Grounded Theory Quotes

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds

My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition--broken mirrors and so forth--hope's not based on any kind of logic, it's just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.

In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat of the sun, the twinkling of the stars. Our human brain searched for an answer, and the conclusion was that it all must be caused by something greater than ourselves - this, of course, sprouted the earliest seeds of religion. This theory is certainly reflected in faery lore. In the beautiful sloping hills of Connemara in Ireland, for example, faeries were believed to have been just as beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant as the world around them. But in the Scottish Highlands, with their dark, brooding mountains and eerie highland lakes, villagers warned of deadly water-kelpies and spirit characters that packed a bit more punch.

DAISY CALLOWAY   I have this theory. Friends aren’t forever. They’re not even for a while. They come into your life and they leave when something or someone changes. Nothing grounds them to you. Not blood or loyalty. They’re just…fleeting.

The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them. I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg. - Lieutenant General James Longstreet to General Robert E. Lee after the initial Confederate victories on day one of the Battle of Gettysburg.

One day you have Einstein, puzzling over the theory of relativity, the next you’ve got the Manhattan Project and a big hole in the ground.

The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived except in relation to a background.

I have this theory. Friends aren’t forever. They’re not even for a while. They come into your life and they leave when something or someone changes. Nothing grounds them to you. Not blood or loyalty. They’re just…fleeting.

In the National Geographic movie of my twisted mind, the lion had just leaped on the gazelle, pinned it to the ground and mounted it from behind. Apparently, the devouring could wait. I should point out that these little flights of fancy on my part often involved extremely improbable animal pairings. I blamed cartoons.

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake. Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past.

Both the veil and makeup are often seen as voluntary behaviours by women, taken up by choice and to express agency. But in both cases there is considerable evidence of the pressures arising from male dominance that cause the behaviours. For instance, the historian of commerce Kathy Peiss suggests that the beauty products industry took off in the USA in the 1920s/1930s because this was a time when women were entering the public world of offices and other workplaces (Peiss, 1998). She sees women as having made themselves up as a sign of their new freedom. But there is another explanation. Feminist commentators on the readoption of the veil by women in Muslim countries in the late twentieth century have suggested that women feel safer and freer to engage in occupations and movement in the public world through covering up (Abu-Odeh, 1995). It could be that the wearing of makeup signifies that women have no automatic right to venture out in public in the west on equal grounds with men. Makeup, like the veil, ensures that they are masked and not having the effrontery to show themselves as the real and equal citizens that they should be in theory. Makeup and the veil may both reveal women’s lack of entitlement.

They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds - or rather, where every day it's more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered 'economic' and what is 'political.

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generatly it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual.

The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection.

Of all the social systems in mankind’s history, capitalism is the only system based on an objective theory of values.[1] Ayn Rand

All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece. As

When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith. This cannot be disproved. Nor can my own pet theory that, from the patterns of behavior that are observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations. However, I was educated by Sir Karl Popper to believe that a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.

There is a story they tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard after dark. This was her folly: when they told her that standing on someone’s grave at night would cause the inhabitant to reach up and pull her under, she scoffed. Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make. I will show you, she said. Pride is the second mistake. They gave her a knife to stick into the frosty earth, as a way of proving her presence and her theory. She went to that graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone. She knelt on the grave and plunged the blade deep. As she stood to run she found she couldn’t escape. Something was clutching at her clothes. She cried out and fell down. When morning came, her friends arrived at the cemetery. They found her dead on the grave, the blade pinning the sturdy wool of her skirt to the ground. Dead of fright or exposure, would it matter when the parents arrived? She was not wrong, but it didn’t matter any more. Afterwards, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she could live. As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake.

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.31 To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

This is what creationists say of evolution, that it’s “only” a theory, it hasn’t been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence.

Nothing like the act of eating for equalising men. Dying is nothing to it. The philosopher dies sententiously—the pharisee ostentatiously—the simple-hearted humbly—the poor idiot blindly, as the sparrow falls to the ground; the philosopher and idiot, publican and pharisee, all eat after the same fashion—given an equally good digestion. There's theory for theory for you!

The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.

He didn't disagree with me, but he seemed to feel that I have a perfection complex of some kind. Much talk from him, and quite intelligent, on the virtues of living the imperfect life, of accepting one's own and others' weaknesses. I agree with him, but only in theory. I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the grounds that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. I said it would be no easy thing to do. Dr Sims said I was putting it too stringently – putting it, he said, as only a perfectionist would.

Things that look like they were designed, probably were... If intelligence is an operative component of the universe, a science that methodologically excludes its existence will be susceptible to being trapped in an endless chase for materialistic causes that do not exist... Where there are sufficient grounds for inferring intelligent causation, based on evidence of "specified complexity," it should be considered as a component of scientific theories. Inclusion of intelligent causation in the scientific equation is not novel and has not impeded the practice of science in the past, e.g. Newton and Kepler, in an age when science was not constrained by a philosophical materialism, and by many current scientists who have remained open to following the evidence where it leads.

The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is, that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections, and no answers to objections. But on every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of confliting reasons. Even in natural philosophy, there is always some other explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true on: and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our opinion. But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from it.

The empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing ‘absolute’ about it.4 Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

One of the major dilemmas inherent in the attempt by black people to break through the cultural aspects of white imperialism is that posed by the use of historical knowledge as a weapon in our struggle. We are virtually forced into the invidious position of proving our humanity by citing historical antecedents; and yet the evidence is too often submitted to the white racists for sanction. The white man has already implanted numerous historical myths in the minds of black peoples; and those have to be uprooted . . . It is necessary to direct our historical activity in the light of two basic principles[:] Firstly, the effort must be directed solely towards freeing and mobilising black minds. There must be no performances to impress whites, for those whites who find themselves beside us in the firing line will be there for reasons far more profound than their exposure to African history. Secondly, the acquired knowledge of African history must be seen as directly relevant but secondary to the concrete tactics and strategy which are necessary for our liberation. There must be no false distinctions between reflection and action . . . If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be by revolutionary means.

Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure.

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds—or rather, where every day it’s more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered “economic” and what is “political.

Now he was…dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected. Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers. But if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?

Voluntary communism, together with laissez-faire capitalism, has nothing to be ashamed of on moral and economic grounds. They can each hold up their heads, high. Far from enemies, they are merely opposite sides of the same voluntaristic coin. Together, they must battle state coercion, whether called State Capitalism or State Socialism. The point is, “left” vs. “right” is a red herring. The reddest and perhaps most misleading red herring in all political-economic theory.

Previous to the war, there were some grounds for saying that—in theory, at least, if not in practice—our government was a free one; that it rested on consent. But nothing of that kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North, is irrevocably established. If that principle be not the principle of the Constitution, the fact should be known. If it be the principle of the Constitution, the Constitution itself should be at once overthrown.

...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

In a way, he was just like the rest of us—trying out different theories for what had happened, trying to figure out what it meant, what it said about us as a country. But of course he was different. He’d seen the country, and the world, from a different perch. And the one thing he kept coming back to was the expanse of time, the fact that we were just “a blip” in human history. In giving advice on how to deal with Trump, he offered a simple maxim: “Find some high ground, and hunker down.

The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’ mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholely ‘useless’ (and this is true of ‘applied’ as of ‘pure’ mathematics). It is not possible to justify the life of any genuine professional mathematician on the ground of the ‘utility’ of his work.… The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are, at present at any rate, almost as ‘useless’ as the theory of numbers. It

The business world is littered with the fossils of companies that failed to evolve. Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.

Quantum attention function is deeply grounded on the mathematics of theoretical physics and penetrates deeply the world of the very small and the world of the very big.

Victory goes to those with the fortitude to do what is required to win. The moral high ground is nice in theory, but in the real world, weakness equals defeat.

About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution, the rise of modern atomism (kinetic theory; dispersion theory; stereochemistry; quantum theory), the gradual emergence of the wave theory of light, occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound be certain 'obvious' methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.

Fully cooperative people, we may say, see themselves as equals, as having grounds for special treatment only in special circumstances that others will equally enjoy at the appropriate times.

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias—why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence. Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.” Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.

Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There's no truly right or wrong way to get there, either--there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds. But that said, once you have a good grounding in it,you get a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.)

Usually, we think of an apple as being red. This is not the same red as that of a cherry or tomato. A lemon is yellow and an orange like that of its name. Bricks vary from beige to yellow to orange, and from ochre to brown to deep violet. Foliage appears in innumerable shades of green. In all these cases the colors named are surface colors. In a very different was, distant mountains appear uniformly blue, no matter whether covered with green trees or consisting of earth and rocks. The sun is glaring white in daytime, but it is full red at sunset. The white ceiling of houses surrounded by lawns or the white-painted eaves of a roof on a sunny day appear in bright green, which is reflected from the grass on the ground. All these cases present film colors. They appear as a thin, transparent, translucent layer between the eye and an object, independent of the object's surface color.

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generally it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual.

