Extinction Help Quotes

The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.

What's more, I was free to do anything that did not hurt others that strengthened me and helped me in the one thing that we are all put on this earth to do: help one another - because it is the only thing that, in the long run, gives us pleasure, as receiving love and friendship and affection is the only thing that gives us joy and ameliorates the dread of our inevitable extinction.

Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.

Because of the varroa mite, wild honey bees are now, for all practical purposes, extinct in the United States.

But I am designed to last forever," said the expendable, "if not interfered with." "Isn't that nice? Expendable yet eternal. You'll be able to go back and observe any part of human history that you wish. Watch the pyramids being unbuilt. See the ice ages go and come in reverse. Watch the de-extinction of the dinosaurs as a meteor leaps out of the Gulf of Mexico." "I will have no useful task. I will not be able to help the human race in any way. My existence will have no meaning after you are dead." "Now you know how humans feel all the time.

Neither season after season of extreme weather events nor the risk of extinction for a million animal species around the world could push environmental destruction to the top of our country’s list of concerns. And how sad, he said, to see so many among the most creative and best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment, acceptance of one’s surroundings as they were, equanimity in the face of worldly cares. (This world is but a shadow, it is a carcass, it is nothing, this world is not real, do not mistake this hallucination for the real world.) Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself. The mindfulness rage was just another distraction, he said. Of course we should be stressed, he said. We should be utterly consumed with dread. Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said. It wasn’t individual efforts to achieve inner peace, it wasn’t a compassionate attitude toward others that might have led to timely preventative action, but rather a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom.

That’s when he finds them. Birds. Mammals. Reptiles. That one was George—a Cheetah with the most flaming fur. That one was Gogy—a gorilla with the clearest pair of eyes. That one was Ms. Mimbo—a hybrid of Macao and African Grey Parrot. And the one near the stone was … well, the Monk goes through around three dozen names. It took fifty years of careful watch to make sure they don’t go extinct. If you live long enough, you might, as well, end up befriending every life your neighboring forest holds. And if you are a war hero, you might even get professionals from the Wildlife Conservation Board to help you during their crossbreeding process. But they’re all dead.

Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done?

A citizen who spiralled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorise help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

There is oppression that shouldn't exist. There is a struggle for freedom all the time. There are very serious dangers: the species may be heading toward extinction. I can't see how anybody can fail to have an interest in trying to help people become more engaged in thinking about these problems and doing something about them.

Extinction, that’s where it’s going, that’s where we’re headed. And we’re going that way because we’re all so fucking afraid of it. We’re so afraid of dying off that we’re setting ourselves up for exactly that. Keeping away from each other, rarely making eye contact with those we don’t already know. Not helping when folks need help. Avoiding confrontation and staying away when we see anything which might instill fear. Doing our best to stay out of trouble, while in effect creating more trouble.

There were two monsters sharing this planet with us when I was a boy, however, and I celebrate their extinction today. They were determined to kill us, or at least to make our lives meaningless. They came close to success. They were cruel adversaries, which my little friends the beavers were not. Lions? No. Tigers? No. Lions and tigers snoozed most of the time. The monsters I will name never snoozed. They inhabited our heads. They were the arbitrary lusts for gold, and, God help us, for a glimpse of a little girl’s underpants.

It was titled “Helping a Species Go Extinct.

I’d made a decision to help the Deltans avoid extinction. What had started as a small, anonymous intervention quickly turned into a full-time job as The Bawbe, resident sky god.

Dianthe cleared her throat and said softly, “I do this because I believe a woman should have the right to fight and die for her dominion, just like any man. We are no longer a population in danger of extinction. There’s no reason for our leaders to ban women from making this choice. So I help them make it anyway. Even if it means giving up who they are. Even if it means joining Military as ghosts.

I told Mr. Rook you were disinherited and he rushed back to help you. Mr. Rook is a rather remarkable person.” “Oh, chuck it,” said Mr. Rook with a hostile air. “Mr. Rook is a monster,” said Father Brown with scientific calm. “He is an anachronism, an atavism, a brutal survivor of the Stone Age. If there was one barbarous superstition we all supposed to be utterly extinct and dead in these days, it was that notion about honour and independence.

Perhaps we can help you, Prisoner. Meaning comes from purpose—” “—and purpose comes in many forms.” Veera steepled her fingers. Surprisingly, Jorrus did not. She said, “Have you ever considered the fact that everything we are originates from the remnants of stars that once exploded?” Jorrus said, “Vita ex pulvis.” “We are made from the dust of dead stars.” “I’m aware of the fact,” said Kira. “It’s a lovely thought, but I don’t see the relevance.” Jorrus said, “The relevance—” “—is in the logical extension of that idea.” Veera paused for a moment. “We are aware. We are conscious. And we are made from the same stuff as the heavens.” “Don’t you see, Prisoner?” said Jorrus. “We are the mind of the universe itself. We and the Jellies and all self-aware beings. We are the universe watching itself, watching and learning.” “And someday,” said Veera, “we, and by extension the universe, will learn to expand beyond this realm and save ourselves from otherwise inevitable extinction.” Kira said, “By escaping the heat death of this space.” Jorrus nodded. “Even so. But the point is not that. The point is that this act of observation and learning is a process we all share—” “—whether or not we realize it. As such, it gives purpose to everything we do, no matter—” “—how insignificant it may seem, and from that purpose, meaning. For the universe itself, given consciousness through your own mind—” “—is aware of your every hurt and care.” Veera smiled. “Take comfort, then, that whatever you choose in life has importance beyond yourself. Importance, even, on a cosmic scale.

Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development.

I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth. Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.

I hope that, in a small way, I am interesting people in animal life and in its conservation. If I accomplish this I will consider that I have achieved something worth while. And if I can, later on, help even slightly towards preventing an animal from becoming extinct, I will be content.

Conservation is not something that should be left to others. It is easy to get depressed and despondent at the impending extinction of the polar bear or the tiger, or at the horrific progress of deforestation in the tropics. Perhaps governments or scientists or organisations such as WWF can do something to help address these situations, but as an individual it is very hard to know where to start – it all seems so remote and dauntingly complex. In contrast, conserving bumblebees is something anyone can do. A single lavender bush on a patio or in a window box will attract and feed bumblebees, even in the heart of a city.

All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of the extinction that would ensue in a few generations if the species did not replenish itself. This is the implicit, and most pestiferous, rationale for propagation: to become fully integrated into a society, one must offer it fresh blood. Naturally, the average set of parents does not conceive of their conception as a sacrificial act. These are civilized human beings we are talking about, and thus they are quite able to fill their heads with a panoply of less barbaric rationales for reproduction, among them being the consolidation of a spousal relationship; the expectation of new and enjoyable experiences in the parental role; the hope that one will pass the test as a mother or father; the pleasing of one’s own parents, not to forget their parents and possibly a great-grandparent still loitering about; the serenity of taking one’s place in the seemingly deathless lineage of a familial enterprise; the creation of individuals who will care for their paternal and maternal selves in their dotage; the quelling of a sense of guilt or selfishness for not having done their duty as human beings; and the squelching of that faint pathos that is associated with the childless. Such are some of the overpowering pressures upon those who would fertilize the future. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and must be released, just as everyone must evacuate their bowels or fall victim to a fecal impaction. And who, if they could help it, would suffer a building, painful fecal impaction? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure. Quite a few people make gardens because they cannot stand the pressure of not making a garden. Others commit murder because they cannot stand the pressure building up to kill someone, either a person known to them or a total stranger. Everything is like that. Our whole lives consist of metaphorical as well as actual bowel movements, one after the other. Releasing these pressures can have greater or lesser consequences in the scheme of our lives. But they are all pressures, all bowel movements of some kind. At a certain age, children are praised for making a bowel movement in the approved manner. Later on, the praise of others dies down for this achievement and our bowel movements become our own business, although we may continue to praise ourselves for them. But overpowering pressures go on governing our lives, and the release of these essentially bowel-movement pressures may once again come up for praise, congratulations, and huzzahs of all kinds.

new influenza virus emerges, it is highly competitive, even cannibalistic. It usually drives older types into extinction. This happens because infection stimulates the body’s immune system to generate all its defenses against all influenza viruses to which the body has ever been exposed. When older viruses attempt to infect someone, they cannot gain a foothold. They cease replicating. They die out. So, unlike practically every other known virus, only one type—one swarm or quasi species—of influenza virus dominates at any given time. This itself helps prepare the way for a new pandemic, since the more time passes, the fewer people’s immune systems will recognize other antigens.

