: number of inbound links).          Page load speed is a significant factor in Google rankings. Ensure that your home page loads more quickly than those of competing

Wall Street: I’d start carrying guns if I were you.      Your annual reports are worse fiction than the screenplay for Dude, Where’s My Car?, which you further inflate by downsizing and laying off the very people whose life savings you’re pillaging. How long do you think you can do that to people? There are consequences. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But inevitably. Just ask the Romanovs. They had a nice little setup, too, until that knock at the door.      Second, Congress: We’re on to your act.      In the middle of the meltdown, CSPAN showed you pacing the Capitol floor yapping about “under God” staying in the Pledge of Allegiance and attacking the producers of Sesame Street for introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. Then you passed some mealy-mouthed reforms and crowded to get inside the crop marks at the photo op like a frat-house phone-booth stunt.      News flash: We out here in the Heartland care infinitely more about God-and-Country issues because we have internal moral-guidance systems that make you guys look like a squadron of gooney birds landing facedown on an icecap and tumbling ass over kettle. But unlike you, we have to earn a living and can’t just chuck our job responsibilities to march around the office ranting all day that the less-righteous offend us. Jeez, you’re like autistic schoolchildren who keep getting up from your desks and wandering to the window to see if there’s a new demagoguery jungle gym out on the playground. So sit back down, face forward and pay attention!      In summary, what’s the answer?      The reforms laws were so toothless they were like me saying that I passed some laws, and the president and vice president have forgotten more about insider trading than Martha Stewart will ever know.      Yet the powers that be say they’re doing everything they can. But they’re conveniently forgetting a little constitutional sitcom from the nineties that showed us what the government can really do when it wants to go Starr Chamber. That’s with two rs.      Does it make any sense to pursue Wall Street miscreants any less vigorously than Ken Starr sniffed down Clinton’s sex life? And remember, a sitting president actually got impeached over that—something incredibly icky but in the end free of charge to taxpayers, except for the $40 million the independent posse spent dragging citizens into motel rooms and staring at jism through magnifying glasses. But where’s that kind of government excess now? Where’s a coffee-cranked little prosecutor when you really need him?      I say, bring back the independent counsel. And when we finally nail you stock-market cheats, it’s off to a real prison, not the rich guys’ jail. Then, in a few years, when the first of you start walking back out the gates with that new look in your eyes, the rest of the herd will get the message pretty fast.

How much would you say? Take a pencil and use this empty page to scribble, sketch, and do some calculations. The answer is on the next page, but I strongly encourage you to have fun and try it out for yourself first. Scribble, sketch, and have fun! I hope you did try to solve it yourself, because learning is so much more fulfilling when it is interactive. If you did not, too bad for you. ☹ In truth, the bacteria have only filled 3.125% of the glass. But how can this be? Well it is simple. If they double every minute, and they fill the entire glass in 60 minutes, then they will have filled half the glass the minute before 60 (or 50% after 59 minutes), half of that the minute before 59 (or 25% after 58 minutes), and so on. Table 3.1 summary of the last 10 minutes, starting from the end.  Time Elapsed    Amount Filled  60 minutes   100 .000%   59 minutes   50 .000%   58 minutes   25 .000%   57 minutes   12. 500%   56 minutes   6. 250%   55 minutes   3. 125%   54 minutes   1. 563%   53 minutes   0. 781%   52 minutes   0. 391%   51 minutes   0. 195%     Table 3.1: Exponential growth of bacteria in a bottle over the last 10 minutes. It all makes sense now, right? Suddenly it becomes clear, even obvious. Who could not get this? It is so simple, right? Apparently, it is not. The most common replies I get are between 50% and 90%. Even college graduates typically get it wrong. And let?s not talk about politicians. We will come back to this in the Appendix, with some real-world examples. For now, I think it is safe to say that we all understand what steady growth means. Let’s now see how this applies to our main focus in the next chapter: information technology.

Summary Let us recap the five steps at this time. 1)      Step One After a long stressful day it can be difficult to memorize. In this step we are resting our minds in the Lord. Although some good tips for long-term health benefits were stated for memorizing we will briefly summarize the short-term. It is good however to apply the long-term things as well seeing that meditating on the word of God is a lifelong commitment. But in the first step we are seeking to bring our minds to a place of peace. 2)      Step Two Although having a peaceful mind may help us with our goal, if we do not have a peaceful place to seek the Lord, we can easily be distracted. Therefore it is good to choose a secret place and hide away with the Lord. A place that is free of distractions, and not associated with work of any kind. In this step we are making our way to hide away with God one-on-one and put out all distractions around us. 3)      Step Three In this step we are meditating on the presence of God while in the secret place. We will continue to rest our minds in Christ as we forget about everything else. Then as we meditate on His presence we prepare for step four.