Conscious” and “unconscious” are only too obviously derivatives of “above ground” and “below ground.” In modern theories of the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electrodynamics. Will functions and thought functions are spoken of in just the same way as the function of a system of forces. To analyze a feeling means to set up a representative silhouette in its place and then to treat this silhouette mathematically and by definition, partition, and measurement. All soul examination of this stamp, however remarkable as a study of cerebral anatomy, is penetrated with the mechanical notion of locality, and works without knowing it under imaginary coordinates in an imaginary space.

Evolutionary humanism has a different solution to the problem of conflicting human experiences. Rooting itself in the firm ground of Darwinian evolutionary theory, it insists that conflict is something to applaud rather than lament.

capitalism too began as a very open-minded scientific theory but gradually solidified into a dogma. Many capitalists keep repeating the mantra “free markets and economic growth” irrespective of realities on the ground. No matter what awful consequences occasionally result from modernization, industrialization, or privatization, capitalist true believers dismiss them as mere “growing pains” and promise that everything will be made good through a bit more growth.

The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain liberation. When that which one had wanted to see isn’t sufficiently revealed, however, the taboo remains, the feeling of “obscenity” stays, and an even greater “obscenity” comes into being. Pornographic films are thus a testing ground for “obscenity,” and the benefits of pornography are clear. Pornographic cinema should be authorized, immediately and completely. Only thus can “obscenity” be rendered essentially meaningless. (from “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film” (1976))

He had discovered a great truth of nature. He had proved it and been disputed. He had tried to show how science is grounded in concrete practice rather than grand theories. In chasing a shadow, he felt, he had sacrificed his tranquillity.

solid grounding for what probability means in a deterministic theory. Here we’ve explored one possible answer: it comes from the credences we have for being on different branches of the wave function immediately after the wave function branches.

To exist is to be in communion, and to be in communion is to exchange information. Accordingly, the fundamental science, indeed the science that needs to ground all other sciences, is a theory of communication, and not, as is widely supposed, an atomistic, reductionistic, and mechanistic science of particles or other mindless entities, which then need to be built up to ever greater orders of complexity by equally mindless principles of association, known as natural laws or algorithms or emergent properties or principles of self-organization.2 Within such a theory of communication, the proper object of study is not particles, but the information that passes between entities—entities in turn defined by their ability to communicate information.

Freud makes his theory of neurosis—so admirably suited to the nature of neurotics—much too dependent on the neurotic ideas from which precisely the patients suffer. This leads to the pretence (which suits the neurotic down to the ground) that the causa efficiens of his neurosis lies in the remote past. In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis.

Derrida… labels as ‘metaphysical’ any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can merely rid ourselves of the urge to forge such first principles, for such an impulse is deeply embedded in our history, and cannot — at least as yet — be eradicated or ignored. Derrida would see his own work as inescapably ‘contaminated’ by such metaphysical thought, much as he strives to give it the slip. But if you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be ‘deconstructed’: they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside.

Human knowledge as it actually is and can only ever be is not a revelation of something objectively and timelessly true, an assured grasp of something existing 'out there' independently of ourselves. It is what we have the best grounds at any given time for believing. Because this is what it is, it does indeed provide the best possible basis for our suppositions and actions. But it always remains our belief, our, conjecture, our hypothesis, our theory; and as such, fallible - and also, as such, a creation of the human mind.

Just because you know a thing is true in theory, doesn't make it true in fact. The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific fact, though they claim to explain all. Yet if one of these savages has all the logical ground for his beliefs taken away—he doesn't stop believing. He then calls his mistaken beliefs 'faith' because he knows they are right. And he knows they are right because he has faith. This is an unbreakable circle of false logic that can't be touched. In reality, it is plain mental inertia.

...properly a theory about knowledge, not about religion. A theist and a Christian may be an agnostic; an atheist may not be an agnostic. An atheist may deny that there is God, and in this case his atheism is dogmatic and not agnostic. Or he may refuse to acknowledge that there is a God simply on the ground that he perceives no evidence for his existence and finds the arguments which have been advanced in proof of it invalid. In this case his atheism is critical, not agnostic. The atheist may be, and not infrequently is, an agnostic.

There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic. Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself. They lay out the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame to our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with them. A close look at our speech-our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies-can therefore give us insight into who we are.

‎"The indictment [the Western/modern question, 'Why be moral?'] also issued from a gross underrating of the 'moral' force that was regarded within the Islamic tradition as an essential and integral part of the 'law.' At the foundation of this underrating stood the observer's ideological judgement about religion (at least the Islamic religion), a judgment of repugnance, especially when religion as a moral and theological force is seen to be fused with law. The judgement, in other words, undercuts a proper apprehension of the role of modernity as a legal form, of its power and force. Historical evidence [in modernity/Enlightenment thought and its intellectual progeny] was thus made to fit into what makes sense to us, not what made sense to a culture that defined itself -- systematically, teleologically, and existentially -- in different terms. This entrenched repugnance for the religious -- at least in this case to the 'Islamic' in Muslim societies -- amounted, in legal terms, to the foreclosure of the possibility of considering the force of the moral within the realm of the legal, and vice versa. Theistic teleology, eschatology, and socially grounded moral gain, status, honor, shame, and much else of a similar type were reduced in importance, if not totally set aside, in favor of other explanations that 'fit better' within our preferred, but distinctively modern, countermoral systems of value. History was brought down to us, to the epistemological here and now, according to our own terms, when in theory no one denies that it was our historiographical set of terms that ought to have been subordinated to the imperatives of historical writing.

our system of race is like a two-headed hydra. One head consists of outright racism—the oppression of some people on grounds of who they are. The other head consists of white privilege—a system by which whites help and buoy each other up. If one lops off a single head, say, outright racism, but leaves the other intact, our system of white over black/brown will remain virtually unchanged. The predicament of social reform, as one writer pointed out, is that “everything must change at once.” Otherwise, change is swallowed up by the remaining elements, so that we remain roughly as we were before.

If we can find a way for them to operate wingsuits while eating at full speed, and they jumped from the Eiger, they could—in theory—finish as many as 45 hot dogs between them before reaching the ground … … which would, if nothing else, earn them what just might be the strangest world record in history.

Chris hurried after him. 'It's so hard to believe we just travelled hundreds of light years.' 'Why?' asked the Doctor. 'I always understood that you cannot travel faster than light,' said Chris. 'Says who?' 'Says Einstein,' said Chris. 'What?' The Doctor stopped and put an arm around Chris's shoulder. 'Do you understand Einstein?' Chris wasn't sure where this was going. 'Yes.' 'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And quantum theory?' 'Yes,' said Chris. He basked in the Doctor's astonishment, on firmer ground at last. 'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Planck?' 'Yes,' said Chris. 'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Newton?' 'Yes!' said Chris. 'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Schoenberg?' Chris paused. Was it a trick question? He recalled reading about the crisis of tonality. He thought he'd caught most of it, so he answered proudly, 'Yes. Of course.' The Doctor whistled, apparently impressed. Then he said, 'You've got an awful lot to unlearn, Bristol.

…his celebrated theory of ‘Forms’—eternal, nonphysical, quintessentially unitary entities, knowledge of which is attainable by abstract and theoretical thought, standing immutably in the nature of things as standards on which the physical world and the world of moral relationships among human beings are themselves grounded.

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things. As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

Vane, you okay in there?” my mom calls through my door. I jump so hard I crash into my desk and knock off some books and video game cases. If my mom comes in and finds a gorgeous girl in a skimpy dress passed out on my worn gray rug, I’ll be grounded for the rest of eternity. Especially since all I have on at the moment are my Batman boxers. Pretty sure she won’t buy my ghost-guardian angel/freak-of-nature theories either. I stumble toward the door, prepared to barricade it with my dresser if I have to. “I’m fine, Mom,” I say as I grab the first T-shirt I see off my floor and throw it on, along with my gym shorts. “Then what’s all that banging?” Come on, Vane. Think! Inspiration strikes. “I found a date roach in my bed.” “Did you kill it?” My mom sounds farther away, like she jumped back. “I tried to, but now I can’t find it.” I don’t need to worry about my mom offering to help. She’s a big believer in the whole boys should kill all the bugs philosophy. “Well, I won’t distract you, then,” she says, and I can’t help smiling.

For me, the characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus (look how many people believe like me!), and that it takes the moral high ground. You will notice that this applies to most religions.

It was a huge and expensive demonstration of Hofstadter’s argument: The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.

Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.” “We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’ To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things…dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact…a film of grease you can’t even see, oil from the touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off—I’ve seen that happen…rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape—stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that’s all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you’ll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.

One reason diplomats have so much trouble coming to any kind of agreement is that they sit in soft chairs around a large table with yellow pads in front of them to doodle on. They're too comfortable for serious negotiation. My theory is that world peace could be achieved in short order if the diplomats were made to hunker out in a barnyard and draw their proposals on the ground with sticks. For hundreds of years, hunters have employed the hunker successfully in negotiating with farmers for permission to hunt their property. I myself am an expert hunkerer and would be willing to teach the technique free of charge to both Russian and American diplomats, just so we can get the present mess straightened out in a hurry.