You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

Under the guise of helping the sick, oppressed and hopeless, psychiatry is paving the way for authoritarian governments to suppress a whole society furthermore, with drugs and obscene practices that promote, not only hypnotic suggestions, but also highly suggestible individuals which, otherwise, would oppose a whole repressive system that threatens both their existence and the existence of future generations on Earth. And so, one can very well say that, psychiatry, aided by pharmaceutical corporations and power-driven governments, or merely governments fearful of their own people and the extinction of immoral politics, will contribute vastly to the extermination and full extinction of the human race.

Bring Cecily home,” he said curtly. “I won’t have her at risk, even in the slightest way.” “I’ll take care of Cecily,” came the terse reply. “She’s better off without you in her life.” Tate’s eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, affronted. “You know what I mean,” Holden said. “Let her heal. She’s too young to consign herself to spinsterhood over a man who doesn’t even see her.” “Infatuation dies,” Tate said. Holden nodded. “Yes, it does. Goodbye.” “So does hero worship,” he continued, laboring the point. “And that’s why after eight years, Cecily has had one raging affair after the other,” he said facetiously. The words had power. They wounded. “You fool,” Holden said in a soft tone. “Do you really think she’d let any man touch her except you?” He went to his office door and gestured toward the desk. “Don’t forget your gadget,” he added quietly. “Wait!” Holden paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned. “What?” Tate held the device in his hands, watching the lights flicker on it. “Mixing two cultures when one of them is all but extinct is a selfish thing,” he said after a minute. “It has nothing to do with personal feelings. It’s a matter of necessity.” Holden let go of the doorknob and moved to stand directly in front of Tate. “If I had a son,” he said, almost choking on the word, “I’d tell him that there are things even more important than lofty principles. I’d tell him…that love is a rare and precious thing, and that substitutes are notoriously unfulfilling.” Tate searched the older man’s eyes. “You’re a fine one to talk.” Holden’s face fell. “Yes, that’s true.” He turned away. Why should he feel guilty? But he did. “I didn’t mean to say that,” Tate said, irritated by his remorse and the other man’s defeated posture. “I can’t help the way I feel about my culture.” “If it weren’t for the cultural difference, how would you feel about Cecily?” Tate hesitated. “It wouldn’t change anything. She’s been my responsibility. I’ve taken care of her. It would be gratitude on her part, even a little hero worship, nothing more. I couldn’t take advantage of that. Besides, she’s involved with Colby.” “And you couldn’t live with being the second man.” Tate’s face hardened. His eyes flashed. Holden shook his head. “You’re just brimming over with excuses, aren’t you? It isn’t the race thing, it isn’t the culture thing, it isn’t even the guardian-ward thing. You’re afraid.” Tate’s mouth made a thin line. He didn’t reply. “When you love someone, you give up control of yourself,” he continued quietly. “You have to consider the other person’s needs, wants, fears. What you do affects the other person. There’s a certain loss of freedom as well.” He moved a step closer. “The point I’m making is that Cecily already fills that place in your life. You’re still protecting her, and it doesn’t matter that there’s another man. Because you can’t stop looking out for her. Everything you said in this office proves that.” He searched Tate’s turbulent eyes. “You don’t like Colby Lane, and it isn’t because you think Cecily’s involved with him. It’s because he’s been tied to one woman so tight that he can’t struggle free of his love for her, even after years of divorce. That’s how you feel, isn’t it, Tate? You can’t get free of Cecily, either. But Colby’s always around and she indulges him. She might marry him in an act of desperation. And then what will you do? Will your noble excuses matter a damn then?

As long as this “brokenness” of existence continues, there is no way out of the inner contradictions that it imposes upon us. If a man has a broken leg and continues to try to walk on it, he cannot help suffering. If desire itself is a kind of fracture, every movement of desire inevitably results in pain. But even the desire to end the pain of desire is a movement, and therefore causes pain. The desire to remain immobile is a movement. The desire to escape is a movement. The desire for Nirvana is a movement. The desire for extinction is a movement. Yet there is no way for us to be still by “imposing stillness” on the desires. In a word, desire cannot stop itself from desiring, and it must continue to move and hence to cause pain even when it seeks liberation from itself and desires its own extinction.

Emma, I came out here to tell you that you don't have to mate with Grom." I raise a brow. "Uh, I was never going to mate with Grom." "What I mean is, Grom is mating with someone else who has the gift of Poseidon. Which means that-" "I don't have to mate with Grom," I finish for him. "That's what I just said." "I mean, I don't have to feel like I've let the entire species of Syrena go extinct because I won't mate with Grom." He grins. "Exactly." "But that doesn't change what I am-a Half-Breed. You still can't be with me, can you?" He rubs his thumb over my bottom lip, thoughtful. "The law forbids it right now. But I think if we give it time, we could get it overturned somehow. And I'm not going anywhere until I do." He turns us toward the SUV, stopping to retrieve my heels from the side of the road. He helps me in the passenger seat of the Escalade, then hands me my shoes. "Thank you," I tell him as he walks around to the driver's side. "It's a little late to blush," he says, strapping in. "I don't think I'll ever stop blushing." "I really hope not," he says, shutting his door. Taking my face into both hands, he pulls me to him again. His lips brush mine, but I want more. Sensing my intention, he puts his hand over mine and the seat belt I'm trying to unsnap. "Emma," he says against my lips. "I've missed you so much. But we can't. Not yet." I'm not trying to do that, I just want to get in a better position to accept his lips. Telling him so would just embarrass us both. But he says yet. What does that mean? That he wants to wait until he can get the law overturned? Or will he give it time, and if it doesn't work out, break Syrena law to be with me? For some reason, I don't want the answer bad enough to ask. Images of "that girl" flare up in my head. I don't want Galen to break his laws-it's a big part of why I love him so much. His loyalty to his people, his commitment to them. It's the kind of devotion almost nonexistent among humans. But I don't want to be "that girl" either. Syrena or not, I want to go to college. I want to experience the world above and below sea level. But it's not like any decisions need to be made right now, do they? I mean, life-changing decisions take time to make. Time and meditation. And physical space between my lips and his. I pull back. "Right. Sorry." He seizes a few tendrils of my hair and runs them along his face, grinning. "Not as sorry as I am. You'll have to help me keep my hands off you." I laugh, even as a charge runs through my veins. "Yeah. No." He laughs too and turns to start the car, then stops. Letting go of the keys, he says, "So. About breaking up." "Let me think about it some more," I tell him on the brink of giggling at his expression. "I'll see what I can do to help you make up your mind." We stay parked for another fifteen minutes. But at least we're not broken up anymore.

We are not just protecting nature somewhere out there or giving things up simply to prevent the extinction of apparently unimportant beetles or species of birds. On the contrary, with every step we take to help conserve the ecosystem that is the Earth, we are at the same time protecting ourselves and our quality of life, simply because we are a fully functioning part of the whole. Environmental conservation is and must be—literally and in the best sense of the word—about just one thing: self-care.

They weren’t just for entrainment and diversion. Books also served as the premier weapon in fighting Adolf Hitler’s “war of ideas.” Nazi Germany sought control over people’s beliefs, not just their bodies and territory. From the 1933 state-sanctioned book burnings in Germany to the purging of libraries across Europe as nations were conquered by the Nazis, “un-German” reading material was threatened with extinction. The scale of destruction was impressive. By V-E Day, it is estimated that Germany had destroyed over 100 million books in Europe.

