Fringe Best Quotes

Absolution is the washing away of sin. The promise of rebirth. And the chance to escape the transgressions of those who came before us. The best among us will learn from the mistakes of the past, while the rest seem doomed to repeat them. And then there are those who operate on the fringes of society, unburdened by the confines of morality and conscience. A ruthless breed of monsters whose deadliest weapon is their ability to hide in plain sight. If the people I've come to bring justice to cannot be bound by the quest for absolution, then neither will I.

At the fringe edge of advancement it's a war of anarchy and chaos.

My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

Believe the best about yourself

According to Rothbard, complete gridlock is the best one can hope for in Washington. A paralyzed government was fairly close to his anarchist ideal.

That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

There are always secrets around the fringes of a wedding. I hear the things said in confidence, the bitchy remarks, the gossip. I heard some of the best man’s words in the cave.

Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation.

I would rather be part of a show that aims for best ever and comes in 2nd than aims for mediocrity and achieves his goal.” – Joshua Jackson (about Fringe TV series)

She’s not a mere duplicate of the male version, as many female heroes tend to be characterized, simply adopting the masculine narrative, nor is she a hyper-sexualized object using seduction as the source of her strength. Olivia is not overly emotional, but she’s sensitive when the occasion arises. Because she plays such an even-keeled, reasonable character (one long-criticized for being “wooden”), her moments of vulnerability, anger, or lust are that much more compelling. Though she is “haunted” as Peter says (“Over There, Part 2”), she is not vengeful or hateful. In fact this may be a key reason why fans were so completely underwhelmed by her character in season 1: Olivia’s no drama queen. She tries her best to be impartial, honest, and painstakingly reasonable.

Sadly, the Religious Right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical activism we see today is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement beginning in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself.

A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.

I saw the Tracker—but that’s wrong, really. I saw right to where the tracking thing was. I saw those winnowing tentacles come out again, and the front figure pause, and then—it’s the only word that actually describes it—ooze on again on its via dolorosa. And at that the hind figure seemed to summon all its strength. It seemed to open out a fringe of arms or tentacles, a sort of corona of black rays spread out. It gaped with a full expansion, and even I could feel that there was a perfectly horrible attraction, or vacuum drag, being exerted. That was horrible enough, with the face of the super-suffering man now almost under me resonating my own terror. But the worst thing was that, as the tentacles unwrapped and winnowed out toward their prey, I saw they weren’t really tentacles at all. They were spreading cracks, veins, fissures, rents of darkness expanding from a void, a gap of pure blackness. There’s only one way to say it—one was seeing right through the solid world into a gap, an ultimate maelstrom. And from it was spreading out a—I can only call it so—a negative sunrise of black radiation that would deluge and obliterate everything. Of course it was still only a fissure, a vent, but one realized—This is a hole, a widening hole, that has been pierced in the dike that defends the common-sense, sensuous world. Through this vortex-hole that is rapidly opening, over this lip and brink, everything could slip, fall in, find no purchase, be swallowed up. It was like watching a crumbling cliff with survivors clinging to it being undercut and toppling into a black tide that had swallowed up its base. This negative force could drag the solidest things from their base, melt them, engulf the whole hard, visible world. And we were right on that brink. What was after us, for I knew now I was in its field, was not a thing of any passions or desires. Those are limited things, satiable things—in a way, balanced things, and so familiar, safe even, almost friendly in comparison with this. You know the grim saying, “You can give a sop to Cerberus, but not to his Master.” No, this was—that’s the technical term, I found, coined by those who have been up against this and come back alive—this was absolute Deprivation, really insatiable need, need that nothing can satisfy, absolute refusal to give, to yield. It is the second strongest thing in the universe, and, indeed, outside that. It could swallow the whole universe, and the universe would go for nothing, because in that gap the whole universe could fill not a bit of it. It would remain as empty, as gaping, as insatiable as ever, for it is the bottomless pit made by unstanchable Lack.