On other and practical grounds we see that the theory of eternal progression is untenable, for destruction is the goal of everything earthly. All our struggles and hopes and fears and joys, what will they lead to? We shall all end in death. Nothing is so certain as this. Where, then, is this motion in a straight line - this infinite progression? It is only going out to a distance, and coming back to the centre from which it started. See how, from nebulae, the sun, moon, and stars are produced; then they dissolve and go back to nebulae. The same is being done everywhere. The plant takes material from the earth, dissolves, and gives it back. Every form in this world is taken out of surrounding atoms and goes back to these atoms.

Nothing like the act of eating for equalising men. Dying is nothing to it. The philosopher dies sententiously—the pharisee ostentatiously—the simple–hearted humbly—the poor idiot blindly, as the sparrow falls to the ground; the philosopher and idiot, publican and pharisee, all eat after the same fashion—given an equally good digestion. There's theory for theory for you!

The question as to which of these two theories applies to the actual world is, like all questions concerning the actual world, in itself irrelevant to pure mathematics.* But the argument against absolute position usually takes the form of maintaining that a space composed of points is logically inadmissible, and hence issues are raised which a philosophy of mathematics must discuss. In what follows, I am concerned only with the question: Is a space composed of points self-contradictory? It is true that, if this question be answered in the negative, the sole ground for denying that such a space exists in the actual world is removed; but this is a further point, which, being irrelevant to our subject, will be left entirely to the sagacity of the reader.

In his Fascism and Social Decay (1934), Dutt pointed out that the ‘revolt against science’ prepares the ground for ‘all the quackeries and charlatanries, of chauvinism, racial theories, antisemitism, Aryan grandmothers, mystic swastikas, divine missions, strong-man saviours, and all the rest of the nonsense through which alone capitalism today can try to maintain its hold a little longer’.

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.

Marxism cannot, even on the grounds of political expediency or party solidarity, be reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics. Nor can it be treated as a standard technique such as work on an automatic lathe. The material, when it is present in human society, has endless variations; the observer is himself part of the observed population, with which he interacts strongly and reciprocally. This means that the successful application of the theory needs the development of analytical power, the ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation. This cannot be learned from books alone. The one way to learn it is by constant contact with the major sections of the people. For an intellectual, this means at least a few months spent in manual labour, to earn his livelihood as a member of the working class; not as a superior being, nor as a reformist, nor as a sentimental "progressive" visitor to the slums. The experience gained from living with worker and peasant, as one of them, has then to be consistently refreshed and regularly evaluated in the light of one's reading. For those who are prepared to do this, these essays might provide some encouragement, and food for thought.

At the highest level, there is the general Subject-Self metaphor, which conceptualizes a person as bifurcated. The exact nature of this bifurcation is specified more precisely one level down, where there are five specific instances of the metaphor. These five special cases of the basic Subject-Self metaphor are grounded in four types of everyday experience: (1) manipulating objects, (2) being located in space, (3) entering into social relations, and (4) empathic projection-conceptually projecting yourself onto someone else, as when a child imitates a parent. The fifth special case comes from the Folk Theory of Essences: Each person is seen as having an Essence that is part of the Subject. The person may have more than one Self, but only one of those Selves is compatible with that Essence. This is called the "real" or "true" Self.

What was all this? He knew only too well. The statistical method! Probability theory! There was a greater probability of finding enemies among people of a non-proletarian background. And it was on these same grounds – probability theory – that the German Fascists had destroyed whole peoples and nations. The principle was inhuman, blind and inhuman. There was only one acceptable way of relating to people – a human way.

If ordinary men never report the occurrence of these acts, for all that, according to the theory, they should be encountered vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom; if ordinary vocabulary has no non-academic names for them; if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds.

All faults or defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking too much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in a shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame. Therefore, concluded that illustrious Philosopher, neither good conduct nor bad conduct is a fit subject, in any sober estimation, for either praise or blame. For why should you praise, for example, the integrity of a Square who faithfully defends the interests of his client, when you ought in reality rather to admire the exact precision of his right angles? Or again, why blame a lying, thievish Isosceles when you ought rather to deplore the incurable inequality of his sides? Theoretically, this doctrine is unquestionable; but it has practical drawbacks. In dealing with an Isosceles, if a rascal pleads that he cannot help stealing because of his unevenness, you reply that for that very reason, because he cannot help being a nuisance to his neighbours, you, the Magistrate, cannot help sentencing him to be consumed - and there's an end of the matter. But in little domestic difficulties, where the penalty of consumption, or death, is out of the question, this theory of Configuration sometimes comes in awkwardly; and I must confess that occasionally when one of my own Hexagonal Grandsons pleads as an excuse for his disobedience that a sudden change of the temperature has been too much for his perimeter, and that I ought to lay the blame not on him but on his Configuration, which can only be strengthened by abundance of the choicest sweetmeats, I neither see my way logically to reject, nor practically to accept, his conclusions. For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles, sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that, when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable of choosing between them.

Also, in every advancement of the world hitherto, the individual has led the masses. Thus, to elicit individuality has been the object of the best political institutions and governments. Now, in these new theories, the individual is ground down into the multitude, and society must be ‘moving all together if it moves at all’ — restricting the very possibility of progress by the use of the lights of genius. Genius is always individual.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

One of the peculiar realities of conspiracism is that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely ever believe just one; most conspiracy theories are interconnected by the nature of their afactual grounding, and often this forms a web of theories that lead to radicalization. This is why anti-vaxxers’ conspiracies coalesced so seamlessly with far-right extremist movements in COVID denialism, and moreover why that commingling became a global phenomenon.

After the war, Manor returned to New York University and finished his degree in 1947. Later that year he became an instructor at the air tactical school at Tyndal Field, Florida. Following that assignment he went to Maxwell Air Force Base at Montgomery, Alabama, and helped organize the squadron officers’ school, staying on to teach the first class. He departed Maxwell for the Tactical Air Command air-ground operations school at Southern Pines, North Carolina.

Nicky turned and bolted. He’d only had about a thirty foot head start and a few were closing ground on him quickly. He cursed his hundred-dollar shoes and his vanity. The shoes looked great, but were definitely not made for running, nor was the suit he was wearing. He vowed that if he made it out of there alive, he’d only wear sneakers and track suits for the rest of his days. "Of course, I’ll probably be laughed out of the mob, but I don’t care at this point.

Explicitly grounding my analysis in multiple voices highlights the diversity, richness, and power of Black women's ideas as part of a long-standing African American women's intellectual community. Moreover, this approach counteracts the tendency of mainstream scholarship to canonize a few Black women as spokespersons for the group and then refuse to listen to any but these select few. While it is certainly appealing to receive recognition for one's accomplishments, my experiences as the "first," "one of the few," and the "only" have shown me how effective selecting a few and using them to control the many can be in stifling subordinate groups. Assuming that only a few exceptional Black women have been able to do theory homogenizes African-American women and silences the majority. In contrast, I maintain that theory and intellectual creativity are not the province of a select few but instead emanate from a range of people.

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.

The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.' Subsequent military theory has put the accent on the first clause instead of on the last: in particular, on the words 'one point' instead of on the word 'equilibrium'. The former is but a physical metaphor, whereas the latter expresses the actual psychological result which ensures 'that the rest is nothing'. His own emphasis can be traced in the strategic course of his campaigns. The word 'point' even, has been the source of much confusion, and more controversy. One school has argued that Napoleon meant that the concentrated blow must be aimed at the enemy's strongest point, on the ground that this, and this only, ensures decisive results. For if the enemy's main resistance be broken, its rupture will involve that of any lesser opposition. This argument ignores the factor of cost, and the fact that the victor may be too exhausted to exploit his success-so that even a weaker opponent may acquire a relatively higher resisting power than the original. The other school-better imbued with the idea of economy of force, but only in the limited sense of first costs-has contended that the offensive should be aimed at the enemy's weakest point. But where a point is obviously weak this is usually because it is remote from any vital artery or nerve centre, or because it is deliberately weak to draw the assailant into a trap. Here, again illumination comes from the actual campaign in which Bonaparte put this maxim into execution. It clearly suggests that what he really meant was not 'point', but 'joint'-and that at this stage of his career he was too firmly imbued with the idea of economy of force to waste his limited strength in battering at the enemy's strong point. A joint, however, is both vital and vulnerable. It was at this time too, that Bonaparte used another phrase that has subsequently been quoted to justify the most foolhardy concentrations of effort against the main armed forces of the enemy. 'Austria is our most determined enemy....Austria overthrown, Spain and Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse our attacks but concentrate them.' But the full text of the memorandum containing this phrase shows that he was arguing, not in support of the direct attack upon Austria, but for using the army on the frontier of Piedmont for an indirect approach to Austria.

When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith. This cannot be disproved. Nor can my own pet theory that, from the patterns of behavior that are observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony and a lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.

Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity. I am not going just now to venture my own theory. But if any one here hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the others, to him I say, “Brother, yours is an impossible hope.” Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid. The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it. Does the seed become the earth; or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant. Similar is the case with religion. The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.

By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to "name"), which her culture imposes in blindness, 'Sapphire' might after all rewrite a radically different text for female empowerment.

With the hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest the corpus of English and American laws – for the two arise for the most pat from the common root of belief and experience - cannot endure forever unless it is laminated by the spirit that void it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain oral prostates of Christian teaching have. been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we group in judicial darkness..

Groos’s findings—which have since been confirmed by a century of experimental evidence—suggested maybe there was something much simpler behind what Nietzsche called the “will to power.” Children come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from the world around them, largely by coming to understand that “they” are the thing which just caused something to happen—the proof of which is the fact that they can make it happen again.7 Crucially, too, this realization is, from the very beginning, marked with a species of delight that remains the fundamental background of all subsequent human experience.8 It is hard perhaps to think of our sense of self as grounded in action because when we are truly engrossed in doing something—especially something we know how to do very well, from running a race to solving a complicated logical problem—we tend to forget that we exist. But even as we dissolve into what we do, the foundational “pleasure at being the cause” remains, as it were, the unstated ground of our being.

There is often a moral overtone to reductionism (science should be essentially reductive). This is related both to instrumentalism and to the Principle of Mediocrity, which I criticized in Chapters 1 and 3. Instrumentalism is rather like reductionism except that, instead of rejecting only high-level explanations, it tries to reject all explanations. The Principle of Mediocrity is a milder form of reductionism: it rejects only high-level explanations that involve people. While I am on the subject of bad philosophical doctrines with moral overtones, let me add holism, a sort of mirror image of reductionism. It is the idea that the only valid explanations (or at least the only significant ones) are of parts in terms of wholes. Holists also often share with reductionists the mistaken belief that science can only (or should only) be reductive, and therefore they oppose much of science. All those doctrines are irrational for the same reason: they advocate accepting or rejecting theories on grounds other than whether they are good explanations.

In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on the ground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time, is a contriving intelligence adapting the means directly to that end. Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch had not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly; and that this again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all—seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the hands were rudimentary; and that going back and back in time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure to vary indefinitely; and secondly, from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all those in other directions; then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end, by an intelligent agent. Now it appears to us that what we have here, for illustration's sake, supposed to be done with the watch, is exactly what the establishment of Darwin's Theory will do for the organic world. For the notion that every organism has been created as it is and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished.

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION 1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. 2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’. 3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths. 4. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. 5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world. 6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels. 7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails. 8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

Liberal theory, however, doesn’t have to demonstrate the difference. It only has to show that moral decisions on matters of public policy in a pluralist and democratic state are satisfied, or justified, by a particular political test: the “ability to gain assent from people who retain radically diverse ideas about the point and meaning of human life, about the path to private perfection.”43 Appeals to the will of God through quoting the Bible, church doctrine, and ecclesiastical authorities, fail this test for public values because

Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic—which was what all magic was—it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred. Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. It was the sort of thing a cat would like a human to think, particularly if it weren’t true.

If we arrive at a comprehensive theory of consciousness, and if we develop ever more sophisticated tools to alter the contents of subjective experience, we will have to think hard about what a good state of consciousness is. We urgently need fresh and convincing answers to questions like the following: Which states of consciousness do we want our children to have? Which states of consciousness do we want to foster, and which do we want to ban on ethical grounds? Which states of consciousness can we inflict upon animals, or upon machines?

From the Right, history appears as the history of Being, as the disclosure of an essential condition that carries its own immutable necessity. From the Left, history is the history of emancipation. It presents the capacity of humanity to choose and alter its condition. For the Right, the record of injustice yields an irreducible ground of suffering that must be affirmed as the essence of Being for humanity. For the Left, suffering is only that which waits to be turned aside when the advanced freedom brings humanity to the point where a choice can be upheld.

As we know, Clay Shaw was acquitted, and the establishment celebrated another victory over the truth. In my view, Ferrie, Banister, Shaw, and Jack Ruby would have been the conspirators Oswald worked with personally, on the ground level, while far more powerful forces manipulated everything behind the scenes. I share Jim Garrison’s theory that Oswald was some kind of intelligence operative who was assigned to infiltrate what he was told was a plot to kill the president, shortly before the actual assassination. At least that’s where I think the evidence logically leads.

Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts inharmoniously blended: on the one hand a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living. The failure to separate these two with sufficient clarity has been a source of much confused thinking. Philosophers, from Plato to William James, have allowed their opinions as to the constitution of the universe to be influenced by the desire for edification: knowing, as they supposed, what beliefs would make men virtuous, they have invented arguments, often very sophistical, to prove that these beliefs are true. For my part I reprobate this kind of bias, both on moral and on intellectual grounds. Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery. And when he assumes, in advance of inquiry, that certain beliefs, whether true or false, are such as to promote good behaviour, he is so limiting the scope of philosophical speculation as to make philosophy trivial; the true philosopher is prepared to examine all preconceptions.

Since CWIL’s discipline-based practice was grounded not only in process but also in New Genre Theory, their criteria included assigning writing that would enable students to engage in the kinds of thinking typical of the discipline, as well as in writing in the genres typical of professional practice. The UCITF, however, was trying to draft criteria for the new Q (quantitative reasoning) and B (breadth) courses as well as for the W-courses. They were motivated to define courses in ways that would be comprehensive and meaningful, but would not impose demands likely to alienate faculty.

At one time, this gave rise to the question of whether the legal validity of the money was determined by the stamp of the ruler of the country or by the metal content of the coin; later, to the question of whether the command of the law or the free usage of business was to settle if the money was legal tender or not. The answer of public opinion, grounded on the principles of private property and the protection of acquired rights, ran the same in both cases: Prout quidque eontraetum est, ita et solvi debet; ut cum re eontraximus, re solvi debet, veluti cum mutuum dedimus, ut Tetro pecuniae tantundem solvi debeat.

This page is related to that page. You're reading something constructed using a rhetorical practice, something informed both directly and indirectly by the entire history of composition up until this point, from the Sophists to Derrida. But you're navigating it using pure logical statements, using spans of text or images that, when clicked or selected, get other files and display them on your screen. The text is based in the rhetorical tradition; the links are based in the logical tradition; and somewhere in there is something worth figuring out. ...the entire history of Western pedagogy [is] an oscillation between these two traditions, between the tradition of rhetoric as a means for obtaining power — language as just a collection of interconnected signifiers co-relating, without a grounding in "truth," and the tradition of seeking truth, of searching for a fundamental, logical underpinning for the universe, using ideas like the platonic solids or Boolean logic, or tools like expert systems and particle accelerators ... what is the relationship between narratives and logic? What is sprezzatura for the web? Hell if I know. My way of figuring it all out is to build the system and write inside it, because I'm too dense to work out theories.

Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore? A publisher...couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other.... The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping..., I might be hurting my own chances for something or other -- what I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would be filled.... If I still feel I am in competition with other women, how do less well-known women feel? Terrible, I have to assume. I have had to train myself to pay as much attention to women at parties as to men.... I have had to force myself not to be dismissive of other women's creativity. We have been semi-slaves for so long (as Doris Lessing says) that we must cultivate freedom within ourselves. It doesn't come naturally. Not yet. In her writing about the drama of childhood developments, Alice Miller has created, among other things, a theory of freedom. in order to embrace freedom, a child must be sufficiently nurtured, sufficiently loved. Security and abundance are the grounds for freedom. She shows how abusive child-rearing is communicated from one generation to the next and how fascism profits from generations of abused children. Women have been abused for centuries, so it should surprise no one that we are so good at abusing each other. Until we learn how to stop doing that, we cannot make our revolution stick. Many women are damaged in childhood -- unprotected, unrespected, and treated with dishonesty. Is it any wonder that we build up vast defences against other women since the perpetrators of childhood abuse have so often been women? Is it any wonder that we return intimidation with intimidation, or that we reserve our greatest fury for others who remind us of our own weaknesses -- namely other women? Men, on the other hand, however intellectually condescending, clubbish, loutishly lewd, are rarely as calculatingly cruel as women. They tend, rather, to advance us when we are young and cute (and look like darling daughters) and ignore us when we are older and more sure of our opinions (and look like scary mothers), but they don't really know what they're doing. They are too busy bonding with other men, and creating male pecking orders, to pay attention to us. If we were skilled at compromise and alliance-building, we could transform society. The trouble is: we are not yet good at this. We are still quarrelling among ourselves. This is the crisis feminism faces today.

Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. In life, he once remarked, 'all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.' The as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of determinism, the establishment of an accepted freedom by magic. We make up aventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those 'privileged moments' to which we alone award their prestige, make our own human clocks tick in a clockless world. And we take a man who is by definition de trop, and create a context in which he isn't. The novel is a lie only as our quotidian inventions are lies. The power which goes to its making--the imagination --is a function of man's inescapable freedom. This freedom, in Mary Warnock's words, 'expresses itself in his ability to see things which are not.' It is by his fiction that we know he is free. It is not surprising that Sartre as ontologist, having to describe many kinds of fictive behaviour, invents stories to do so, thus moving into a middle ground between life and novel. ....

