Execute Immediate Escape Quotes

On the evening of Wednesday, June 22, 1955, there was an official re-election ceremony being held on the open porch behind the Executive Mansion. As usual it was hot and steamy in Monrovia and without air-conditioning the country’s President and several members of his administration were taking in the cooler, but still damp, night air. Without warning, several shots were fired in the direction of the President. In the dark all that could be seen were the bright flashes from a pistol. Two men, William Hutchins, a guard, and Daniel Derrick, a member of the national legislature, fell wounded, but fortunately President Tubman had escaped harm and was hurried back into the building. In the dark no one was certain, but Paul Dunbar was apparently seen by someone in the garden behind the mansion. James Bestman, a presidential security agent, subdued and apprehended the alleged shooter in the Executive Pavilion, best known for its concrete painted animals. It was said that Bestman had used his .38 caliber “Smith and Wesson,” revolver. Members of the opposition party were accused of participating in the assassination plot and a dragnet was immediately cast to round up the alleged perpetrators. It didn’t take long before the son of former President William Coleman, Samuel David Coleman, was indicted, as was his son John. The following day, warrants for the arrest of Former President Barclay, and others in opposition to Tubman, were also issued for allegedly being accomplices. Coleman and his son fled to Clay-Ashland, a township 15 miles north of Monrovia in the St. Paul River District of Montserrado County. Photo Caption: The (former) Liberian Executive Mansion.

Hindu treatise on the art of government, the Arthashastra, lays down the rules of policy for the complete tyrant, describing the organization of his palace, his court, and his state in such fashion as to make Machiavelli seem a liberal. The first rule is that he must trust no one, and be without a single intimate friend. Beyond this, he must organize his government as a series of concentric circles composed of the various ministers, generals, officers, secretaries, and servants who execute his orders, every circle constituting a degree of rank leading up to the king himself at the center—like a spider in its web. Beginning with the circle immediately surrounding the king, the circles must consist alternately of his natural enemies and his natural friends. Because the very highest rank of princes will be plotting to seize the king’s power, they must be surrounded and watched by a circle of ministers eager to gain the king’s favor—and this hierarchy of mutually mistrusting circles must go all the way out to the fringe of the web. Divide et impera—divide and rule. Meanwhile, the king remains in the safety of his inmost apartments, attended by guards who are in turn watched by other guards hidden in the walls. Slaves taste his food for poison, and he must sleep either with one eye open or with his door firmly locked on the inside. In case of a serious revolution, there must be a secret, underground passage giving him escape from the center—a passage containing a lever which will unsettle the keystone of the building and bring it crashing down upon his rebellious court. The Arthashastra does not forget to warn the tyrant that he can never win. He may rise to eminence through ambition or the call of duty, but the more absolute his power, the more he is hated, and the more he is the prisoner of his own trap. The web catches the spider. He cannot wander at leisure in the streets and parks of his own capital, or sit on a lonely beach listening to the waves and watching the gulls. Through enslaving others he himself becomes the most miserable of slaves.