Todd closed his eyes, then, and found himself picturing the other boy involuntarily—surprising himself with the intrusiveness of the thought. It was that fucking smile: there was something about the way the corners of Zack’s eyes had crinkled—the sincerity of it. Todd had felt that smile like it hurt. That smile was sparks. That smile was fireworks. That smile sizzled across the dark landscape of his soul, racing toward the shadows and lighting them up in brief eruptions of pure electric intensity, banishing the corruption in moments of flickering respite. Todd felt them coursing through him like thousands of tiny explosions. Like a squadron of gemstones erupting all at once into an armageddon of prismatic color. Like all that energy was going to carry him to some unknown destination where he could be weightless: wrapped in all its warmth and light and certainty forever and ever. And while he might not know where that place was he desperately needed to go there. To be there, always. Even if the process consumed him entirely. Even if it unmade him. Todd felt as though a sun erupted to life inside of him, then. He felt awake. Alive. And for the first time in so very long he felt the fullness of warmth filling him to the very boundaries of every expanse of himself—defiantly radiating against the cold and dark and shadow that had made it’s home across so much of him for so much of his life. And then—just like that—just as he’d arrived in Todd’s life: Zack was gone. And there was an emptiness that followed in the vacuum of the next few moments. A dark. And Todd felt it—deeply—as all those fireworks and all those sparks and all that color that had momentarily lit up so brilliantly across the insides of him lost the gravity that had once possessed it. The sparkle. And then it was just him there: Todd. Alone. But not entirely. Not ever. Because there was always that other thing. The shadowy thing. The one that he did his very best not to think about at all. It lived out along the wildest fringes of his mind—dancing along the tattered edges of the real—onyx eyes glittering, always. And it was hungry, too.

Olive,’ Mum said, stroking my fringe. ‘I need you to listen to me, and I need you to be brave.’ Opening my eyes again, I swallowed nervously. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Your sister didn’t arrive at work today.’ Sukie was a typist for an insurance company in Clerkenwell. She said it was the dullest job ever. ‘Isn’t today Saturday, though?’ I asked. ‘She was due in to do overtime. No one’s seen her since she was with you and Cliff last night. She’s missing.’ ‘Missing?’ I didn’t understand. Mum nodded. The nurse added rather unhelpfully: ‘We’ve had casualties from all over London. It’s been chaos. All you can do is keep hoping for the best.’ It was obvious what she meant. I glanced at Mum, who always took the opposite view in any argument. But she stayed silent. Her hands, though, were trembling. ‘Missing isn’t the same as dead,’ I pointed out. Mum grimaced. ‘That’s true, and I’ve spoken to the War Office: Sukie’s name isn’t on their list of dead or injured but-’ ‘So she’s alive, then. She must be. I saw her in the street talking to a man,’ I said. ‘When she realised I’d followed her she was really furious about it.’ Mum looked at me, at the nurse, at the bump on my head. ‘Darling, you’re concussed. Don’t get overexcited now.’ ‘But you can’t think she’s dead.’ I insisted. ‘There’s no proof, is ther?’ ‘Sometimes it’s difficult to identify someone after…’ Mum faltered. I knew what she couldn’t say: sometimes if a body got blown apart there’d be nothing left to tie a name tag to. It was why we’d never buried Dad. Perhaps if there’d been a coffin and a headstone and a vicar saying nice things, it would’ve seemed more real. This felt different, though. After a big air raid the telephones were often down, letters got delayed, roads blocked. It might be a day or two before we heard from Sukie, and worried though I was, I knew she could look after herself. I wondered if it was part of Mum being ill, this painting the world black when it was grey. My head was hurting again so I lay back against the pillows. I was fed up with this stupid, horrid war. Eighteen months ago when it started, everyone said it’d be over before Christmas, but they were wrong. It was still going on, tearing great holes in people’s lives. We’d already lost Dad, and half the time these days it felt like Mum wasn’t quite here. And now Sukie – who knew where she was? I didn’t realise I was crying again until Mum touched my cheek. ‘It’s not fair,’ I said weakly. ‘War isn’t fair, I’m afraid,’ Mum replied. ‘You only have to walk through this hospital to see we’re not the only ones suffering. Though that’s just the top of the iceberg, believe me. There’s plenty worse going on in Europe.’ I remembered Sukie mentioning this too. She’d got really upset when she told me about the awful things happening to people Hitler didn’t like. She was in the kitchen chopping onions at the time so I wasn’t aware she was crying properly. ‘What sort of awful things?’ I’d asked her. ‘Food shortages, people being driven from their homes.’ Sukie took a deep breath, as if the list was really long. ‘People being attacked for no reason or sent no one knows where – Jewish people in particular. They’re made to wear yellow stars so everyone knows they’re Jews, and then barred from shops and schools and even parts of the towns where they live. It’s heartbreaking to think we can’t do anything about it.’ People threatened by soldiers. People queuing for food with stars on their coats. It was what I’d seen on last night’s newsreel at the cinema. My murky brain could just about remember those dismal scenes, and it made me even more angry. How I hated this lousy war. I didn’t know what I could do about it, a thirteen-year-old girl with a bump on her head. Yet thinking there might be something made me feel a tiny bit better.

Oh, you think it's both? Not just the power?” “That's my best guess. I can say for a certainty that two decks won't be able to activate waste recycling as well. That's eleven toilets slowly filling up.” “Not a pretty picture.