The fundamental problem with learning mathematics is that while the number sense may be genetic, exact calculation requires cultural tools—symbols and algorithms—that have been around for only a few thousand years and must therefore be absorbed by areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. The process is made easier when what we are learning harmonizes with built-in circuitry. If we can’t change the architecture of our brains, we can at least adapt our teaching methods to the constraints it imposes. For nearly three decades, American educators have pushed “reform math,” in which children are encouraged to explore their own ways of solving problems. Before reform math, there was the “new math,” now widely thought to have been an educational disaster. (In France, it was called les maths modernes and is similarly despised.) The new math was grounded in the theories of the influential Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that children are born without any sense of number and only gradually build up the concept in a series of developmental stages. Piaget thought that children, until the age of four or five, cannot grasp the simple principle that moving objects around does not affect how many of them there are, and that there was therefore no point in trying to teach them arithmetic before the age of six or seven.

SolarCity is a key part of what can be thought of as the unified field theory of Musk. Each one of his businesses is interconnected in the short term and the long term. Tesla makes battery packs that SolarCity can then sell to end customers. SolarCity supplies Tesla’s charging stations with solar panels, helping Tesla to provide free recharging to its drivers. Newly minted Model S owners regularly opt to begin living the Musk Lifestyle and outfit their homes with solar panels. Tesla and SpaceX help each other as well. They exchange knowledge around materials, manufacturing techniques, and the intricacies of operating factories that build so much stuff from the ground up.

What’s more, SolarCity is a key part of what can be thought of as the unified field theory of Musk. Each one of his businesses is interconnected in the short term and the long term. Tesla makes battery packs that SolarCity can then sell to end customers. SolarCity supplies Tesla’s charging stations with solar panels, helping Tesla to provide free recharging to its drivers. Newly minted Model S owners regularly opt to begin living the Musk Lifestyle and outfit their homes with solar panels. Tesla and SpaceX help each other as well. They exchange knowledge around materials, manufacturing techniques, and the intricacies of operating factories that build so much stuff from the ground up.

For this new battle we need a new economics. Above all we need an economics that can not only explain economic growth but vindicate it. We need an economics of mind, an economics of information grounded in the truth that the growth of recent centuries has been achieved not by ravishing “natural” resources but by regenerating them, not by accumulating matter but by replacing it with mind, not by wasting energy but by using it more ingeniously. Information theory shows that we accumulate wealth not by stealing from the earth but by adding to our store of knowledge. We need an economics of information. Superabundance is the pioneering text on this new frontier of economic truth. George Gilder

There is ... a contemporary trend to make a sort of 'common intellect' out of society and forbid man his own independent access to truth. All is culture-clouded, and society as the climate of thought is the cause of our thoughts. But in Thomas's theory a man can transcend his environment just as he can transcend the material conditions surrounding any essence; material conditions will be his point of departure, and yet arrival at the truth or being of whatever he is studying is not ruled out. As an unlimited power, man's intellect opens man to the infinite, although only love reaches it. The relation of each man to transcendent existence in his knowing and living experience - this is the ground of objectivity.

(William) Hamilton recast the central ideas (of the evolutionary theory of aging) in mathematical form. Though this work tells us a good deal about why human lives take the course they do, Hamilton was a biologist whose great love was insects and their relatives, especially insects which make both our lives and an octopus’s life seem rather humdrum. Hamilton found mites in which the females hang suspended in the air with their swollen bodies packed with newly hatched young, and the males in the brood search out and copulate with their sisters there inside the mother. He found tiny beetles in which the males produce “and manhandle sperm cells longer than their whole bodies. Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. 'No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our “backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

A theorem is no more proved by logic and computation than a sonnet is written by grammar and rhetoric, or than a sonata is composed by harmony and counterpoint, or a picture painted by balance and perspective. Logic and computation, grammar and rhetoric, harmony and counterpoint, balance and perspective, can be seen in the work after it is created, but these forms are, in the final analysis, parasitic on, they have no existence apart from, the creativity of the work itself. Thus the relation of logic to mathematics is seen to be that of an applied science to its pure ground, and all applied science is seen as drawing sustenance from a process of creation with which it can combine to give structure, but which it cannot appropriate.

Landsman and Bina were married to each other for twelve years and together for five before that. Each was the other's first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something -- even the marriage itself -- went wrong. For half their lives they tangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose-to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing up fistfuls of each other's hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bina's nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet.

In Moscow I asked how these things were achieved. I was told that the whole theory of the Communist state was opposed to the separation of peoples on religious or racial grounds, and that workers had no strength divided up into warring camps. I was told the Soviet schools taught that all men are equal. I said, "The theory of our American democracy is that all men are equal, too--except that where I live it does not seem to work out that way. Theories are all right--but how do you make them work in Russia?" "Here we have laws against racial intolerance," they said. I said, "We have such laws in some of our American cities, too, but often the laws do not work." The Russians said, "In the Soviet Union, we make them work. Here nobody dares insult or spit on or hurt a Jew simply because he is a Jew any more.

Now I realize, of course, that not everyone accepts the Thomistic (or any other traditional) ontology, and that moreover a reductio to quantity constitutes in fact the definitive tendency of the modern age. One fact, however, is incontrovertible: as I have shown in The Quantum Enigma, it is possible to interpret all of physics—by virtue of its definitive modus operandi—in traditional (and thus non-Cartesian) terms, based precisely on a categorical distinction between the 'corporeal' (i.e., perceptible) and the 'physical' universe: the universe, namely, as conceived by the physicist. Everyone, of course, is free to disagree with the non-Cartesian interpretation of physics: what is NOT possible (by virtue of the above-said finding) is to do so on SCIENTIFIC ground. ("Taking Stock of a New Philosophy of Physics: The KKE Theory")

What actually happens in these incest and womb fantasies is that the libido immerses itself in the unconscious, thereby provoking infantile reactions, affects, opinions and attitudes from the personal sphere, but at the same time activating collective images (archetypes) which have a compensatory and curative meaning such as has always pertained to the myth. Freud makes his theory of neurosis—so admirably suited to the nature of neurotics—much too dependent on the neurotic ideas from which precisely the patients suffer. This leads to the pretence (which suits the neurotic down to the ground) that the causa efficiens of his neurosis lies in the remote past. In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis.

When I heard about the path, I had to come down and see it for myself. I had heard about it before but didn’t really think it existed.” Zach was quick with his questions. “What do you think it is, and who made it?” he asked. Jeff looked at the boy, then back at Rock. “It’s my theory that Native Americans made the path using a giant shell for a mold. It’s the shape of a Noble Pen Shell, which is odd, because this shell is only found in the Mediterranean Sea. It could have been brought here from across the sea by early traders though - something to trade to the Indians in exchange for rich minerals such as gold or silver. They would have been fascinated by a shell this large and odd shaped. “The mold would have been filled with a crushed base layer, probably ground oyster shell, sand, rock and maybe even non-porous clay - then mixed with a binding agent, I have no idea what until I analyze it.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa;

gene, the mutation of whose DNA building blocks accelerated after the split between humans and chimpanzees, around 5.5 million years ago. The theory has also been put forward that the human brain is still evolving, on the grounds that a genetic variant of ASPM is thought to have originated only 5,800 years ago and then spread rapidly through the population. A genetic variant of the microcephalin gene (D allele of MCPH1), which regulates brain size, is thought to have only entered the DNA of Homo sapiens during the last ice age, around 37,000 years ago—yet 70 percent of the current world population carries this variant. A rapid increase of this kind is only possible if a variant confers a clear evolutionary advantage. Genes whose mutations are associated with human language have also been found. Mutations of the FOXP2 gene cause language and speech disorders that run in families. And ASPM and microcephalin also appear to have a linguistic connection.

The Levellers . . . only change and pervert the natural order of things: they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. . . . Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold), the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. . . . In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. . . . Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. . . . Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. . . . You would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the Gospel— no interpreters of law, no general officers, no public councils. You might change the names: the things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names— to the causes of evil, which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. . . . The effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be covered with the 'all-atoning name' of Liberty. . . . But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. . . . To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government, that is to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.