They weren’t just for entertainment and diversion. Books also served as the premier weapon in fighting Adolf Hitler’s “war of ideas.” Nazi Germany sought control over people’s beliefs, not just their bodies and territory. From the 1933 state-sanctioned book burnings in Germany to the purging of libraries across Europe as nations were conquered by the Nazis, “un-German” reading material was threatened with extinction. The scale of destruction was impressive. By V-E Day, it is estimated that Germany had destroyed over 100 million books in Europe.

TELLING TIME Before she was old, she took canoe trips in the rain and buried her passions deep within nature poems. Ten years before she was old, her husband died and developers paid a mighty price for their dairy farm. She knew she was getting old, when rest stops in Iowa changed over to those crazy automated washrooms. When she was old, God helped with little things (growing tomatoes in her garden) but was missing on big ticket items (bringing her husband back). She knew she had lived too long when her grandson explained extinction to his stuffed polar bear.

We are often appalled at the tragic prevalence of wildlife poaching in Africa, where only a resolute if underfunded band of park guards works to prevent the total elimination of rhino and elephant.* But 70 years ago things were even more desperate in Europe, for Europe had lost its megafauna, and even its wisent had been driven into extinction in the wild. Its largest surviving wild creatures were antelope-sized, and even some of them were being exterminated by the most determined poaching. The lessons of history should make the world more helpful to the dozens of unsung African Renzo Videsotts working today. With a little help, they may succeed in conserving some of Africa’s fauna.

Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast out the devil with Beelzebub – the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They too do not appear to have heard anything of the elementary axiom of mass psychology, that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not burden themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, or rebirth of the spirit – deo concedente. It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try – as they apparently do – to rope the individual into a social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.

The careful, embroidered stitches delineated a coil of some sort. It looked rather like a halved snail shell, but the interior was divided into dozen of intricate chambers. "Is that a nautilus?" he asked. "Close, but no. It's an ammonite." "An ammonite? What's an ammonite? Sounds like an Old Testament people overdue for smiting." "Ammonites are not a biblical people," she replied in a tone of strained forbearance. "But they have been smited." "Smote." With a snap of linen, she shot him a look. "Smote?" "Grammatically speaking, I think the word you want is 'smote.' " "Scientifically speaking, the word I want is 'extinct.' Ammonites are extinct. They're only known to us in fossils." "And bedsheets, apparently." "You know..." She huffed aside a lock of hair dangling in her face. "You could be helping." "But I'm so enjoying watching," he said, just to devil her. Nonetheless, he picked up the edge of the top sheet and fingered the stitching as he pulled it straight. "So you made this?" "Yes." Though judging by her tone, it hadn't been a labor of love. "My mother always insisted, from the time I was twelve years old, that I spend an hour every evening on embroidery. She had all three of us forever stitching things for our trousseaux." 'Trousseaux.' The word hit him queerly. "You brought your trousseau?" "Of course I brought my trousseau. To create the illusion of an elopement, obviously. And it made the most logical place to store Francine. All these rolls of soft fabric made for good padding." Some emotion jabbed his side, then scampered off before he could name it. Guilt, most likely. These were sheets meant to grace her marriage bed, and she was spreading them over a stained straw-tick mattress in a seedy coaching inn. "Anyhow," she went on, "so long as my mother forced me to embroider, I insisted on choosing a pattern that interested me. I've never understood why girls are always made to stitch insipid flowers and ribbons." "Well, just to hazard a guess..." Colin straightened his edge. "Perhaps that's because sleeping on a bed of flowers and ribbons sounds delightful and romantic. Whereas sharing one's bed with a primeval sea snail sounds disgusting." Her jaw firmed. "You're welcome to sleep on the floor." "Did I say disgusting? I meant enchanting. I've always wanted to go to bed with a primeval sea snail.

The first distinction that we make is between public and private anger. Much research treats the two as equivalent, but in fact they are opposites. Public anger is often worn like a badge of honour. Icelanders protesting against a corrupt political class are emboldened by virtue. They railed against corruption and sought moral redress. Extinction Rebellion is fueled by the anger of righteousness. When people are publicly angry, because they are wronged, or they witness wrong-doing, they want it to be recognized and addressed. This is moral outrage. Private anger resembles its opposite. It is often characterized by shame. People who are angry in their private lives, often seek counseling, rather than retribution. An angry colleague, a stressed parent, or an enraged driver – these are people in need of help, not deserving of redress. But public anger itself is also two-sided.

You cannot help but be human, said Saphira, attempting to comfort Nasuada. Yet you do not have to be bound by what those around you believe. You can grow beyond the limits of your race if you have the will. If the events of the past can teach us anything, it is that the kings and queens and other leaders who have brought the races closer together are the ones who have accomplished the greatest good in Alagaësia. It is strife and anger we must guard against, not closer relations with those who were once our foes. Remember your distrust of the Urgals, for they have well earned it, but also remember that once dwarves and dragons loved one another no more than humans and Urgals. And once dragons fought against the elves and would have driven their race extinct if we could have. Once those things were true, but no more, because people like you had the courage to set aside past hatreds and forge bonds of friendship where, previously, none existed.

Likewise for all cases of extinction, which represent well over 99 percent of species that ever lived. (This, by the way, poses an enormous problem for theories of intelligent design (ID). It doesn’t seem so intelligent to design millions of species that are destined to go extinct, and then replace them with other, similar species, most of which will also vanish. ID supporters have never addressed this difficulty.) Natural selection must also work with the design of an organism as a whole, which is a compromise among different adaptations. Female sea turtles dig their nests on the beach with their flippers—a painful, slow, and clumsy process that exposes their eggs to predators. Having more shovel-like flippers would help them do a better and faster job, but then they couldn’t swim as well. A conscientious designer might have given the turtles an extra pair of limbs, with retractable shovel-like appendages, but turtles, like all reptiles, are stuck with a developmental plan that limits their limbs to four.

WHY PARADIGMS MATTER Ideas drive results. People's beliefs drive their actions. Actions that stem from a simple, complete and accurate paradigm result in personal fulfillment, harmonious relationships, and economic prosperity. Actions based on false, incomplete and inaccurate paradigms, however well intended or passionately defended, are the cause of widespread misery, suffering and deprivation. As detailed in Rethinking Survival: Getting to the Positive Paradigm of Change, a fatal information deficit explains the worldwide leadership deficit and related budget deficits. In a dangerous world where psychological and economic warfare compete with religious extremism and terrorism to undo thousands of years of incremental human progress, a healing balance is urgently needed. Restoring a simple, complete and accurate paradigm of leadership and relationships now could make the difference between human survival on the one hand, and the extinction of the human race (or the end of civilization as we know it), on the other. p. 7.

Flow is an extremely potent response to external events and requires an extraordinary set of signals. The process includes dopamine, which does more than tune signal-to-noise ratios. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. Evolutionarily, it serves a similar function. Human beings are hardwired for exploration, hardwired to push the envelope: dopamine is largely responsible for that wiring. This neurochemical is released whenever we take a risk or encounter something novel. It rewards exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle firing timing in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well. Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay. And as a pleasure-inducer, if dopamine’s drug analog is cocaine, norepinephrine’s is speed, which means this enhancement comes with a hell of a high. Endorphins, our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high. These natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin. Potent too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. The next neurotransmitter is anandamide, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “bliss”—and for good reason. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (our ability to link disparate ideas together). More critically, anandamide also inhibits our ability to feel fear, even, possibly, according to research done at Duke, facilitates the extinction of long-term fear memories. Lastly, at the tail end of a flow state, it also appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin, the neurochemical now associated with SSRIs like Prozac. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity,” Oxford University’s Philip Cowen told the New York Times, “to not lose it, to keep going and try to sort everything out.” In flow, serotonin is partly responsible for the afterglow effect, and thus the cause of some confusion. “A lot of people associate serotonin directly with flow,” says high performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “but that’s backward. By the time the serotonin has arrived the state has already happened. It’s a signal things are coming to an end, not just beginning.” These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop.

better. Instead, he said, Galbatorix still has two dragon eggs. During our first audience with Hrothgar, you mentioned that you would like to rescue them. If we can— Saphira snorted bitterly. It could take years, and even if we did retrieve the eggs, I have no guarantee that they would hatch, nor that they would be male, nor that we would be fit mates. Fate has abandoned my race to extinction. She lashed her tail with frustration, breaking a sapling in two. She seemed perilously close to tears. What can I say? he asked, disturbed by her distress. You can’t give up hope. You still have a chance to find a mate, but you have to be patient. Even if Galbatorix’s eggs don’t work, dragons must exist elsewhere in the world, just like humans, elves, and Urgals do. The moment we are free of our obligations, I’ll help you search for them. All right? All right, she sniffed. She craned back her head and released a puff of white smoke that dispersed among the branches overhead. I should know better than to let my emotions get the best of me. Nonsense. You would have to be made of stone not to feel this way. It’s perfectly normal.… But promise you won’t dwell on it while you’re alone.