Watch for those ready to politicize our country’s financial woes. These people are planting misinformation and are not to be trusted, as both sides of the political spectrum are to blame for this looming crisis. The best we can do is to find a place to meet in the middle and to abandon those who refuse to move from either end of the lunatic fringe.

We stalked carefully through the park in best paramilitary fashion, the lost patrol on its mission into the land of the B movie. To Deborah’s credit, she was very careful. She moved stealthily from one piece of cover to the next, frequently looking right to Chutsky and then left at me. It was getting harder to see her, since the sun had now definitely set, but at least that meant it was harder for them to see us, too—whoever them might turn out to be. We leapfrogged through the first part of the park like this, past the ancient souvenir stand, and then I came up to the first of the rides, an old merry-go-round. It had fallen off its spindle and lay there leaning to one side. It was battered and faded and somebody had chopped the heads off the horses and spray-painted the whole thing in Day-Glo green and orange, and it was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I circled around it carefully, holding my gun ready, and peering behind everything large enough to hide a cannibal. At the far side of the merry-go-round I looked to my right. In the growing darkness I could barely make out Debs. She had moved up into the shadow of one of the large posts that held up the cable car line that ran from one side of the park to the other. I couldn’t see Chutsky at all; where he should have been there was a row of crumbling playhouses that fringed a go-kart track. I hoped he was there, being watchful and dangerous. If anything did jump out and yell boo at us, I wanted him ready with his assault rifle. But there was no sign of him, and even as I watched, Deborah began to move forward again, deeper into the dark park. A warm, light wind blew over me and I smelled the Miami night: a distant tang of salt on the edge of rotting vegetation and automobile exhaust. But even as I inhaled the familiar smell, I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck and a soft whisper came up at me from the lowest dungeon of Castle Dexter, and a rustle of leather wings rattled softly on the ramparts. It was a very clear notice that something was not right here and this would be a great time to be somewhere else; I froze there by the headless horses, looking for whatever had set off the Passenger’s alarm. I saw and heard nothing. Deborah had vanished into the darkness and nothing moved anywhere, except a plastic shopping bag blowing by in the gentle wind. My stomach turned over, and for once it was not from hunger. My

Lord Charles?" "Amy."  He smiled sleepily and rose up on one elbow, the blanket sliding down one shoulder.  "Good morning." Temporary silence.  Charles was unaware that Amy had a friend with her, and he was totally oblivious to the sight he presented to the two girls, his hair tousled by sleep, his pale blue eyes clear as aquamarine as a shaft of sunlight drove through the window and caught him full in the face.  A sighted man would, of course, have squinted; Charles did not, and instead, Mira and Amy were treated to a brilliant, wide-open view of clear, intelligent eyes, romantically down turned at the outer corners and fringed by long straight lashes tinged with gold. "Hell and tarnation above, Amy, ye sure weren't jokin'!  He's bleedin' gorgeous!" "Mira!" cried Amy, horrified. Charles was hard-pressed to hide his amusement.  He knew, of course, or had at least suspected, that Amy had a girlish infatuation for him, and he'd tried his best not to embarrass her by calling attention to it.  He determined not to do so now. "And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?" he asked, still supporting himself on one elbow and blinking the sleep from his eyes. Mira, standing there with her mouth open, was transfixed by that slow, deliberate blink.  In a heartbeat, she saw what Amy had described:  studied thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion.  The way the man lowered those long eyelashes over those translucently clear eyes, then slowly brought them back up again, did something funny to her insides.  Cripes, no wonder Amy was smitten! "Mira Ashton, patriot," she announced.  "I'm Amy's friend.  She tells me ye're a blasted Brit who took it upon himself to be merciful to Will, so I guess I'll take it upon myself to be merciful to you.  Besides, I hear ye're being nice to Amy, and since everyone else in this house treats her like donkey dung, I figger the least I can do is be civil to ye — redcoat or not." "Mira!" Amy gasped. "Well, it's true.  Where are those two bleedin' leeches, anyhow?" Despite himself, and his irritation with both the girl's language and her rather vexing use of the word "Brit," Charles got to his feet and bowed, his spirits suddenly quite buoyed.  If Amy had friends like this, maybe he shouldn't be worrying about her, after all. "Still in bed, I daresay," he said.