It must be *possible* for the *I think* to accompany all my representations: for otherwise something would be represented within me that could not be thought at all, in other words, the representation would either be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. That representation which can be given prior to all thought is called *intuition*, and all the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the *I think* in the same subject in which this manifold of intuition is found. This representation (the *I think*), however, is an act of *spontaneity*, that is, it cannot be considered as belonging to sensibility. I call it *pure apperception*, in order to distinguish it from empirical apperception, as also from original apperception, because it is that self-consciousness which, by producing the representations, *I think* (which must be capable of accompanying all other representations, and which is one and the same in all consciousness), cannot itself be accompanied by any further representations. I also call the unity of apperception the *transcendental* unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate that *a priori* knowledge can be obtained from it. For the manifold representations given in an intuition would not one and all be *my* representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. What I mean is that, as my representations (even though I am not conscious of them as that), they must conform to the condition under which alone they *can* stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not one and all belong to me. From this original combination much can be inferred. The thoroughgoing identity of the apperception of a manifold that is given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations, and is possible only through the consciousness of this synthesis. For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is itself dispersed and without reference to the identity of the subject. Such a reference comes about, not simply through my accompanying every representation with consciousness, but through my *adding* one representation to another and being conscious of the synthesis of them. Only because I am able to combine a manifold of given representations *in one consciousness* is it possible for me to represent to myself the *identity of the consciousness in these representations*, that is, only under the presupposition of some *synthetic* unity of apperception is the *analytic* unity of apperception possible. The thought that the representations given in intuition belong one and all *to me*, is therefore the same as the thought that I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least do so; and although that thought itself is not yet the consciousness of the synthesis of representations, it nevertheless presupposes the possibility of this synthesis. In other words, it is only because I am able to comprehend the manifold of representations in one consciousness that I call them one and all *my* representations. For otherwise I should have as many-coloured and varied a self as I have representations of which I am conscious. Synthetic unity of the manifold of intuitions, as given *a priori*, is thus the ground of the identity of apperception itself, which precedes *a priori* all *my* determinate thought. Combination, however, does not lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them by perception and thus first be taken into the understanding. It is, rather, solely an act of the understanding, which itself is nothing but the faculty of combining *a priori* and of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception; and the principle of this unity is, in fact, the supreme principle of all human knowledge." —from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 124-128

Hey—we have a problem. You have some unexpected guests down at the gate. You should go check it out.” Guests? Who would come here to see me? I hop in the golf cart and drive down to the main gate. Just in time to hear Franny Barrister, the Countess of Ellington, tearing into a poor, clueless Matched security guard. “Don’t you tell me we can’t come in, you horse’s arse. Where’s Henry—what have you done with him?” Simon, my brother’s best friend, sees me approach, his sparkling blue eyes shining. “There he is.” I nod to security and open the gate. “Simon, Franny, what are you doing here?” “Nicholas said you didn’t sound right the last time he spoke to you. He asked us to peek in on you,” Simon explains. Franny’s shrewd gaze rakes me over. “He doesn’t look drunk. And he obviously hasn’t hung himself from the rafters—that’s better than I was expecting.” “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” Simon peers around the grounds, at the smattering of crew members and staging tents. “What the hell is going on, Henry?” I clear my throat. “So . . . the thing is . . . I’m sort of . . . filming a reality dating television show here at the castle and we started with twenty women and now we’re down to four, and when it’s over one of them will get the diamond tiara and become my betrothed. At least in theory.” It sounded so much better in my head. “Don’t tell Nicholas.” Simon scrubs his hand down his face. “Now I’m going to have to avoid his calls—I’m terrible with secrets.” And Franny lets loose a peal of tinkling laughter. “This is fabulous! You never disappoint, you naughty boy.” She pats my arm. “And don’t worry, when the Queen boots you out of the palace, Simon and I will adopt you. Won’t we, darling?” Simon nods. “Yes, like a rescue dog.” “Good to know.” Then I gesture back to their car. “Well . . . it was nice of you to stop by.” Simon shakes his head. “You’re not getting rid of us that easily, mate.” “Yes, we’re definitely staying.” Franny claps her hands. “I have to see this!” Fantastic.

Pull out a match and light up a million notes and a million words, consume the energy on papers like its fuel, and all the long lost feelings are your coal. Set the whole thing on fire and never look back, an expert on regrets and mistakes, tell the story as easy as a philosophical theory; devils disguised as angels, angels turning into devils, and the perfectionist in between always stuck in the middle. Tired and hurt, but angry till I burn, watching a sinner blaming life and life taking his side still, anyway I took my advice and kept the things I loved from day one aside, so I'm not alone and love is also taking my side. Save the date, it's 365 days in training, and we finally reached the end of our magical tragic failure and if you are smart then it's not a surprise; you know that my sky is not raining. Take out a match and burn this house down, it took me two seconds to figure out that I deserve solid better-looking ground. So let me feel the heat in my brain blow out and my heart beating in its place safe and sound inside.

Now, if on the one hand it is very satisfactory to be able to give a common ground in the theory of knowledge for the many varieties of statements concerning space, spatial configurations, and spatial relations which, taken together, constitute geometry, it must on the other hand be emphasised that this demonstrates very clearly with what little right mathematics may claim to expose the intuitional nature of space. Geometry contains no trace of that which makes the space of intuition what it is in virtue of its own entirely distinctive qualities which are not shared by “states of addition-machines” and “gas-mixtures” and “systems of solutions of linear equations”. It is left to metaphysics to make this “comprehensible” or indeed to show why and in what sense it is incomprehensible. We as mathematicians have reason to be proud of the wonderful insight into the knowledge of space which we gain, but, at the same time, we must recognise with humility that our conceptual theories enable us to grasp only one aspect of the nature of space, that which, moreover, is most formal and superficial.

Quantum uncertainty and chaos theory have had deplorable effects upon popular culture, much to the annoyance of genuine aficionados. Both are regularly exploited by obscurantists, ranging from professional quacks to daffy New Agers. In America, the self-help ‘healing’ industry coins millions, and it has not been slow to cash in on quantum theory’s formidable talent to bewilder. This has been documented by the American physicist Victor Stenger. One well-heeled healer wrote a string of best-selling books on what he calls ‘Quantum Healing’. Another book in my possession has sections on quantum psychology, quantum responsibility, quantum morality, quantum aesthetics, quantum immortality and quantum theology. Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for ‘chaos’ implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions. Undoubtedly it is mathematically interesting.

Knowledge of revelation cannot interfere with ordinary knowledge. Likewise, ordinary knowledge cannot interfere with knowledge of revelation. There is no scientific theory which is more favorable to the truth of revelation than any other theory. It is disastrous for theology if theologians prefer one scientific view to others on theological grounds. And it was humiliating for theology when theologians were afraid of new theories for religious reasons, trying to resist them as long as possible, and finally giving in when resistance had become impossible. This ill-conceived resistance of theologians from the time of Galileo to the time of Darwin was one of the causes of the split between religion and secular culture in the past centuries. The same situation prevails with regard to historical research. Theologians need not be afraid of any historical conjecture, for revealed truth lies in a dimension where it can neither be confirmed nor negated by historiography. Therefore, theologians should not prefer some results of historical research to others on theological grounds, and they should not resist results which finally have to be accepted if scientific honesty is not to be destroyed, even if they seem to undermine the knowledge of revelation. Historical investigations should neither comfort nor worry theologians. Knowledge of revelation, although it is mediated primarily through historical events, does not imply factual assertions, and it is therefore not exposed to critical analysis by historical research. Its truth is to be judged by criteria which lie within the dimension of revelatory knowledge. Psychology, including depth psychology, psychosomatics, and social psychology, is equally unable to interfere with knowledge of revelation. There are many insights into the nature of man in revelation. But all of them refer to the relation of man to what concerns him ultimately, to the ground and meaning of his being. There is no revealed psychology just as there is no revealed historiography or revealed physics. It is not the task of theology to protect the truth of revelation by attacking Freudian doctrines of libido, repression, and sublimation on religious grounds or by defending a Jungian doctrine of man in the name of revelatory knowledge.

The fact that no one made demands on her knowledge in her special field was lucky for Simochka. Not only she but many of her girlfriends had graduated from the institute without any such knowledge. There were many reasons for this. The young girls had come from high schools with very little grounding in mathematics and physics. They had learned in the upper grades that at faculty council meetings the school director had scolded the teachers for giving out failing marks, and that even if a pupil didn't study at all he received a diploma. In the institute, when they found time to sit down to study, they made their way through the mathematics and radio-technology as through a dense pine forest. But more often there was no time at all. Every fall for a month or more the students were taken to collective farms to harvest potatoes. For this reason, they had to attend lectures for eight and ten hours a day all the rest of the year, leaving no time to study their course work. On Monday evenings there was political indoctrination. Once a week a meeting of some kind was obligatory. Then one had to do socially useful work, too: issue bulletins, organize concerts, and it was also necessary to help at home, to shop, to wash, to dress. And what about the movies? And the theater? And the club? If a girl didn't have some fun and dance a bit during her student years, when would she do so afterward? For their examinations Simochka and her girlfriends wrote many cribs, which they hid in those sections of female clothing denied to males, and at the exams they pulled out the one the needed, smoothed it out, and turned it in as a work sheet. The examiners, of course, could have easily discovered the women students' ignorance, but they themselves were overburdened with committee meetings, assemblies, a variety of plans and reports to the dean's office and to the rector. It was hard on them to have to give an examination a second time. Besides, when their students failed, the examiners were reprimanded as if the failures were spoiled goods in a production process—according to the well-known theory that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. Therefore the examiners did not try to trip the students up but, in fact, attempted to get them through the examination with as good results as possible.