An Aside   To break with this routine I have written this manuscript in a way that challenges my reader to explore on the edge of language instead of drowning in devices intending to take for granted meanings and draw false assumptions burdened by planted biases. In your face are thrown one lie after another that defy what is actually seen and offer nothing of balance to either perspective or clarity on a daily basis... yet, it seems natural to you. Because there is no power to your sense of expectation. None. You are boxed into what is possible and what is not, even unsure of the shape of the earth. Led into debates over something as idiotic as that while you balk at having neighbors from elsewhere. So enormous is this Universe and yet you would limit its possibility to produce any of the wonders on some tiny grain of sand found on a beach in comparison. From written history anomalies have been spied and reported accomplishing what nothing today can. Trans Lunar Phenomena, recorded hundreds of years with thousands of reports demonstrate intelligent presence on the moon while nothing of this is factored into your narrow credulity. When one emerges who can answer resolution to so many anomaly, predicts events with accuracy, and offers what is needed to help you survive a planet crippled to the point of extinction, you cannot quit your routine of acquired preference for the mundane suited to a boxed-in comfort zone long enough to check him out. The few above this are too few. I feel quite privileged to have found four. Others are awakening yet still not shown to be at a point of no return to stifling group thought. If you are, then show me. Show me you are aware we near the point where nothing is left to lose. Where resolute action need not be possessed of fear. I will say this, unified consciousness would have no trouble with accepting this challenge I throw at your feet, but then conditions so favorable to enslavement here may be your problem and not that solely attributable to split consciousness. I am willing to engage with you to the very end of hope to find out. Wake up to the signs and ramifications of the trends set I have touched upon. Help awaits a world ready to receive it.

One way to try to answer the question “What makes us human?” is to ask “What makes us different from great apes?” or, to be more precise, from nonhuman apes, since, of course, humans are apes. As just about every human by now knows—and as the experiments with Dokana once again confirm—nonhuman apes are extremely clever. They’re capable of making inferences, of solving complex puzzles, and of understanding what other apes are (and are not) likely to know. When researchers from Leipzig performed a battery of tests on chimpanzees, orangutans, and two-and-a-half-year-old children, they found that the chimps, the orangutans, and the kids performed comparably on a wide range of tasks that involved understanding of the physical world. For example, if an experimenter placed a reward inside one of three cups, and then moved the cups around, the apes found the goody just as often as the kids—indeed, in the case of chimps, more often. The apes seemed to grasp quantity as well as the kids did—they consistently chose the dish containing more treats, even when the choice involved using what might loosely be called math—and also seemed to have just as good a grasp of causality. (The apes, for instance, understood that a cup that rattled when shaken was more likely to contain food than one that did not.) And they were equally skillful at manipulating simple tools. Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues. When the children were given a hint about where to find a reward—someone pointing to or looking at the right container—they took it. The apes either didn’t understand that they were being offered help or couldn’t follow the cue. Similarly, when the children were shown how to obtain a reward, by, say, ripping open a box, they had no trouble grasping the point and imitating the behavior. The apes, once again, were flummoxed. Admittedly, the kids had a big advantage in the social realm, since the experimenters belonged to their own species. But, in general, apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society. “Chimps do a lot of incredibly smart things,” Michael Tomasello, who heads the institute’s department of developmental and comparative psychology, told me. “But the main difference we’ve seen is 'putting our heads together.' If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.

A new feeling of dread for the world I live in formed in my stomach. I began to wish the ‘theory’ of Rutherford’s followers wasn’t just too good to be true: Earth would be paradise. Jesus, all by himself but by the help of God, would rule the world. Barrack Obamas, Queen Elizabeths, David Camerons, Pope Francises and the rest would go into extinction because Jehovah’s minions would be in charge. Infact violence would end. There would be surplus food. No more sicknesses. No more deaths. This forensic suite would be needless. God would come to dwell with us. Fiction couldn’t have been more real.

Do you think a sociopath cries to God as they die? Ironic that one counterfeit being would cry out to another for help.

The bald eagle was still soaring above them, too, showing them that anything was possible, even a return from near extinction, as long as you had a little help.

that meat production is the second or third largest contributor to environmental problems at every level and at every scale, from global to local. It is a primary culprit in land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, species extinction, loss of biodiversity, and climate change.

War! What is it good for? Well, it’s good for businessmen making munitions. It’s good for dirty politicians who need people to think about something else. It also helps getting rid of bastards and evil empires. Sometimes it can even save your space-time continuum.

BENJAMIN Age: 10 Height: 5’1 Favourite animal: His dog, Spooky   Of all the Cluefinders, Benjamin is the most interested in sports. He is very physically active, playing football and cricket at the weekends, and often going for a morning jog with Jake, his next-door neighbour, and their Dads. Ben took some karate lessons until he decided that he never wanted to fight another person if he could help it. Like Chris, he loves to read comic books, and his favourite super-hero is Spider-Man, who is also very athletic. He says, “I love to exercise because it means I can eat whatever I want without getting fat!” Ben especially loves spaghetti Bolognese and pizza.   Ben has a dog, Spooky, who he plays with all the time. Ben has a soft spot for all animals, and supports the World Wildlife Fund, which aims to protect endangered wild animals which are at risk of going extinct. His goals for the future include travelling around the world, an ambition he shares with Clara. He would like to visit the countries of South America, where there is an abundance of wildlife.

Technically, it is correct that extinction can’t be used to help people cope with problems that are not based on learning because what it does is induce new learning that competes with the original learning. But

Cope laughed. “I wouldn’t worry yourself, my friend. Eobasileus has been extinct for thirty-seven million years.” At this, the preacher could no longer contain himself. “Nonsense! Utter nonsense!” “Nonsense?” asked Cope. “The archbishop James Ussher, using the Holy Bible itself, worked back generation by generation, mathematically, and calculated that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC at precisely eight a.m.” “Did he, now? Eight a.m., precisely?” “Precisely,” the preacher insisted. Copy and Sternberg exchanged amused looks. “Well,” Cope replied, “since the rotation of the Earth assures us that it’s always eight a.m. somewhere in the world, I suppose I should applaud him for guessing the correct time, at least.” The cowboy couldn’t help but interject. “Pardon me, Preacher, but if I recall correctly, didn’t the Bible say something about the Lord resting on the seventh day?” The preacher looked confused. “What?” “I’m certain of it.” The cowboy quickly snatched the Bible from the preacher’s hands and opened it to the first page of Genesis. “Sure. Here it is. He got started on a Monday, making light and darkness. By the time he got around to creating the Earth it was well into the third day. I make that to be Wednesday, not Sunday.” Nonplussed and blushing, the preacher snatched his Bible back. The cowboy shrugged. “Looks to me like your archbishop pulled a fast one, Preacher. Or maybe he just wasn’t all that good at calculating.