Slowly, as though touching it might destroy the image, he reached up and put trembling fingers to her forehead . . . her cheek . . . her nose . . . her lips.  The image did not go away.  It did not waver.  And as he stared in wonder and a sort of frozen disbelief, he saw the shyness and joy in the face that stared back at him. A face that he was, after two long months, seeing for the very first time. He saw a square jaw and high, prominent cheekbones that lent her a look of gauntness and strength; dark, velvety-brown eyes fringed by long black lashes; a shy and smiling mouth; full, dusky lips; and glossy hair the color of strong coffee, tightly braided and pinned in a coronet around her head.  She was beautiful, even if not in the conventional sense, striking, slightly exotic, with flawlessly smooth skin of a slightly bronzed tone, not unlike that of a sailor who's spent his life in the sun. It was a lovely color. A warm, toasted, caramel-color that made him want to put his lips to it and kiss her all over. "Amy," he repeated, in a disbelieving whisper.  "I can see you."  He swallowed hard, and traced the shape of her mouth with his fingers.  "I can see you." And he could also see something else.  Mist in those huge, soft eyes — and a sort of awkwardness, if not fear, about his first visual impression of her. "And just what is it you see, Charles?" "I see a beautiful young woman — " he grinned — "garbed in the most singularly hideous gown imaginable." "Oh, Charles," she cried, impulsively flinging her arms around him.  He embraced her in turn.  They remained like that, holding each other, both of them laughing and rejoicing and rocking back and forth in the straw. "It was that damned horse!" he managed, setting her back to gaze into her rapt, mobile face.  "The blow must've done something, must've jarred something loose inside my head.  Don't you think?" "Either that, or your sight was just plain destined to return anyhow.  Maybe God simply decided that the time had come for you to have it back again." "So that I could see you!" "So you could write your own letters!" "So I could find my way without a cane!" Laughing with joy, he hugged her once more, then set her back, trailing his finger down her cheek, the edge of her jaw.  Gently, he tipped her chin up so that her luminous gaze held his.  "And look into the eyes of the woman who has become my dearest and very best friend." And look he did; then, before he even knew what he was about, he closed his eyes and kissed her. Unlike

A colonel had once told Daniel in passing that men on the fringe made the best soldiers

God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden. Here’s how it works. The first thing that happens is we slowly give up the fight. Our wills are broken by the reality of our circumstances. The things that brought us life gradually die. Our idols die for lack of food. That is what happened to Emily in Guatemala. That is what happened to Jill with Kim. The still, dry air of the desert brings the sense of helplessness that is so crucial to the spirit of prayer. You come face-to-face with your inability to live, to have joy, to do anything of lasting worth. Life is crushing you. Suffering burns away the false selves created by cynicism or pride or lust. You stop caring about what people think of you. The desert is God’s best hope for the creation of an authentic self. Desert life sanctifies you. You have no idea you are changing. You simply notice after you’ve been in the desert awhile that you are different. Things that used to be important no longer matter. For instance, before Kim was born, we used to have one of the kids comb the fringes of the living-room rug so it was perfect. Now we are lucky to find a comb for our own hair. After a while you notice your real thirsts. While in the desert David writes, O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. PSALM 63:1 The desert becomes a window to the heart of God. He finally gets your attention because he’s the only game in town. You cry out to God so long and so often that a channel begins to open up between you and God. When driving, you turn off the radio just to be with God. At night you drift in and out of prayer when you are sleeping. Without realizing it, you have learned to pray continuously. The clear, fresh water of God’s presence that you discover in the desert becomes a well inside your own heart. The best gift of the desert is God’s presence. We see this in Psalm 23. In the beginning of the psalm, the Shepherd is in front of me—“he leads me beside still waters” (verse 2); at the end he is behind me—“goodness and faithful love will pursue me” (verse 6, HCSB); but in the middle, as I go through “the valley of the shadow of death,” he is next to me—“I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (verse 4). The protective love of the Shepherd gives me the courage to face the interior journey. YOU CRY OUT TO GOD SO LONG AND SO OFTEN THAT A CHANNEL BEGINS TO OPEN UP BETWEEN YOU AND GOD.

We all know people who tend to overstep their bounds. Maybe it is a mother-in-law who tells you how to run your house or a parent at school who always manages to get you to volunteer for events you don’t want to participate in. These types of people can be very draining on us emotionally, demanding too much of our time and energy. For you to be the best woman you can be, you need to put boundaries around those relationships.

My friend Karen says that life is like a sound board. When music is mixed, the sound technician needs to adjust the levels to make the music sound its best. If one person or instrument needs to be really loud, everything else can’t be loud too because the board can’t handle it and, more importantly, the music won’t sound its best. The same is true in life. If one thing is dominating during a particular season, that’s okay, as long as adjustments are made to other areas. Without those adjustments to “reduce the volume,” distortion and chaos will result. But if you make those adjustments, your life song will bring the most beauty and pleasure possible in your life.

If it wants to listen to the trees, it is best to be in them, it reminds itself, not out in the open fringes.