China seems to offer a much more serious challenge than Western social protestors. Despite liberalising its politics and economics, China is neither a democracy nor a truly free-market economy, which does not prevent it from becoming the economic giant of the twenty-first century. Yet this economic giant casts a very small ideological shadow. Nobody seems to know what the Chinese believe these days – including the Chinese themselves. In theory China is still communist, but in practice it is nothing of the kind. Some Chinese thinkers and leaders toy with a return to Confucianism, but that’s hardly more than a convenient facade. This ideological vacuum makes China the most promising breeding ground for the new techno-religions emerging from Silicon Valley (which we will discuss in the following chapters). But these techno-religions, with their belief in immortality and virtual paradises, will take at least a decade or two to establish themselves. Hence at present China doesn’t pose a real alternative to liberalism. For bankrupt Greeks despairing of the liberal model and searching for a substitute, ‘imitating the Chinese’ isn’t a viable option.

Cultivating an ethic of responsibility begins with nonnatives understanding ourselves as beneficiaries of the illegal settlement of indigenous people's land, and unjust appropriation of indigenous peoples' resources and jurisdiction. When faced with this truth, it is common for activists to get stuck in their feelings of guilt, which I would argue is a state of self-absorption that actually upholds privilege. While guilt is often representative of much-needed shift in consciousness, in itself it does nothing to motivate the responsibility necessary to actively dismantle entrenched systems of oppression. In a movement-building round table, longtime Montreal activist Jaggi Singh expressed that "the only way to escape complicity with settlement is active opposition to it. That only happens in the context of on-the-ground, day-to-day organizing, and creating and cultivating the spaces where we can begin dialogues and discussions as natives an nonnatives." Original blog post: Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice. Quoted In: Decolonize Together: Moving beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization. Taking Sides.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. In saying of me, “He is no longer a child,” “His tastes will not change now,” and so forth, my father had suddenly made me apparent to myself in my position in Time, and caused me the same kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old pensioner, but one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a book: “He very seldom comes up now from the country. He has finally decided to end his days there.

The choice today is revolt. Igor Stravinsky wrote, “The old original sin was one of knowledge, the new original sin is one of non-acknowledgment.” It is the refusal to acknowledge anything outside the operation of the human will—most especially the good toward which the soul is ordered. The good is what must ultimately inform human justice. Therefore, moral relativism is inimical to justice, as it removes the epistemological ground for knowing the good. As Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, wrote, “Everything that is relative presupposes the existence of something that is absolute, and is meaningful only when juxtaposed to something absolute.”4 What happens if the absolute is absent? If what is good is relative to something other than itself, then it is not the good but the expression of some other interest that only claims to be the good. Claims of “good” then become transparent masks for self-interest. This is the surest path back to barbarism and the brutal doctrine of “right is the rule of the stronger”. The regression is not accidental. Relativism inevitably concludes in nihilism, and the ultimate expression of nihilism is the supremacy of the will.

A man may have metaphysical certainty without having "faith", that is, without this certainty residing in his soul as a continuously active presence. But if metaphysical certainty suffices on doctrinal grounds, it is far from being sufficient on the spiritual plane where it must be completed and brought to life by faith. Faith is nothing other than the adherence of our whole being to Truth, whether we have a direct intuition of this Truth or an indirect notion. It is a misuse of language to reduce "faith" to "belief"; it is the opposite that is true: belief--or theoretical knowledge--must be changed into the faith "that moves mountains". For the Apostles there was no difference in practice between an idea and its spiritual validation; they did not separate theory from realization, hence the word "love" as a way of indicating all conformity to divine Truth. He who has faith acts as if he were in the presence of what he believes--or knows--to be true. One can neither cast doubt on the fact that simple belief is already an adherence to Truth nor affirm that metaphysical certainty by itself implies an adherence of our whole being; for every man, whether he "knows" or "believes", perfection is "to worship God as if you saw Him, and if you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you".

Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers. Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up. Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93. Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best. Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome. Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition.

In the Brhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad7 the first form of the doctrine of transmigration is given. The souls of those who have lived lives of sacrifice, charity and austerity, after certain obscure peregrinations, pass to the World of the Fathers, the paradise of Yama; thence, after a period of bliss, they go to the moon; from the moon they go to empty space, whence they pass to the air, and descend to earth in the rain. There they “become food,… and are offered again in the altar fire which is man, to be born again in the fire of woman”, while the unrighteous are reincarnated as worms, birds or insects. This doctrine, which seems to rest on a primitive belief that conception occurred through the eating by one of the parents of a fruit or vegetable containing the latent soul of the offspring, is put forward as a rare and new one, and was not universally held at the time of the composition of the Upaniṣad. Even in the days of the Buddha, transmigration may not have been believed in by everyone, but it seems to have gained ground very rapidly in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Thus the magnificently logical Indian doctrines of saṃsāra, or transmigration, and karma, the result of the deeds of one life affecting the next, had humble beginnings in a soul theory of quite primitive type; but even at this early period they had an ethical content, and had attained some degree of elaboration. In

Einstein’s first public collision with this anti-Semitism came in the summer of 1920. A shady German nationalist named Paul Weyland, an engineer by training, had turned himself into a polemicist with political aspirations. He was an active member of a right-wing nationalistic political party that pledged, in its 1920 official program, to “diminish the dominant Jewish influence showing up increasingly in government and in public.”9 Weyland realized that Einstein, as a highly publicized Jew, had engendered resentment and jealousy. Likewise, his relativity theory was easy to turn into a target, because many people, including some scientists, were unnerved by the way it seemed to undermine absolutes and be built on abstract hypotheses rather than grounded in solid experiment. So Weyland published articles denouncing relativity as “a big hoax” and formed a ragtag (but mysteriously well-funded) organization grandly dubbed the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of a Pure Science. Joining with Weyland was an experimental physicist of modest reputation named Ernst Gehrcke, who for years had been assailing relativity with more vehemence than comprehension. Their group lobbed a few personal attacks at Einstein and the “Jewish nature” of relativity theory, then called a series of meetings around Germany, including a large rally at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 24.

Occam's Razor: The simplest theory that fits the facts corresponds most closely to reality. Fit this, Jillian--why do I treat you so horribly? He grimaced. The simplest theory that encompassed the full range of asinine behavior he exhibited around Jillian was that he was hopelessly in love with her, and if he wasn't careful she would figure it out. He had to be cold, perhaps cruel, for Jillian was an intelligent woman and unless he maintained a convincing facade she would see right through him. He drew a deep breath and steeled his will. "You were saying?" He arched a sardonic brow. Powerful men had withered into babbling idiots beneath the sarcasm and mockery of that deadly gaze. But not his Jillian, and it delighted him as much as it worried him. She held her ground, even leaned closer, ignoring the curious stares and perked ears of the onlookers. Close enough that her breath fanned his neck and made him want to seal his lips over hers and draw her breath into his lungs so deeply that she'd need him to breathe it back into her. She looked deep into his eyes, then a smile of delight curved her mouth. "You do remember," she whispered fiercely. "I wonder what else you lie to me about," she murmured, and he had the dreadful suspicion she was about to start applying a scientific analysis to his idiotic behavior. The she'd know, and he'd be exposed for the love-struck dolt he was.

Since there is no a priori knowledge in nature or of nature (no "self-evident" truths) to guide the human will, the human will must itself be the a priori source of all knowledge. Unfettered will is the ground, then, of all morality. That is why National Socialism—which understood itself as "The Triumph of the Will"—is the prototypical modern regime. Long before Hitler, though, it was Marx who wrote: "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it." Marx meant by this that traditional philosophy—an attempt to interpret or understand the world—was illusory. He believed that genuine knowledge of the world was possible only by changes in the world that originated in one's will. Hence the highest form of intellectual activity—of philosophy—was to be found not in speculation or theory, but in practice or revolution. The supreme revolutionary is the supreme philosopher. The outcome of the most radical revolution is therefore the highest form of wisdom. Hence "the inner truth and greatness" of Hitler's revolution and of Stalin's is one and the same. As such it is beyond skepticism. To doubt becomes treason and is punishable as such, for the aim or purpose of radical modernity—of modern philosophy in its final form—is the elimination of skepticism from human life, the transcendence of the opposition between reason and revelation by the abolition of both.

Only when it comes to explaining psychic phenomena of a minimal degree of clarity are we driven to assume that archetypes must have a nonpsychic aspect. Grounds for such a conclusion are supplied by the phenomena of synchronicity, which are associated with the activity of unconscious operators and have hitherto been regarded, or repudiated, as 'telepathy' etc. Scepticism should, however, be levelled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right. No unbiased observer can deny them. Resistance to the recognition of such facts rests principally on the repugnance people feel for an allegedly supernatural faculty tacked on to the psyche, like 'clairvoyance'. The very diverse and confusing aspects of these phenomena are, so far as I can see at present, completely explicable on the assumption of psychically relative space-time continuum. As soon as the psychic content crosses the threshold of consciousness, the synchronistic marginal phenomena disappear, time and space resume their accustomed sway, and consciousness is once more isolated in its subjectivity. We have here one of those instances which can best be understood in terms of the physicist's idea of 'complementarity'. When an unconscious content passes over into consciousness its synchronistic manifestation ceases; conversely, synchronistic phenomena can be evoked by putting the subject into an unconscious state (trance).