Stephen Maturin sipped his scalding coffee, the right Mocha berry, brought back from Arabia Felix in the pilgrim dhows, and considered. He was naturally a reserved and even a secretive man: his illegitimate birth (his father was an Irish officer in the service of His Most Catholic Majesty, his mother a Catalan lady) had to do with this; his activities in the cause of the liberation of Ireland had more; and his voluntary, gratuitous alliance with naval intelligence, undertaken with the sole aim of helping to defeat Bonaparte, whom he loathed with all his heart as a vile tyrant, a wicked cruel vulgar man, a destroyer of freedom and of nations, and as a betrayor of all that was good in the Revolution, had even more. Yet the power of keeping his mouth shut was innate; so perhaps was the integrity that made him one of the Admiralty’s most valued secret agents, particularly in Catalonia – a calling very well disguised by his also being an active naval surgeon, as well as a natural philosopher of international renown, one whose name was familiar to all those who cared deeply about the extinct solitaire of Rodriguez (close cousin to the dodo), the great land tortoise Testudo aubreii of the Indian Ocean, or the habits of the African aardvark. Excellent agent though he was, he was burdened with a heart, a loving heart that had very nearly broken for a woman named Diana Villiers: she had preferred an American to him – a natural preference, since Mr. Johnson was a fine upstanding witty intelligent man, and very rich, whereas Stephen was a plain bastard at the best, sallow with odd pale eyes, sparse hair and meager limbs, and rather poor.

The paradigm of self-interest is neutral between a person’s decision to help others or to not help others. If fear and uncertainty make people more short-sighted, self-centric and engage in hoarding cash, withdrawing from banks, disinvesting their savings in capital markets and buying essential goods in bulk, then there is no drive, urge or impetus that economics can offer to suggest otherwise. It is neutral between these choices and the choice for altruism. On the other hand, as per physics, we were stardust before and stardust after extinction. As per evolutionary biology, we are one of the millions and millions of species that have earned the right to survive under the sun for a brief period until genetic mutations bury our specie as well. We were born through a fierce and destructive competition and survive until we manage to withstand that competition. While waiting and acting on morals, we should not be here in the first place.

In the workday world, complainers will not go far. When someone asks how you are doing, you had better be wise enough to reply "I can't complain." If you do complain, even justifiably, people will stop asking how you are doing. Complaining will not help you succeed and influence people. You can complain to your physician or psychiatrist because they are paid to hear you complain. But you cannot complain to your boss or your friends, if you have any. You will soon be dismissed from your job and dropped from the social register. Then you will be left alone with your complaints and no one to listen to them gratis. Perhaps then the message will sink into your head: If you do not feel good enough for long enough, you should act as if you do and even think as if you do. That is the way to get yourself to feel good for long enough and stop you from complaining for good, as any self-improvement book can affirm. But should you not improve, someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. This is monumentally so if you are a pessimist or a depressive. Should you conclude that life is objectionable or that nothing matters, do not waste our time with your nonsense. We are on our way to the future, and the philosophically disheartening or the emotionally impaired are not going to hinder our progress. If you cannot say something positive, or at least equivocal, keep it to yourself. Pessimists and depressives need not apply for a position in the enterprise of life. You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsake by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin our fabricated reality or stubbornly insist on... what? That we should mollycoddle non-positive thinkers like you or rethink how the whole world transacts it's business? That we should start over from scratch? Or that we should go extinct? Try to be realistic. We did the best we could with the tools we had. After all, we are only human, as we like to say. Our world may not be in accord with nature's way, but it did develop organically according to our consciousness , which delivered us to a lofty prominence over the Creation. The whole thing just took on a life of its own, and nothing is going to stop it anytime soon. There can be no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no melancholic head-case is going to bad-mouth our catastrophe. The universe was created by the Creator, by damn. We live in a country we love and that loves us back, We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to be overhauled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not double-plus-good and never will be. Our lives may not be unflawed, that would deny us a better future to work towards but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. Lighten up or leave us alone. You will never get us to give up our hopes. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. We are not contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. Such opinions will not be accredited by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity. To lay it on the line, whatever thoughts may emerge from your deviant brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to hang on you, who are only "one of those people." So start pretending that you feel good enough for long enough, stop your complaining, and get back in line.

Knowing who I was helped me avoid a lot of dead ends in life. A lot of opportunities look good, but I’ve found that sometimes success and happiness are about knowing when to say no.

The biggest impact of the Norman invasion was on the English language, which was replaced by French and Latin as the medium of government and law for three centuries. It might well have gone extinct, just as at least eight previous native languages of England had been, but most likely sheer weight of numbers and its established literature helped it survive.

One more thing makes influenza unusual. When a new influenza virus emerges, it is highly competitive, even cannibalistic. It usually drives older types into extinction. This happens because infection stimulates the body’s immune system to generate all its defenses against all influenza viruses to which the body has ever been exposed. When older viruses attempt to infect someone, they cannot gain a foothold. They cease replicating. They die out. So, unlike practically every other known virus, only one type—one swarm or quasi species—of influenza virus dominates at any given time. This itself helps prepare the way for a new pandemic, since the more time passes, the fewer people’s immune systems will recognize other antigens.

The declining rate of profit To shore up our understanding of the declining rate of profit it is helpful to represent capital production with the formula c + v + s. The value of c is not increased in production but merely preserved by it, whereas v is the only part of capital that enables the capitalist to increase the value of their capital. s is the portion of the newly created value appropriated by the capitalist. The rate of surplus value is therefore s / v and the rate of profit is the ratio between surplus value and total capital, that is s / (c + v). The organic composition of capital, c / v, measures the difference between the rate of surplus value, s / v, and the rate of profit – ie, in general, the higher the organic composition of capital, the more capital-intensive the industry, and the lower the rate of profit; the more labour-intensive, the higher the rate of profit. Because the demands of capital accumulation, as well as the need to stay ahead of or keep up with competitors, compels capitalists to innovate in order to raise productivity, the fundamental tendency of the capitalist system is to increase the ratio of constant capital to variable capital. But when the organic composition of capital, c / v, increases, other things being equal, the profit rate, s / (c + v), declines.

Unless we act first, the torture and exploitation on trees, Nature and common people by the humanity with the help of media is alarming signal for the extinction of the humanity itself.

Cloning must be sacrilege to the doctrines of metempsychosis, as it interrupts the sequence of reincarnations and the migration of souls. But it is also sacrilegious where the laws of evolution are concerned, since it is tantamount to an unlimited perpetuation of the species. In the body, a will to help begins to form. It is the body that chooses, among the innumerable pathogenic elements at its disposal, the illness that will purify you by diet and fever.

but it was not a history-maker” like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction.

The report helpfully provided that Quakers are a religious group that pride themselves on their nonviolent beliefs. That was a stupid principle on which to found a religion, Chung-Cha thought. One could not rule out violence, because violence was often necessary. And since other religions routinely employed violence, those that did not were in constant danger of being rendered extinct.

I sometimes wonder whether any of the animals I film will become extinct, leaving these images as part of the record of their time on Earth. I have filmed rarer birds than these Adelies, but when I look at the young penguins, preening and pottering about my feet, I can't help thinking it would have been like this to sit beside a group of dodos. Adelies could move further south to find more ice but eventually the Antarctic continent will block their way and that will be the beginning of the end, because penguins must always have access to the sea. Their species may become one of the earliest casualties of climate change. More young birds are coming down to the shore and as they pass I speak to each of them: 'Good luck. Good luck. Good luck.