Here are some advice for teachers handling introvert children: Think of introverts as different and not someone who needs to be cured. They simply have a different learning style. In helping with social skills, opt to teach them outside class. Accept them for who they are. Studies reveal that almost half of the population are introverts. This means a class has an almost even number of extroverts and introverts. So balance teaching methods to benefit both types. Introverts often have deep interests that are uncommon among their peers. Encourage them to pursue this and help them find like-minded friends. Introverts also benefit from collaborative work as long as it is in small groups. And it helps if they know their particular role. Teach all children to work independently to encourage Deliberate Practice. Do not seat introverts in “high interaction” areas because they have a tendency to feel more threatened. Do not force them to participate in class because it can be harmful to their self-esteem. Introvert children perform differently in a playgroup setting from a more relaxed and comfortable one. Consider this when rating a child’s performance.

...yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.

Connective talents are useless, of course, if people can’t perform the work. And the most talented people in every occupation have huge advantages over their ordinary peers. Dean Keith Simonton, who studies greatness and genius, finds that whether it comes to songwriters, composers, scientists, programmers, or filmmakers, the top 10 percent generate as much or more output than the other 90 percent. The superiority of great bosses is seen in a summary of eighty-five years of research on employee selection methods. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that the top 15 percent of professionals and managers produced nearly 50 percent more output than their average peers. The strongest predictors of performance included general mental ability (IQ and similar measures), job sample tests (having people prove they can do the work), and evaluations by peers; other useful predictors included structured employment interviews (where each candidate is asked the same questions in the same order) and conscientiousness (self-discipline and follow-through, similar to grit). These findings provide ammunition for bosses who stock up on the best talent and believe that little else is required. Yet without constructive connections among people, collective performance and humanity is tough to achieve – no matter how many superstars are in the fold.

Fake seafood is not a Florida problem or a Massachusetts problem or a New York City problem - it is an everywhere problem. Oceana took its study national in 2013 and found that mislabeling in violation of FDA regulations was often much worse in the biggest cities. A summary released with the report noted that "Oceana found seafood fraud everywhere it tested, including mislabeling rates of 52 percent in Southern California, 49 percent in Austin and Houston, 48 percent in Boston, 39 percent in New York City, 38 percent in Northern California and South Florida, 32 percent in Chicago, 26 percent in Washington, DC, and 18 percent in Seattle."... Dr. Warner's most recent project for Oceana was a global "study of studies," in which she and her colleagues did a comprehensive analysis of fake fish studies conducted by many different entities in different countries, including sixty-seven peer-reviewed studies, seven government reports, and twenty-three news articles. The results are pages and pages of more disturbing fraud information, but she was able to sum up the results for me in two sentences: "All studies that have investigated seafood fraud have found it. The take-home message is that anytime someone looks for mislabeling and species substitution in the marketplace, anywhere, they find it.

Business Plan Samples This sample business plan is intended to provide you with a template that can be used as a reference for when you’re hard at work on your plan. It's always easier to write something if you can read an example first, so here's an executive summary example that you can use as a model for your own business plan's executive summary. The Executive Summary is where you explain the general idea behind your company; it’s where you give the reader (most likely an investor, or someone else you need on board) a clear indication of why you’ve sent this Business Plan to them. In the Business Plan section, you will want to get the reader’s attention by letting them know what you do. It’s vitality important to set up a strong foundation and a thorough business plan in the beginning. Nonprofit business plans have several different features and quirks that you’ll need to include to receive funding and having a strong passion to help your community is only a fragment of what it takes to run a not-for-profit organization.

You can’t let recognition be your motivation. To find pride in yourself and in what you do, you have to define success as the peace of mind that comes with knowing you did your best.

You can now relax and detach from the visualisation. Continue to breathe in and out slowly – 7 seconds – through the nose (Yogi breathing) Keep the same Mudra The only difference between these breaths is the feeling in your Heart. Breath 11, both in and out Heart: Harmony Breath 12, both in and out Heart: Peace Breath 13, both in and out Heart: Reverence for God After the 13th breath the Golden Sphere is now stabilised and you now have two clear spheres, the inner and the outer. I enclose a summary of breaths 7 – 13 in the end of this book to make it easier for you to follow it when you are practising. There is no problem with you reading while you are doing the exercise.  Your body will soon be assisting you to remember all parts of the activation. Exercise Continue to anchor your Heart meditation.  It is good to start each day with this meditation. Do the meditation to find The Room under the Stars at least once a week, about 15-20 minutes each time. Practice the first 6 breathing practices in your Merkaba Practice the following 7-13 breaths in your Merkaba until you understand them.