The topic of motivation often comes up when dealing with the issue of follow-through on plans. Many adults with ADHD may aspire to achieve a goal (e.g., exercise) or get through an unavoidable obligation (e.g., exam, paying bills), but fall prey to an apparent lack of motivation, despite their best intentions. This situation reminds us of a quote attributed to the late fitness expert, Jack LaLanne, who at the age of 93 was quoted as saying, “I’m feeling great and I still have sex almost every day. Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday . . .” Returning to the executive dysfunction view of ADHD, motivation is defined as the ability to generate an emotion about a task that promotes follow-through in the absence of immediate reward or consequence (and often in the face of some degree of discomfort in the short-term). Said differently, motivation is the ability to make yourself “feel like” doing the task when there is no pressing reason to do so. Thus, you will have to find a way to make yourself feel like exercising before you achieve the results you desire or feel like studying for a midterm exam that is still several days away. You “know” logically that these are good ideas, but it is negative feelings (including boredom) or lack of feelings about a task that undercut your attempts to get started. In fact, one of the common thinking errors exhibited by adults with ADHD when procrastinating is the magnification of emotional discomfort associated with starting a task usually coupled with a minimization of the positive feelings associated with it. Adults with ADHD experience the double whammy of having greater difficulty generating positive emotions (i.e., motivation) needed to get engaged in tasks and greater difficulty inhibiting the allure of more immediate distractions, including those that provide an escape from discomfort. In fairness, from a developmental standpoint, adults with ADHD have often experienced more than their fair share of frustrations and setbacks with regard to many important aspects of their lives. Hence, our experience has been that various life responsibilities and duties have become associated with a degree of stress and little perceived reward, which magnifies the motivational challenges already faced by ADHD adults. We have adopted the metaphor of food poisoning to illustrate how one’s learning history due to ADHD creates barriers to the pursuit of valued personal goals. Food poisoning involves ingesting some sort of tainted food. It is an adaptive response that your brain and digestive system notice the presence of a toxin in the body and react with feelings of nausea and rapid expulsion of said toxin through diarrhea, vomiting, or both. Even after you have fully recuperated and have figured out that you had food poisoning, the next time you encounter that same food item, even before it reaches your lips, the sight and smell of the food will reactivate protective feelings of nausea due to the previous association of the stimulus (i.e., the food) with illness and discomfort. You can make all the intellectual arguments about your safety, and obtain assurances that the food is untainted, but your body will have this initial aversive reaction, regardless. It takes progressive exposure to untainted morsels of the food (sometimes mixing it in with “safe” food, in extreme cases) in order to break the food poisoning association. Similarly, in the course of your efforts to establish and maintain good habits for managing ADHD, you will encounter some tasks that elicit discomfort despite knowing the value of the task at hand. Therefore, it is essential to be able to manufacture motivation, just enough of it, in order to be able to shift out of avoidance and to take a “taste” of the task that you are delaying.

Scarlett …” The alarming voice of Nickolas sounded from behind her. This girl was looking for her own execution. As much as he dreaded admitting it they had lost. The rebellion failed many and young people sacrificed their lives for this failure. Scarlett was a victim he was not willing to sacrifice. She only turned to him without saying a word. Her gaze was invincible. He saw literal flames burning in her blue eyes. He recognized the emotion immediately. Scarlett’s eyes were burning with rage! Was he seeing things, or were these actual flames? “It’s time for this bastard to pay for being such a treacherous ass!” she spoke. With every word, it was as if the fire in her eyes whirled around her pupils like a vortex. She felt her whole body start to burn. The blood in her veins was boiling like never before. Smoke began to emerge from her skin. It hurt her, she felt as if her whole body had set itself on fire. The pain could not be compared to the first time it happened with her palms. She was fighting the urge to scream as loud as she could, but could not afford even the slightest distraction. Nickolas’s life, as well as Chris’, depended on her. The men around her looked stunned at what was happening. Pratcher realized that nothing had played with his sanity when the soldiers, along with Hammerdell, took a step back after the girl’s body had begun emitting smoke. It was all very real indeed. What the hell was going on? “Get away from her! She will set herself on fire!” Christopher grabbed the man’s shoulders and pulled him back. He knew what was going to happen. He had seen Scarlett burn her palms, but never her whole body. He was afraid for her! The telekinesis with the jeep was a step away from killing her, and with that burning, her death could be inevitable. There was not enough energy in her body to escape without consequences. Scarlett did not stop focusing on her anger. She had to maintain it if she wanted to achieve the desired result. The pain was taking over her, she felt exhausted and gave out smoke. Her eyes did not go down from Hammerdell. At first, her hands were ablaze, and fire spread all over her body as if it had been covered with gas. Her clothes became ash. Scarlett remained naked under the tongues of the red flames. She fell to her knees on the pebble track - the fire swirled, and the pain was growing even more intolerable. “Shoot!” The mayor screamed in a voice full of fear. He had never seen such a thing. What was that hat girl? Definitely not an ordinary person! Seconds before they pulled the trigger, the guns jumped off from the hands of the soldiers all by themselves. A cone of fire separated from Scarlett and flew towards them, enclosing them in a perfect circle. She sacrificed her last drop of strength to create a fiery dome above them, which trapped her enemies and became a lid from which they could not get away. They burned alive with the last shrieking screams of panic, fear, and despair. It was over. Hammerdell had earned his merit. Now, the rebels could finally rest easy. In pain and exhaustion, she left herself get swallowed by the darkness.