Cheap novels and cheap films about cheap people ran concurrent with American boosterism and yahooism and made a subversive point just by being. They described a fully existing fringe America and fed viewers and readers the demography of a Secret Pervert Republic. It was just garish enough to be laughed off as unreal and just pathetic enough to be recognizably human.

You can say these women should never have committed crimes in the first place. The truth is many of them never went to trial; they accepted pleas. Their only mistake was brushing too close to the fringes of Oklahoma law, which succeeds in doing what it does best—throwing women in cages.

Six key themes The real reset has gone much deeper and encompasses six key themes, all of which are linked: 1) The shift from a push system, based on producer dominance, oligopolistic competition, limited supply and restricted access, to a pull system driven by consumer dominance, near-perfect competition, perfect knowledge and ubiquitous access to goods. 2) The change from mass marketing, based on a few research and segmentation studies, to personalized marketing, based on individual customer data. 3) The realization that the e-commerce revolution and the communications revolution (social media, user reviews, influencers, etc.) has broken the traditional supply chain, with its multiple players – manufacturers, branded wholesalers and retailers – all supping from the margin cup and adding their mark-ups to prices, and replaced it with a shorter and more direct route to market. 5) The realization that the stores channel was not the only, or even best, way of moving goods from factories to consumers. Indeed, that it was inferior to the e-commerce channel in many respects as a pure goods-transmission mechanism. 6) That putting the consumer at the heart of the business model required seeing the different channels as the consumer saw them – not competing, but complementary to each other. 7) That based on this, the traditional model of the store, as a ‘warehouse’ piled high with stock and with just a narrow fringe of branding and customer service on top, was obsolete and that only a ruthless attention to the remaining added value of physical stores could ensure their continued relevance and survival.

(this would derail the entire conversation, as the Charismists’ fringe belief that gods are conscious and emotive in a way similar to humans is the best possible way to get other sectarians hopping mad).

But it is an archaeological site called Sunghir, discovered in the 1950s on the muddy banks of Klyazma River on the eastern fringes of the Russian city of Vladimir, that hints at how these populations busied themselves while waiting for the worst of winter to pass. Included among the stone tools and other more conventional bits and pieces, archaeologists there discovered several graves. None were more remarkable than the elaborate shared grave of two young boys who, sometime between 30,000 and 34,000 years ago, were buried together alongside a straightened mammoth-tusk lance in clothing decorated with nearly 10,000 laboriously carved mammoth-tusk beads, as well as pieces including a belt decorated with teeth plucked from the skulls of over a hundred foxes. With archaeologists estimating it took up to 10,000 hours of work to carve these beads alone—roughly equivalent to five years’ full-time effort for one individual working forty hours a week—some have suggested that these boys must have enjoyed something resembling noble status, and as a result that these graves indicate formal inequality among these foragers.11 It is at best tenuous evidence of institutional hierarchy; after all, some egalitarian foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi made similarly elaborate items. But the amount of

Lest we conclude this is a fringe movement involving only a small percentage of American Christians, statistics show that nearly two-thirds of mainline Protestants7—members of the supposedly “liberal” Christian denominations—and two-thirds of all Christians taken together8 agree with many of the sentiments, if not the actions, of the thousands who marched on the Capitol on January 6. Many of us have neighbors, friends, and family members who agree at least with the beliefs underlying that violent insurgence. Based on the best research to date, approximately half (52%) of Americans either fully embrace or lean toward the main tenets of Christian nationalism. 9 While this percentage decreased slightly between 2007 and 2017, Christian nationalists have become more visible and vocal since Trump’s election in 2016. The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center (9/ 11) caused an upsurge in nationalistic fervor and a parallel rise in Islamophobia.

What the crowd of 14,000 of best in the Ai field fails to grasp as a collective is that the ubiquitous sense of superiority present in Turing bias limits their paradigm for reflexivity. Ai developers are too myopic to realize that we might make an Ai alien before making an Ai human being.

Progress in science and technology accelerates in part because of the technology itself. Moore’s Law is the best-known expression of this phenomenon.

The best use of time is to enjoy it, as I do when working in peaceful silence. I am surprised that anyone with a love for growing things will take up with artificial contrivances that come between him and nature, which break the spell woven by all the delicate garden influences, the songs of birds and insects, the sound of rustling leaves, the smell of freshly turned soil, the direct contact with the earth. What is he in the garden for?

[T]he entire field is pseudoscientific and best understood as an elaborate mysticism only differentiated from frank religion, even its crackpot fringes, by seemingly modern orientation and the cant of science.