While we’ve driven many to extinction, to others we’ve brought absurd levels of global success. We think of eucalyptus trees as native to Australia, but they were rare there when humans showed up forty-five thousand years ago. Our use of fire to clear other species helped these fire-resistant trees eventually thrive and spread throughout that continent. When I first visited Northern California, I assumed that eucalyptuses were native there, as they so dominate the forested hills. Yet they were introduced only during the gold rush, in the 1850s, when they were thought to be a promising source of timber for railroad ties. They turned out to be lousy for that purpose, but they took well to the dry, sunny hills, where they displaced many native trees. They are now regarded as an invasive species and, ironically, given their history in Australia,

At the time, I thought my colleague’s views sounded absurdly legalistic: if Christianity had lost all its living and breathing followers in Tunisia (say), what did it matter if the institutional minutiae survived? But on reflection, I think he was making a worthwhile point about the time span of human history. The scriptures of many religions remind us that the divine does not necessarily work according to our concepts of time. As the Psalmist declares, “[A] thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night.” Perhaps only our limited awareness of time leads us to think that the ruin of a church has happened “forever,” when all we mean is that, by our mortal standards, we can see no chance of it being reversed. In fact, religions are like biological organisms, which do not become extinct just because they are driven from a particular environment. Provided they continue to exist elsewhere, they might well return someday to recolonize. And often, in the human context, memories of that historical precedent help shape the new settlement.

To this day I believe a person’s ideal first job is the one that reveals the most about them. Knowing who I was helped me avoid a lot of dead ends in life. A lot of opportunities look good, but I’ve found that sometimes success and happiness are about knowing when to say no.

- “Do you know the difference between us and them.... We are awake. We sense the truth: that something is deeply wrong with the world.... Deep down, they know it too. The feeling ebbs and flows. Some events cover it up for a time: you fall in love, you get a new job, you win the game. You think that’s all you needed, that the feeling will go away, but it doesn’t. It returns, again and again. Our species has become exceedingly adept at covering up the feeling. We work ourselves to death. We buy things. We go to parties and ball games. We laugh, shout, and cheer—and worse, we fight, and argue, and say things we don’t mean. Alcohol and drugs quiet the most acute episodes. But we are constantly keeping the beast at bay. Underneath it all, our subconscious is crying out for help. For a solution—a cure for the root problem. We’re all suffering from the same thing.” - “Which is?” - “We’ve been told that it’s simply the human condition. But that’s not true. Our problem is really very simple: the world is not as it seems.” - “Then what is it?” - “Science gives you one answer. Religious texts offer countless others. But the human population is slowly tiring of those answers. They are starting not to believe. They are awakening—and that awakening will soon tear the world apart. It will be a catastrophe with no equal.

From Mencius ... "If, however, dogs and swine eat that food which should be eaten by human beings, without thought being taken to put a stop to this practice, if people starve to death on the public highways, without thought being taken as to how to help them, and if one still says, in the face of the extinction of the population, 'It is not I who am to blame for this, but the bad year'—this is just the same as if one stabs a person to death and says, 'It is not I who did this, but the sword.

The bones are pieces of a puzzle, left for us to find someday—when we are ready to put them together, when our technology can unravel the mystery. It will be the greatest discovery of all time. We only need to find the pieces. Would you like to help me search for them?

The difference between working on extinction level events and working on longevity is that longevity is guaranteed to give you dividends; guaranteed to have a pay off at some point, perhaps even by accident.

Humans did so in the Pleistocene by helping to drive hundreds of species of large mammals to extinction. They did so in the mid-Holocene by clearing forests for farming. Although we do not do so, it is possible to define the Anthropocene so that it begins with any of these activities.

Think about it. Look at what it took for intelligence to emerge in Nature. Today is Monday. If the 3.8 billion years life has thrived on Earth equated to 38 days, then for over a month all we had around here were microbes. “Complex, multicellular life arose last Wednesday. Dinosaurs came in on Friday. Sometime this morning, around 1am, a meteor struck and the best part of an entire phylogenetic clade was pushed to extinction. Those few avian dinosaurs that did survive went on to supply us with deep fried chicken and scrambled eggs.” I can’t help but smile at Avika’s compressed take on the history of life on Earth. “Mammals have been around at least since Sunday, but they were little more than rodents most of the time. That rock from space cleared out vast swathes of the ecosystem, and mammals rushed to fill the gap. “Every multicellular creature has some degree of intelligence, or at least instinct, but it wasn’t until some point in the last hour that the wisest of men, Homo sapiens arose, and yet even then, intelligence was little more than a desperate struggle for survival. “For the last seven minutes, or roughly two hundred thousand years, our intelligence extended little further than chipping at rocks to make stone knives. “In the last thirty seconds, we’ve been on a bender. We’ve built pyramids, sailed the oceans and landed on the Moon!” I say, “So your point is, human intelligence is the pinnacle of evolution?” “Oh, no. Not at all. There’s plenty of intelligence in the animal kingdom, especially among mammals, birds and cephalopods, but it took 3.8 billion years before intelligence could exploit its own ingenuity and blossom in its own right. “If all our intellectual accomplishments are the result of the last thirty seconds, then perhaps creating artificial intelligence isn’t quite as easy as busting out some Perl scripts.” I

My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.” She leaned forward, suddenly energized. “If more people were like us, imagine what we could accomplish. New crops to feed the millions going hungry. Stopping pandemics from raging across our world. Ending most disease and all poverty and all war. No more mass extinctions. Clean, renewable, limitless energy. Spreading into the solar system.” Twenty years later, as the hot water beat down on my back, I felt a chill run through me. “So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

to produce. As John Adams wrote, “Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.”1 Here are ten steps that I think might help put us more on the course intended by the Revolutionary generation, to help us move beyond where we are stuck and instead toward what we ought to be: 1. Don’t panic Did the founders anticipate a Donald Trump? I would say yes. As James Madison wrote in the most prominent of his contributions to the Federalist Papers, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”2 Just after Aaron Burr nearly became president, Jefferson wrote that “bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles. This is a subject with which wisdom & patriotism should be occupied.”3 Fortunately the founders built a durable system, one that often in recent years has stymied Trump. He has tried to introduce a retrogressive personal form of rule, but repeatedly has run into a Constitution built instead to foster the rule of law.4 Over the last several years we have seen Madison’s checks and balances operate robustly. Madison designed a structure that could accommodate people acting unethically and venally. Again, our national political gridlock sometimes is not a bug but a feature. It shows our system is working. The key task is to do our best to make sure the machinery of the system works. This begins with ensuring that eligible citizens are able to vote. This ballot box is the basic building block of our system. We should appreciate how strong and flexible our Constitution is. It is all too easy, as one watches the follies and failings of humanity, to conclude that we live in a particularly wicked time. In a poll taken just as I was writing the first part of this book, the majority of Americans surveyed said they think they are living at the lowest point in American history.5 So it is instructive to be reminded that Jefferson held similar beliefs about his own era. He wrote that there were “three epochs in history signalized by the total extinction of national morality.” The first two were in ancient times, following the deaths of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, he thought, and the third was his own age.6 As an aside, Trump’s attacks on immigrants might raise a few eyebrows among the founders. Seven of the thirty-nine people who signed the Constitution were themselves born abroad, most notably Hamilton and James Wilson.7

Purpose of Purpose (The Sonnet) The purpose of science is its correction, The purpose of religion is its extinction. The purpose of art is purposeful reflection, The purpose of a human is self-annihilation. The purpose of hands is to unfold in help, The purpose of heart is to be a shelter. The purpose of feet is to walk forward, The purpose of eyes is to enhance insight. Purpose is the antithesis of imprisonment, Life is the antithesis of indoctrination. Hands aren't meant to be used for hogging, Heart is the antithesis of division. All purpose must be an aid to the uplift of humanity. If it is impediment, it ain't no purpose, but inhumanity.

In the place where our ancestors first evolved, sugar in plastic bottles is replacing the sweetness of the food that helped to make us human, honey.

The folly of man—the folly of the blasted silos he had helped to build—this assumption that things needed saving. They ought to have been left on their own, both people and the planet. Mankind had the right to go extinct.