Defense when attacker is sitting on top of defender, striking defender's face and punching him 1. The attacker is sitting on top attempting to strike the defender. 2.     The defender is blocking the attacker, simultaneously executing a bridge move, throwing the attacker on to his face while the defender parallels his forearm to his face to block him. He uses his other arm to punch the attacker in the groin. The punch should come immediately after the bridge, before the opponent has the opportunity to fall back down. 3.     The defender keeps striking the attacker’s groin as he turns out and gets up ready to kick and walk away. Note: In this technique, throwing the attacker out of balance diverts his first attempted strike while forcing him to use his hands for balance and prepare for his fall. Therefore, he cannot think about striking again. In addition, the defender delivers a series of blows to the attacker’s groin, forcing him to roll over due to a combination of pain and force directed toward his center of gravity. Defense against an attacker sitting on top of defender, choking him 1. The attacker sits on top of the defender and chokes him. 2.     The defender releases himself from the opponent’s chokehold by using a spoon grip with all five fingers on the same side of the opponent’s wrist. At the same time, the defender creates a bridge by lifting his waist up, keeping heels close to the butt, throwing the opponent off his stomach. The defender extends his forearm parallel to his face to block the opponent’s fall, punching the opponent’s groin with his other hand. 3.     The defender keeps striking the attacker’s groin as he turns to the side, getting up ready to kick and walk away. Note: Follow the steps in the previous drill for escape and counter attack! Attacker is positioned to the side of the defender while choking or striking him 1.     The attacker stands on his knees, next to defender, choking or striking him. The defender pushes off the attacker’s thumbs away from his throat. 2.     The defender uses his right knee to push the attacker away from his ribs, enabling him to smash the attacker’s head to the ground with his left leg. The defender keeps holding the attacker’s right arm to prevent him from escaping his fate. 3. Alas. The attacker meets his fate.

Beyond the deprivations, degradations, and tortures these prisoners endured, each man often recounts how he got to the camps Weller visited. These conflicts, and all they implied, would have been instantly recognizable to the 1945 public. Many of the Dutch and the British, the Australians and Canadians, were taken in the defeats of Singapore (130,000), Java (32,000), and Hong Kong (14,000). Many of the Americans got captured on Guam or Wake; or in the Philippines (75,000), to then endure the Bataan death march, on which one in four died. Some built the Siam-Burma railroad, which claimed yet another 15,000 lives, same ratio. Nearly everywhere, in a hurry, the Japanese won and the Allies lost. The United States saw its navy smashed at Pearl Harbor and its Pacific air forces wiped out in Manila, just before MacArthur got himself safely out to Australia. This litany of early military disasters added up to astonishing numbers. In a mere six months the Japanese, at a cost of only 15,000 of their own men (deaths and casualties), took 320,000 Allied soldiers out of the war, either as deaths, casualties, or prisoners; over half these were Asiatic. White prisoners, about 140,000 total over the course of the conflict, became slave labor across the growing Japanese empire. (Asiatic prisoners were often turned loose, as good propaganda among the subjugated peoples.) Japan had not signed the 1929 Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of prisoners of war, and a Japanese soldier would sooner be killed than captured: thus every enemy soldier who surrendered was a coward, a cur, a thing. Any notion of “inhumane treatment” toward a surrendered Chinese, much less a white man, was incomprehensible. White men were the foe, so their role was to work, then die. Whether their deaths proved painful did not matter to the Japanese. Unlike the Nazi POW camps, there were few escape attempts, for it was obvious to any Allied POW in Asia that a white face was an immediate giveaway even had he succeeded, and the Japanese made it clear that they would execute ten men for every man who escaped. Statistically it was seven times healthier to be a POW under the Nazis than under the Japanese. By war’s end, one out of every three white prisoners had died as their captives—“starved to death, worked to death, beaten to death, dead of loathsome epidemic diseases that the Japanese would not treat,” as Daws puts it. Another year of war and there would have been no POWs still alive. (A Japan War Ministry directive of August 1944 iterated that “the aim is to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.”)