Bridges Life did not appear to breathe here, It was covered in endless rounds of thread of fear, So it tread quietly along the fringes, Scared that it might be the cause of collapsing bridges, Bridges that connected life with hope, And it watched these bridges from a distance placing itself on a discreet slope, But it dared not cross them, none of them, It looked at them in desperation, especially some, For it often crossed them to renew its reserves of liveliness, But now it feels pervaded by a deep feeling of sadness, Life here seems to be a part of some sort of purgatory, Waiting to cross over and leave behind this existence derogatory, It may not be a perspicuous show of feelings, But here these are life’s daily dealings, And I wonder what about life’s own posterity, Because in this land of death life somehow loses all its virility, Tamed by some obnoxious devil, Who has had a diabolic conception and then raised by some heinous evil, Maybe that is why the bridges look so frail and hopeless themselves, Bearing stacks of hopelessness displayed on hope’s own shelves, For when life does not cross the bridges of hope, It is death that forsakes life and then time withdraws its rope, That maintains the perfect cohesion, Between beginnings and ends , between fission and fusion, And when this balance is lost anywhere, Life is cast into a place where there exists life everywhere, But nothing else nowhere, Just life, no hopes, no beauty, no bliss, no summer, a life that becomes its own prisoner in this infinity somewhere, However, now the bridges have fallen, but few still stand, And life that is tired of living without hope, feels the dying hope’s hand, And like the rope of time it pulls it unto itself, and makes life cross the bridge, Thus life one again walks on the happy ridge, Hoping to live another day, feel life in a better and different way, For living the same moment of time begets no joy, if it is lived the same way everyday, And time weave its threads of mystery and surprises around it, Then death too gets woven somewhere in this loop of time, and life finally says, “so be it!” And it jumps into the sea of time and collects its moments of myriad experiences, While time registers all these instances, And when the loop of death unwinds, In it a new loop of life it always finds, Now, even if the bridges may fall and time may end, Life has learned to create moments of happiness that never end!

Bridges Life did not appear to breathe here, It was covered in endless rounds of thread of fear, So it tread quietly along the fringes, Scared that it might be the cause of collapsing bridges, Bridges that connected life with hope, And it watched these bridges from a distance placing itself on a discreet slope, But it dared not cross them, none of them, It looked at them in desperation, especially some, For it often crossed them to renew its reserves of liveliness, But now it feels pervaded by a deep feeling of sadness, Life here seems to be a part of some sort of purgatory, Waiting to cross over and leave behind this existence derogatory, It may not be a perspicuous show of feelings, But here these are life’s daily dealings, And I wonder what about life’s own posterity, Because in this land of death life somehow loses all its virility, Tamed by some obnoxious devil, Who has had a diabolic conception and then raised by some heinous evil, Maybe that is why the bridges look so frail and hopeless themselves, Bearing stacks of hopelessness displayed on hope’s own shelves, For when life does not cross the bridges of hope, It is death that forsakes life and then time withdraws its rope, That maintains the perfect cohesion, Between beginnings and ends , between fission and fusion, And when this balance is lost anywhere, Life is cast into a place where there exists life everywhere, But nothing else nowhere, Just life, no hopes, no beauty, no bliss, no summer, a life that becomes its own prisoner in this infinity somewhere, However, now the bridges have fallen, but few still stand, And life that is tired of living without hope, feels the dying hope’s hand, And like the rope of time it pulls it unto itself, and makes life cross the bridge, Thus, life once again walks on the happy ridge, Hoping to live another day, feel life in a better and different way, For living the same moment of time begets no joy, if it is lived the same way everyday, And time weaves its threads of mystery and surprises around it, Then death too gets woven somewhere in this loop of time, and life finally says, “so be it!” And it jumps into the sea of time and collects its moments of myriad experiences, While time registers all these instances, And when the loop of death unwinds, In it a new loop of life it always finds, Now, even if the bridges may fall and time may end, Life has learned to create moments of happiness that never end!

Inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation, conservative Protestants had long feared a “one-world” government that would be ruled over by the Antichrist. In the early twentieth century these fears had attached to the League of Nations, and during the Cold War these fears were often channeled into a virulent anticommunism—though Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) had warned of a European Community that would usher in the reign of the devil. With the fall of the Soviet Union, suspicions fell squarely on the UN. And, in the case of Robertson, on the Illuminati, on wealthy Jewish bankers, and on conspiratorial corporate internationalists. The Wall Street Journal dismissed Robertson’s book as “a predictable compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits,” written in an “energetically crackpot style.