An especially close friend inquired ‘is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?’ As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too . . . ‘Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.’ How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said to myself. But again there was an unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. -Mortality

In his 1993 book Technopoly, Neil Postman distilled the main tenets of Taylor’s system of scientific management. Taylorism, he wrote, is founded on six assumptions: “that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”11 What’s remarkable is how well Postman’s summary encapsulates Google’s own intellectual ethic. Only one tweak is required to bring it up to date. Google doesn’t believe that the affairs of citizens are best guided by experts. It believes that those affairs are best guided by software algorithms—which is exactly what Taylor would have believed had powerful digital computers been around in his day.

We don’t think about saving money very often. When we finally do think about it, our thoughts rarely lead us to save more. To test the extent that the design of digital wallets could influence behavior, Dan and his colleagues conducted a large-scale experiment with thousands of customers of a mobile money-saving system in Kenya. Some participants received two text messages every week: one at the start of the week to remind them to save and another one at the end of the week with a summary of their savings. Other participants got slightly different text reminders: It was framed like it came from their kid, asking them to save for “our future.” Four other groups were bribed (formally known as “financially incentivized”) for saving. The first of these groups got a 10 percent bonus for the first 100 shillings that they saved. The second group got a 20 percent bonus for the first 100 shillings that they saved. The third and fourth groups got the same 10 percent and 20 percent bonuses for the first 100 shillings that they saved, but they got it together with loss aversion. (In these conditions, the researchers placed the full amount of the match—10 or 20 shillings—into their account at the beginning of the week. The participants were told that they would get the match based on how much they saved, and that the amount of the match that they did not save would be taken out of their account. Financially, this loss aversion approach was the same as the regular end-of-the-week match, but the idea was that experiencing money leaving their account would be painful and would get the participants to increase their savings.) A final set of participants received those same text messages plus a golden-colored coin with the numbers 1–24 engraved on it, to indicate the 24 weeks that the plan lasted. These participants were asked to place the coin somewhere visible in their home and scratch with a knife the number for that week to indicate if they saved or not.2 At the end of six months, the treatment that performed spectacularly better than every other was—drumroll please!—the coin. Every other treatment increased savings a bit, but those who received the coin saved about twice as much as those who only received text messages. You might think the winner would have been the 20 percent bonus or maybe the 20 percent bonus with loss aversion—and this is in fact what most people predict would be the most effective way to get people to save—but you’d be wrong.

IN THE 1970S, not long before he died, the sci-fi writer Phil Dick moved into an apartment in Orange County a few miles from Disneyland, an irony not lost on him. There he wrote a perfect summary of his dread about the transformation of American society and culture as the real and unreal became indistinguishable. “We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.” I can’t do better, so I’ll quote him at length. The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes…. I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides….Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.

Chapter Summary The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us. We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe. We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those with status and prestige). One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group. The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves. If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.

Chapter Summary The inversion of the 4th Law of Behavior Change is make it unsatisfying. We are less likely to repeat a bad habit if it is painful or unsatisfying. An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us. A habit contract can be used to add a social cost to any behavior. It makes the costs of violating your promises public and painful. Knowing that someone else is watching you can be a powerful motivator.

Ebling Mis said unhurriedly, ‘You know what I’m doing these days?’ ‘I have your reports here,’ replied the mayor, with satisfaction, ‘together with authorized summaries of them. As I understand it, your investigations into the mathematics of psycho-history have been intended to duplicate Hari Seldon’s work and, eventually, trace the projected course of future history, for the use of the Foundation.

Summary Self-control is actually much less of a problem than most people think. They think to themselves, “If only I wanted it more, I could do it.” Research shows that most people, regardless of whether they describe themselves as “disciplined” or “undisciplined”, actually have the same amount of willpower. The only real difference, again, is their environment. The “disciplined” group simply spends less time in a triggering environment than the “undisciplined” group. If you want to be more disciplined, create a more structured environment with fewer temptations. If you are trying to quit drinking, don’t hang out at a bar. Likewise, keeping alcohol at home is a sure way to fail.

The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man; any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of the exceedingly tiny facets of which there is to know. They will be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, will not be passed on. They will be lost through the generations. But, if we now prepare a giant summary of all knowledge, it will never be lost. Coming generations will build on it, and will not have to rediscover it for themselves. One millennium will do the work of thirty thousand.

In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones. This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year. As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.