With the importance of resetting the entropy each time a steam engine goes through a cycle, you might wonder what would happen if the entropy reset were to fail. That’s tantamount to the steam engine not expelling adequate waste heat, and so with each cycle the engine would get hotter until it would overheat and break down. If a steam engine were to suffer such a fate it might prove inconvenient but, assuming there were no injuries, would likely not drive anyone into an existential crisis. Yet the very same physics is central to whether life and mind can persist indefinitely far into the future. The reason is that what holds for the steam engine holds for you. It is likely that you don’t consider yourself to be a steam engine or perhaps even a physical contraption. I, too, only rarely use those terms to describe myself. But think about it: your life involves processes no less cyclical than those of the steam engine. Day after day, your body burns the food you eat and the air you breathe to provide energy for your internal workings and your external activities. Even the very act of thinking—molecular motion taking place in your brain—is powered by these energy-conversion processes. And so, much like the steam engine, you could not survive without resetting your entropy by purging excess waste heat to the environment. Indeed, that’s what you do. That’s what we all do. All the time. It’s why, for example, the military’s infrared goggles designed to “see” the heat we all continually expel do a good job of helping soldiers spot enemy combatants at night. We can now appreciate more fully Russell’s mind-set when imagining the far future. We are all waging a relentless battle to resist the persistent accumulation of waste, the unstoppable rise of entropy. For us to survive, the environment must absorb and carry away all the waste, all the entropy, we generate. Which raises the question, Does the environment—by which we now mean the observable universe—provide a bottomless pit for absorbing such waste? Can life dance the entropic two-step indefinitely? Or might there come a time when the universe is, in effect, stuffed and so is unable to absorb the waste heat generated by the very activities that define us, bringing an end to life and mind? In the lachrymose phrasing of Russell, is it true that “all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins”?

I’m fine,” he said. “Just a little woozy. Must not have gone in deep enough.” I scanned the ridge, and I caught a flicker of light reflecting off metal. “Sharpshooter,” I whispered. “But you can’t do that with tranq darts.” “These people can resurrect extinct supernatural races, Maya,” Daniel whispered. “I think their technology goes a little beyond the norm.” “Right. Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Follow me.” I started crawling through the brush. I’d gone only a few steps when I realized Daniel wasn’t behind me. I turned to see him on his stomach, blinking hard. “Nope,” he said. “It went in deep enough.” I scrambled back to him. “Go on, Maya,” he said. “No.” Ignoring his arguments, I tried to lift him, arm over my shoulders. When that failed, I tried dragging him from the bushes, pleading with him to help me, to just get himself a little ways away from where he’d fallen, please just a little ways. But he was almost unconscious, fighting just to keep his head up. “Go on, Maya,” he said, words slurring. “Remember what we said. Only one has to get away.” “Then it’ll have to be Rafe or Corey. I’m not leaving--” “They got Rafe and Corey. You know they did. Go.” I shook my head. “I won’t.” “One of us has to get away.” He managed to look up at me, his eyes so unfocused I knew he couldn’t see anything. “Please, Maya. Go.” He dropped then, a dead weight, falling on his side. I could hear a team coming. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll make it up to you.” I bent and kissed Daniel’s cheek. Then I left.

When we first started working with this wolf, he was ninety-nine miles down a one-hundred-mile-long road to extinction. We now have him identified, and we feel we have him turned around the other way. It will be a long uphill push to save him; I don't know if we can do it. If we do decide that it is feasible, we need you to help pull; we are sure going to push." Curtis J. Carley, first Red Wolf Recovery Project field coordinator, Fish and Wildlife Service, at a public outreach presentation (1977)

What we do know is that the basic structure of the tree of life has helped us understand that all extant life on Earth is derived from a single, extinct microbial organism.

When we first started working with this wolf, he was ninety-nine miles down a one-hundred-mile-long road to extinction. We now have him identified, and we feel we have him turned around the other way. It will be a long uphill push to save him; I don’t know if we can do it. If we do decide that it is feasible, we need you to help pull; we are sure going to push. Curtis J. Carley, first Red Wolf Recovery Project field coordinator, Fish and Wildlife Service, at a public outreach presentation (1977)

Tm merely trying to do my job. God, Scholscher, how can we talk of progress when we’re still destroying, all around us, life’s most beautiful and noble manifestations? Our artists, our architects, our scientists, our poets, sweat blood to make life more beautiful, and at the same time we force our way into the last forests left to us, with our finger on the trigger of an automatic weapon, and we poison the oceans and the very air we breathe with our atomic devices. Perhaps this madman Morel will succeed in rousing public opinion. By God, I feel I could join him in his maquis. We’ve got to resist this degradation. Are we no longer capable of respecting nature, or defending a living beauty that has no earning power, no utility, no object except to let itself be seen from time to time? Liberty, too, is a natural splendor on its way to becoming extinct. I’m speaking for myself to get it off my chest, because I haven't the courage to act like Morel. It’s absolutely essential that man should manage to preserve something other than what helps to make soles for shoes or sewing machines, that he should leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge and where he himself can feel safe from his own cleverness and folly. Only then will it be possible to begin talking of a civilization. A utilitarian civilization will always go on to its logical conclusion-forced labor camps. We must leave a margin. And besides, let me tell you . . . There's nothing to be so proud of, is there?

Some of the older people I've counseled seemed almost disappointed that humanity was spared its just ecological deserts." "It was tough on the Schadenfreude crowd," Majewski agreed, grinning. "The ones who viewed humankind as a sort of plague organism spoiling what might otherwise have been a pretty good planet. But paleontologists tend to take a long view of life. Some creatures survive, some become extinct. But no matter how great the ecological disaster, the paradox called life keeps on defying entropy and trying to perfect itself. Hard times just seem to help evolution.

The pills didn’t try to get me,” she explained. “They weren’t forced down my throat. I made a conscious choice to take them in order to numb the searing pain. It didn’t matter the pain was mostly in my head, it stung all the same. And I convinced myself that crawling into that warm glow of oblivion would help get me back on my feet when all it was really doing was pushing me closer to the ground.

The Vril Society was one of the major occult societies that helped fuel Nazism in Germany. In the book, The Black Sun, author Peter Moon provides some basic information on its formation and its beliefs:

The Chronovisor. From the founding of the Roman Empire to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the Romans crucifying Jesus Christ, Ernetti alleged that with the help of the device, he and his team had taken a peek into some of the most important events in history.

What if the zombies come back?” “They won't. I promise.” “But how do you know?” “I just do.” He closes his eyes. “If the zombies ever come back, you can wake me up and I'll help you chase them away. But I promise, they won't come, because they're not real in the first place. And if you keep telling yourself that, then you never need to be scared again, do you?” He rolls onto his side, facing away from his daughter. “Just remember that,” he adds,

Fear. First, it’s important to recognize that fear-based thinking is evolutionary. It is called the “negativity bias,” and scientists believe it originated as an adaptive mechanism to help human beings survive. Imagine that one of our early ancestors saw rustling in tall grasses. If his instincts consistently told him it was a tiger, rather than a rabbit, his risk of extinction decreased. In these circumstances, fear saved lives.

Look at the Buddhists who believe in no God and follow the guiding principle of harming nothing and helping everything and everyone. Never hurt, always help.

Diego, a giant tortoise, single-handedly saved his species from extinction. As one of the few surviving representatives of his kind, he was moved from an American zoo to a breeding program on the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador. Diego’s unrelenting mating efforts helped raise the number of these tortoises from just fifteen to two thousand. One hundred years old, Diego keeps going.

He wanted to change the world—to help create a world where no one grew up the way he had.

How do you think it will happen?' 'Well, thermonuclear extinction has always been very popular. Although the big boys are being quite polite to each other at the moment.' 'Asteroid strike?' said Aziraphale. 'Quite the fashion these days, I understand. Strike into the Indian Ocean, great big cloud of dust and vapour, goodbye all higher life forms.' 'Wow,' said Crowley. taking care to exceed the speed limit. Every little helped. 'Doesn't bear thinking about it, does, it,' said Aziraphale gloomily. 'All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that.' 'Terrible.' 'Nothin but dust and fundamentalists.' 'That was nasty.' 'Sorry, couldn't resist it.' They stared at the road. 'Maybe some terrorist-?' Aziraphale began. 'Not one of ours,' said Crowley. 'Or ours,' said Aziraphale. 'Although ours are freedom fighters, of course.' 'I'll tell you what,' said Crowley, scorching rubber on the Tadfield bypass. 'Cards on the table time. I'll tell you ours if you tell me yours.' 'All right. You first.' 'Oh, no. You first.' 'But you're a demon.' 'Yes, but a demon of my word, I should hope.' Aziraphale named five political leaders. Crowley named six. Three names were on both lists.