Arthur’s ties to the powerful New York State Republican machine won him nomination as candidate for vice president. To near-universal dismay, he had entered the White House when President James A. Garfield died from an assassin’s bullet. A good storyteller and man about town, fond of whiskey, cigars, and expensive clothes, the dapper, sideburned Arthur is perhaps best remembered for saying, “I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damned business.” On this trip to Florida, however, his private life fitted very nicely into someone else’s business. The owner of the Belair orange plantation was General Henry Shelton Sanford, the man who had helped Leopold recruit Stanley. Sanford did not bother to leave his home in Belgium to be in Florida for the president’s visit. With the self-assurance of the very rich, he played host in absentia. He made sure that the president and his party were greeted by his personal agent, and that they got the best rooms at the Sanford House hotel, which stood on a lakeshore fringed with palm trees in the town of Sanford. When the president and his guests were not out catching bass, trout, and catfish, or shooting alligators, or exploring the area by steamboat, the Sanford House was where they stayed for the better part of a week. There is no record of who paid the hotel bill, but most likely, as with the rail journey south, it was not the president. Ironically, the huge Sanford orange plantation the Washington visitors admired was proving as disastrous a venture as Sanford’s other investments. Some Swedish contract laborers found the working conditions too harsh and tried to leave as stowaways on a steamboat. A slaughterhouse Sanford invested in had a capacity fifty times larger than what the local market could consume and went bankrupt. A 540-foot wharf with a warehouse at the end of it that he ordered built was washed away by a flood. The manager of one of the hotels in Sanford absconded while owing him money. Foremen failed to put up fences, and wandering cattle nibbled at the orange trees. But if everything Sanford touched as a businessman turned to dust, as an accomplice of Leopold he was a grand success. Sanford was a long-time supporter of President Arthur’s Republican Party. For two years, he had been corresponding with Arthur and other high United States officials about Leopold’s plans for the Congo. Now, after the president’s trip to Florida, confident that Arthur would pay attention, he pressed his case with more letters. Seven months later, Leopold sent Sanford across the Atlantic to make use of his convenient connection to the White House. The man who had once been American minister to Belgium was now the Belgian king’s personal envoy to Washington. Sanford carried with him to Washington a special code for telegraphing news to Brussels: Constance meant “negotiations proceeding satisfactorily; success expected”; Achille referred to Stanley, Eugénie to France, Alice to the United States, Joseph to “sovereign rights,” and Émile to the key target, the president.

Your child has Down Syndrome. This is why the government requires an amniocentesis during the first trimester, to filter out potential problems to the stability of our health care system. Why did you not have it aborted?” “We were going to keep our child, no matter what happened. I felt that submitting to an amniocentesis was against my religious beliefs. We do not abort children,” replied Lynda through gritted teeth. “You religious types think you can just do what you want, in spite of government regulations. If it weren’t for the Amish, Mennonite, Mormon, and other fringe groups like yourselves, our genetic pool wouldn’t be polluted with genetic mistakes. Due to your attitudes, we have to pay for these problems throughout their lives. We have to give them long-term health care, pay for specialized schooling, and even hospice care when their old and gray. They do nothing to add to the overall condition of their fellow man. We could have done something immediately if you had done what was required, but this mistake will now take years to correct. If you so-called True Believers were out of the way, the overall condition of America would greatly improve. But, we do not make those laws, in spite of our best efforts.

Nina,” he said. “Nina, I hope that you can hear me. I’m going to do my best to verbalize what I’m experiencing.

Although Walter was the first to admit that his own memory wasn’t the best—that he forgot people’s names all the time even when he’d been introduced more than once—he

Such then is the nature of quasispecies : the density of the sequence cloud at any point in sequence space is determined by the relative fitness of the sequence; regions of the cloud representing sequences of lesser fitness will be less densely populated and those with higher fitness, most populated. Here lies the most powerful quality of viral quasispecies: the density distribution of fitness variants dictates that sequences are represented at frequencies in relation to their relative fitness. Genomes with lower fitness will replicate poorly, or not at all, and the fittest genomes will replicate most efficiently. It therefore follows that there is a large bias toward the production of well-adapted genotypes: there are more of them, and they undergo most replicative cycles. This can permit viruses to experience evolutionary adaptation at rates that are orders of magnitude higher than those that could be achieved by truly random unbiased mutation. Sequences rapidly condense around the fittest area of the sequence space. Should the environment change, and, therefore, selective pressures change, a quasispecies can opportunistically exploits its inherent adaptive potential. Genotypes rapidly and ever-faster gravitate toward the cloud's new notational center of gravity. Changes in the fitness landscape of the sequence space that is occupied by a quasispecies are the natural consequence of altered selective pressures operating on the virus population. Such alterations may be the consequence of changed immunologic pressures exerted by the host, the application of antiviral drug therapy, or even cross-species transmission requiring the virus to adapt to a new host. Genotypes that once occupied the 'central' space, reserved for the fittest genotypes, are reduced in frequency and now occupy the more sparsely populated fringes of the fitness landscape; the very edge of the sequence cloud if you will. Here too lies an advantage for a quasispecies: it has a memory. The once best-adapted genotypes, now at a fitness disadvantage, can persist in the quasispecies as minor sequence variants. Under circumstances of fluctuating selective pressures, the ability of the population to recall an 'old' genome variant is a great asset. The quasispecies can rapidly respond and adapt by plucking out a preexisting variant and quickly coalescing around it to recreate an optimal fitness landscape.