Peace. Warm yourself, warrior, while I tell you of peace. History is unerring, and even the least observant mortal can be made to understand, through innumerable repetition. Do you see peace as little more than the absence of war? Perhaps, on a surface level, it is just that. But let me describe the characteristics of peace, my young friend. A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity — honour, loyalty, sacrifice — are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labours. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself, and the spirit grows… restless. Is this a singular pessimism? Allow me to continue with a description of what follows a period of peace. Old warriors sit in taverns, telling tales of vigorous youth, their pasts when all things were simpler, clearer cut. They are not blind to the decay all around them, are not immune to the loss of respect for themselves, for all that they gave for their king, their land, their fellow citizens. The young must not be abandoned to forgetfulness. There are always enemies beyond the borders, and if none exist in truth, then one must be fashioned. Old crimes dug out of the indifferent earth. Slights and open insults, or the rumours thereof. A suddenly perceived threat where none existed before. The reasons matter not — what matters is that war is fashioned from peace, and once the journey is begun, an irresistible momentum is born. The old warriors are satisfied. The young are on fire with zeal. The king fears yet is relieved of domestic pressures. the army draws its oil and whetstone. Forges blast with molten iron, the anvils ring like temple bells. Grain-sellers and armourers and clothiers and horse-sellers and countless other suppliers smile with the pleasure of impending wealth. A new energy has gripped the kingdom, and those few voices raised in objection are quickly silenced. Charges of treason and summary execution soon persuade the doubters. Peace, my young warrior, is born of relief, endured in exhaustion, and dies with false remembrance. False? Ah, perhaps I am too cynical. Too old, witness to far too much. Do honour, loyalty and sacrifice truly exist? Are such virtues born only from extremity? What transforms them into empty words, words devalued by their overuse? What are the rules of the economy of the spirit, that civilization repeatedly twists and mocks? Withal of the Third City. You have fought wars. You have forged weapons. You have seen loyalty, and honour. You have seen courage and sacrifice. What say you to all this?" "Nothing," Hacking laughter. "You fear angering me, yes? No need. I give you leave to speak your mind." "I have sat in my share of taverns, in the company of fellow veterans. A select company, perhaps, not grown so blind with sentimentality as to fashion nostalgia from times of horror and terror. Did we spin out those days of our youth? No. Did we speak of war? Not if we could avoid it, and we worked hard at avoiding it." "Why?" "Why? Because the faces come back. So young, one after another. A flash of life, an eternity of death, there in our minds. Because loyalty is not to be spoken of, and honour is to be endured. Whilst courage is to be survived. Those virtues, Chained One, belong to silence." "Indeed. Yet how they proliferate in peace! Crowed again and again, as if solemn pronouncement bestows those very qualities upon the speaker. Do they not make you wince, every time you hear them? Do they not twist in your gut, grip hard your throat? Do you not feel a building rage—" "Aye. When I hear them used to raise a people once more to war.

So, in summary, plants use the Gibbs free energy in sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates that contain some of the original solar free energy, while releasing oxygen. Animals access the Gibbs free energy trapped in carbohydrates to live and, by so doing, recombine the carbon in the carbohydrates with atmospheric oxygen to emit carbon dioxide and water. Scientists have now accounted for every single transfer of Gibbs free energy in all the chemical processes that occur in plants and animals and overall. A beautiful symmetry is at work here. Plants take in 2,870 kilojoules of solar free energy to make 180 grams of glucose (a typical carbohydrate). An animal that eats 180 grams of glucose releases exactly 2,870 kilojoules of free energy, eventually breathing out carbon dioxide.

American philosophy rests on basically three ideals. The first is that human beings have rights that are given to them solely because they are human beings, and not for anything they have done or need to do. The second, is that all human beings have equal rights, and that these rights don't change based on how much worth one gains from work or skill. The third is that the American government should protect the rights of the people, not override them—even for the greater good.

First, never watch your hand as you make finger motions. These include: Simply pressing a finger down to play the note directly underneath, Reaching sideways with a finger to play another key (called a "reach" or an "extension"), and, Crossing the thumb under a finger or a finger over the thumb ("crossovers and crossunders"). When your "fingers do the walking" your eyes should NOT be watching. Second, when your hand must be picked up and moved sideways to a new location, you CAN glance down at the keyboard and back up to the music. But....you will now have to learn to glance down and back up to look directly at the exact point of the music where you need to be looking. That’s a separate skill altogether. Unlike typing, music has a beat and you better not miss it.  I mentioned above that “losing your place” would be discussed. Many more advanced players still have trouble with this, and it's a lack of this skill. The rewards of not watching? Let me spell those out clearly: There is probably nothing you could do which would give you greater speed, better expression, and more confidence than to learn to play without watching your hands. In summary, glance at the really hard hand motions, those with significant sideways displacement. Don't watch anything else. Do this for six months and you will be a completely new musician, a player with skills which will reward you for the many years of your