Our era, which began and has developed under the banner of the Enlightenment, first invented liberal democracy, then took it as its political ideal. But we have become enslaved by speed, and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, impairs our concentration and forces us to consume information in ever-smaller packets. To be worthy of the name, we Homo sapiens should rid ourselves of speed before it reduces us to a species in danger of extinction. A firm defense of quiet, rational deliberation is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. Our defense of reason must rest on three pillars. First, we must better understand the conditions that make it possible. Second, we must deliberate about how to improve those conditions. And finally, we must engage in collective action aimed at bringing about those improvements. Only in this way can we banish the degrading effects of Fast Life. In its frenzied competition for attention, Fast Politics has changed our way of making decisions, making us prey to demagogues. This threatens our democracy and our way of life. Slow Politics is now the only truly progressive answer. Politics should be about cultivating intelligence rather than demeaning it, building on experience rather than going with our gut feelings. What better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects? Slow Politics promises a better future. Slow Politics cannot succeed as an individual endeavor. It is an idea that needs many committed supporters who can help turn this into an international movement.

Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

Life is endlessly inventive, always tinkering and experimenting, but not with a particular notion of progress. For us mammals , the Cretaceous extinction was the lucky break that cleared the way for a golden age, but if the story of the biosphere were written from the perspective of prokaryotic rather than macroscopic life, the extinctions would hardly register. Even today, prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) make up at least 50% of all biomass on Earth. 23 One might say that Earth’s biosphere is, and always has been, a “microcracy,” ruled by the tiny.

Most things we learn are easier to apply in a material form, as when following a certain decision or task, when thinking rationally about ourselves and our life. Everything becomes messed up when are trying to understand what makes us who we are, and that's why love exists, to pushes us there. Emotions are very powerful, I believe up to five thousand times more than the mind - there are actual scientific studies on the topic. In other words, our brain is nothing compared to the heart. The heart has an intelligence of its own. But it is indeed connected to the rest of us, including our mind. So what this means is that our emotions are far more powerful than our reason. You know, like when a grasshopper gets his head chopped off by a female after sex - he knows he is going to die, but he sill can't help himself. A large majority of us is like that. We think we are superior to animals, but only in the amount of problems. Nonetheless, when you look at someone very smart doing something very stupid, you wonder what the hell is happening, and that's when we enter the fields of spirituality and psychology. Psychology can answer pretty much most of our behaviors - as we either move towards pleasure or pain, to avoid one and obtain more of the other. When both get mixed it all becomes complicated, but it does happen, in families, relationships, and so on. The extreme of this is altruism, when a person literally sacrifices his life to save another. You can start by Jesus, but you don't need to go so far. There are many examples everywhere, like the fireman that tries to save a guy that attempted to commit suicide by setting his house on fire. The fireman may know the other man did it on purpose, but he still risks his life to save him. The same with the exorcist, who faces the devil to save someone who actually accepted to be possessed or did some crazy ritual to get more knowledge, power, sex, and whatsoever; the exorcist knows he is risking his life and mental health to save an ignorant soul, and yet he still does it. The same with the father who runs after the son who is consuming drugs. He knows that his son or one of his companions may kill him out of anger but he still can't help himself. The same occurs with the police officer, when risking getting a bullet from the person to whom he is pointing a gun with no desire to shoot it. So what about love? It's a similar relation. Many times we are programmed to behave in a certain way and we can't help ourselves. Life, however, is more complex than that, which can be a good thing, like when we are cheated by someone who was already no good in our life. He or she did us a very good favor, even if we can't see it right then. The same when someone dies. Well, yeah, this one sounds bad, but people don't just die for no reason, even though it may seem so, not when they are texting while driving or drunk or high on weed. And what about when we lose our job and our partner starts fighting about money? That's also a blessing, as otherwise we would never know that that's all he or she cared about. There are countless ways to look at it. And yet, many times we have strong feelings for someone who is simply mentally sick. Is this love or insanity? I don't really know. I know as much as the grasshopper that gets his head chopped by a female for thousands of years and is not yet extinct by reason.

Most things we learn are easier to apply in a material form, as when following a certain decision or task, when thinking rationally about ourselves and our life. Everything becomes messed up when are trying to understand what makes us who we are, and that's why love exists, to pushes us there. Emotions are very powerful, I believe up to five thousand times more than the mind - there are actual scientific studies on the topic. In other words, our brain is nothing compared to the heart. The heart has an intelligence of its own. But it is indeed connected to the rest of us, including our mind. So what this means is that our emotions are far more powerful than our reason. You know, like when a praying mantis gets his head chopped off by a female after sex - he knows he is going to die, but he sill can't help himself. A large majority of us is like that. We think we are superior to animals, but only in the amount of problems. Nonetheless, when you look at someone very smart doing something very stupid, you wonder what the hell is happening, and that's when we enter the fields of spirituality and psychology. Psychology can answer pretty much most of our behaviors - as we either move towards pleasure or pain, to avoid one and obtain more of the other. When both get mixed it all becomes complicated, but it does happen, in families, relationships, and so on. The extreme of this is altruism, when a person literally sacrifices his life to save another. You can start by Jesus, but you don't need to go so far. There are many examples everywhere, like the fireman that tries to save a guy that attempted to commit suicide by setting his house on fire. The fireman may know the other man did it on purpose, but he still risks his life to save him. The same with the exorcist, who faces the devil to save someone who actually accepted to be possessed or did some crazy ritual to get more knowledge, power, sex, and whatsoever; the exorcist knows he is risking his life and mental health to save an ignorant soul, and yet he still does it. The same with the father who runs after the son who is consuming drugs. He knows that his son or one of his companions may kill him out of anger but he still can't help himself. The same occurs with the police officer, when risking getting a bullet from the person to whom he is pointing a gun with no desire to shoot it. So what about love? It's a similar relation. Many times we are programmed to behave in a certain way and we can't help ourselves. Life, however, is more complex than that, which can be a good thing, like when we are cheated by someone who was already no good in our life. He or she did us a very good favor, even if we can't see it right then. The same when someone dies. Well, yeah, this one sounds bad, but people don't just die for no reason, even though it may seem so, not when they are texting while driving or drunk or high on weed. And what about when we lose our job and our partner starts fighting about money? That's also a blessing, as otherwise we would never know that that's all he or she cared about. There are countless ways to look at it. And yet, many times we have strong feelings for someone who is simply mentally sick. Is this love or insanity? I don't really know. I know as much as the praying mantis that gets his head chopped by a female for thousands of years and is not yet extinct by reason.

In a very real sense, it was a game, the very subtle and entirely serious game of comparative rank which is played by all social animals. It is the method by which individuals arrange themselves—horses in a herd, wolves in a pack, people in a community—so that they can live together. The game pits two opposing forces against each other, both equally important to survival: individual autonomy and community welfare. The object is to achieve dynamic equilibrium. At times and under certain conditions individuals can be nearly autonomous. An individual can live alone and have no worry about rank, but no species can survive without interaction between individuals. The ultimate price would be more final than death. It would be extinction. On the other hand, complete individual subordination to the group is just as devastating. Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed. Humans in a community, whether it is as small as two people or as large as the world, and no matter what form the society takes, will arrange themselves according to some hierarchy. Commonly understood courtesies and customs can help to smooth the friction and ease the stress of maintaining a workable balance within this constantly changing system. In some situations most individuals will not have to compromise much of their personal independence for the welfare of the community. In others, the needs of the community may demand the utmost personal sacrifice of the individual, even to life itself. Neither is more right than the other, it depends on the circumstances; but neither extreme can be maintained for long, nor can a society last if a few people exercise their individuality at the expense of the community.