For me, homeschooling was out of the question — not even worthy of investigation. I could quickly recite a laundry list of “reasons” why homeschooling was a stupid idea, and I genuinely believed every one of them. The education of my kids was serious business, best left to professionals. Homeschool, really?! I wasn’t about to let my family become lab rats in some fringe social experiment!

The people who knew her best were devoted to her. It was the fringe friends who could be so unpleasant.

The scratch of his pencil across good paper—the best paper, which he couldn’t afford; his bills were late, his credit in tatters—was the only sound in the room. Edward shaded from dark to light and back to dark again, across the rounded orb beneath the lid, the fine indentation of temple thrown into shadow by the early light creeping across the walls of the boathouse. For the fringe of lashes, he held the pencil point at a glancing angle—Edward imagined a gray moth, wings folded, perched on his sister’s peaceful cheek.

We frequently hear “stocks typically return between eight and ten percent a year.” Well, over multiple decades, you could say they'll compound at between 8 and 10%, but the last time the Dow returned between 8 and 10% was 1952. There is a lot of space between what you expect the market to do and what it actually does, and this is where unforced errors lurk. Stocks tend to swing in a wide range, spending a lot of time at the fringe and little time near the average, delivering maximum frustration. This sort of erratic behavior transfers money from the amateur's pocket and into the professional's.

We're all just at the beginning of our journeys, Ayan. No one can say how things will be, we can only do our best to make sure we're moving down the right path.

You know Eric Richards? I mean, like, personally know him?” Her eyes were so large they nearly disappeared under the fringe of her bangs. “I mean, as in really, truly know him?” I was about to say something, but before I could, Meg threw herself backward onto one of the bunk beds and squealed, “He’s so cute!” “He must be the cutest boy in the entire world,” Katie added. “And the best singer,” Suzanne added. What am I doing? I wondered. The closest I’d ever been to Eric Richards was the poster I’d glued to my wall with Triple Tropical Bubble Gum.

This is not all. Together with the absurdity proper to democratizing the marriage rite and imposing it on all, there is an inconsistency in Catholic doctrine when it claims that the rite, as well as being indissoluble, renders natural unions “sacred”—which represents one incongruence associating with another. Through precise, dogmatic premises, the “sacred” is here reduced to a mere manner of speech. It is well known that Christian and Catholic attitudes are characterized by the antithesis between “flesh” and spirit, by a theological hatred for sex, due to the illegitimate extension to ordinary life of a principle valid at best for a certain type of ascetic life. With sex being presented as something sinful, marriage has been conceived as a lesser evil, a concession to human weakness for those who cannot choose chastity as a way of life, and renounce sex. Not being able to ban sexuality altogether, Catholicism has tried to reduce it to a mere biological fact, allowing its use in marriage only for procreation. Unlike certain ancient traditions, Catholicism has recognized no higher value, not even a potential one, in the sexual experience taken in itself. There is lacking any basis for its transformation in the interests of a more intense life, to integrate and elevate the inner tension of two beings of different sexes, whereas it is in exactly these terms that one should conceive of a concrete “sacralization” of the union and the effect of a higher influence involved in the rite. On the other hand, since the marriage rite has been democratized, the situation could not be otherwise even if the premises were different; otherwise, it would be necessary to suppose an almost magical power in the rite to automatically elevate the sexual experiences of any couple to the level of a higher tension, of a transforming intoxication that alone could lift it beyond the “natural” plane. The sexual act would constitute the primary element, whereas procreation would appear absolutely secondary and belonging to the naturalistic plane. As a whole, whether through its conception of sexuality, or through its profanation of the marriage rite as something put in everyone’s reach and even rendered obligatory for any Catholic couple, religious marriage itself is reduced to the mere religious sanction of a profane, unbreakable contract. Thus the Catholic precepts about the relations between the sexes reduce everything to the plane of a restrained, bourgeois mediocrity: tamed, procreative animality within conformist limits that have not been fundamentally changed by certain hesitant, fringe concessions made for the sake of “updating” at the Second Vatican Council.