In this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power.

Descartes, whose arguments are of just the same sort as those of early Greek philosophers, said that extension is the essence of matter, and therefore there is matter everywhere. For him, extension is an adjective, not a substantive; its substantive is matter, and without its substantive it cannot exist. Empty space, to him, is as absurd as happiness without a sentient being who is happy. Leibniz, on somewhat different grounds, also believed in the plenum, but he maintained that space is merely a system of relations. On this subject there was a famous controversy between him and Newton, the latter represented by Clarke. The controversy remained undecided until the time of Einstein, whose theory conclusively gave the victory to Leibniz. The modern physicist, while he still believes that matter is in some sense atomic, does not believe in empty space. Where there is not matter, there is still something, notably light-waves. Matter no longer has the lofty status that it acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides. It is not unchanging substance, but merely a way of grouping events. Some events belong to groups that can be regarded as material things; others, such as light-waves, do not. It is the events that are the stuff of the world, and each of them is of brief duration. In this respect, modern physics is on the side of Heraclitus as against Parmenides. But it was on the side of Parmenides until Einstein and quantum theory.

Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco’s return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West. Coal, another item that had caught Marco’s attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe. Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope—which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance—and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope—based on the same technology—to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols. Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land. In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance—or, for that matter, the modern world—without the benefit of Marco Polo’s example of cultural transmission between East and West.

Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, 'It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.' In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything-that is, the theory that described all motion. It all began when he was twenty-three years old. Cambridge University was closed because of the black plague. One day in 1666, while walking around his country estate, he saw an apple fall. Then he asked himself a question that would alter the course of human history. If an apple falls, then does the moon also fall? Before Newton, the church taught that there were two kinds of laws. The first were the laws found on Earth, which were corrupted by the sin of mortals. The second were the pure, perfect, and harmonious laws of the heavens. The essence of Newton's idea was to propose a unified theory that encompassed the heavens and the Earth. In his notebook, he drew a fateful picture (see figure 1). If a cannonball is fired from a mountaintop, it goes a certain distance before hitting the ground. But if you fire the cannonball at increasing velocities, it travels farther and farther before coming back to Earth, until it eventually completely circles the Earth and returns to the mountaintop. He concluded that the natural law that governs apples and cannonballs, gravity, also grips the moon in its orbit around the Earth. Terrestrial and heavenly physics were the same.

One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that it is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It's completely appropriate of course to challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds, particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will in the long run withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were only measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising, but only because the sun is getting hotter, have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly 4 out of 69,406 authors of peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And that the peer reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis. Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are harming the planet. In doing so, they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense. Physical scientists have no such agenda and the evidence speaks for itself. And it's precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

we were disposed, when starting out, to use them as the basis for our practice in this new context. In our early work with professors, however, we were not in a position to impose rules. We soon discovered the folly of making any pronouncements about the amount of writing, for instance, which might distinguish a writing-intensive approach, and took it as our goal to find professors willing to experiment and to take some steps toward engaging more with writing. We were consultants with expertise in how to use and teach writing, and we suggested strategies and provided materials. The fact that those strategies were grounded in research and theory, and could be signaled as criteria emerged in our process of discussion with faculty about the rationale for adopting particular teaching strategies. The emphasis was on alternative pedagogies, not on a list of rules requiring compliance. Just as one does not need to know that a particular word in a sentence is functioning as an adjective in order to use adjectives, faculty also neither needed, nor were necessarily concerned, to associate a practice like revision with criteria for an as yet non-existent W-course. What eventually became official criteria were initially the elements that we encouraged according to what an individual faculty member was able and willing to accommodate. The early pilot courses overall represented all the elements that we would identify as foundational to effective practice in teaching writing, but in very few courses were all of the criteria present. Faculty members positioned themselves across a spectrum of starting points in their views of writing and its role in their courses. For many professors in the Arts and social sciences, the “writing-intensive” label simply acknowledged that their courses included substantial amounts of writing. For many in the Physical Sciences, the concept as applied to their courses could, at first glance,

The persistence of superannuated institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like the obstinacy of a rancid odour clinging to the hair; the pretension of spoiled fish that insists on being eaten, the tenacious folly of a child's garment trying to clothe a man, or the tenderness of a corpse returning to embrace the living. "Ingrates!" exclaims the garment. "I shielded you in weakness. Why do you reject me now?" "I come from the depths of the sea," says the fish; "I was once a rose," cries the odour; "I loved you," murmurs the corpse; "I civilized you," says the convent. To this there is but one reply; "In the past." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of things dead and the government of mankind by embalming; to restore dilapidated dogmas, regild the shrines, replaster the cloisters, reconsecrate the reliquaries, revamp old superstitions, replenish fading fanaticism, put new handles in worn-out sprinkling brushes, reconstitute monasticism; to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites; to foist the past upon the present, all this seems strange. There are, however, advocates for such theories as these. These theorists, men of mind too, in other things, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a coating of what they term divine right, respect for our forefathers, time-honored authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy; and they go about, shouting, "Here! take this, good people!" This logic was familiar to the ancients; their soothsayers practised it. Rubbing over a black heifer with chalk, they would exclaim, "She is white" Bos cretatus. As for ourselves, we distribute our respect, here and there, and spare the past entirely, provided it will but consent to be dead. But, if it insists upon being alive, we attack it and endeavor to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them, body to body, and make war upon them and that, too, without cessation; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash upon the ground.

This is a good moment to remember one of Mansfield’s Manly Maxims: “Manly men tend their fields.” It means that we take care of the lives and property entrusted to us. It means that we take responsibility for everything in the “field assigned to us.” We cannot do this without knowledge. We cannot do it if we are ignorant of our times, blind to the trends shaping our lives, and oblivious to the basic knowledge that allows us to do what we are called to do as men. We must know enough about law, health, science, economics, politics, and technology to fulfill our roles. We should also know enough about our faith to stand our ground in a secular age, resist heresies, and teach our families. We also shouldn’t be without the benefits of literature and poetry, of good novels and stirring stories, all of which make us more relevant and more effective. We need all of this, and no one is going to force it upon us. Nor will we acquire what we need from a degree program or a study group alone, as valuable as these can be. The truth is that men who aspire to be genuine men and serve well have no choice: they must devote themselves to an aggressive program of self-education. They have to read books, stay current with websites and periodicals, consult experts, and put themselves in a position to know. It isn’t as hard as it sounds, particularly in our Internet age. Much of what a man needs to know can land in his iPad while he is sleeping, but he has to know enough to value this power in the first place. To ignore this duty can mean disaster. How many men have lost jobs because they did not see massive trends on the horizon? How many men have failed to stay intellectually sharp and so gave up ground in their professions to others with more active minds? How many have lost money through uninformed investments or have not taken opportunities in expanding fields or have missed promotions because they had not bothered to learn about new technologies or what changes social media, for example, would bring to their jobs? I do not want to be negative. Learning is a joy. Reading is one of the great pleasures of life. A man ought to invest in knowledge because it is part of living in this world fully engaged and glorifying God. Yet our times also make it essential. The amount of knowledge in the world is increasing. Technology is transforming our lives. New trends can rise like floodwaters and sweep devastation into our homes. Men committed to tending their fields learn, study, research, dig out facts, and test theories. They know how to safeguard their families. They serve well because they serve as informed men.

Develop a rapid cadence. Ideal running requires a cadence that may be much quicker than you’re used to. Shoot for 180 footfalls per minute. Developing the proper cadence will help you achieve more speed because it increases the number of push-offs per minute. It will also help prevent injury, as you avoid overstriding and placing impact force on your heel. To practice, get an electronic metronome (or download an app for this), set it for 90+ beats per minute, and time the pull of your left foot to the chirp of the metronome. Develop a proper forward lean. With core muscles slightly engaged to generate a bracing effect, the runner leans forward—from the ankles, not from the waist. Land underneath your center of gravity. MacKenzie drills his athletes to make contact with the ground as their midfoot or forefoot passes directly under their center of gravity, rather than having their heels strike out in front of the body. When runners become proficient at this, the pounding stops, and the movement of their legs begins to more closely resemble that of a spinning wheel. Keep contact time brief. “The runner skims over the ground with a slithering motion that does not make the pounding noise heard by the plodder who runs at one speed,” the legendary coach Percy Cerutty once said.7 MacKenzie drills runners to practice a foot pull that spends as little time as possible on the ground. His runners aim to touch down with a light sort of tap that creates little or no sound. The theory is that with less time spent on the ground, the foot has less time to get into the kind of trouble caused by the sheering forces of excessive inward foot rolling, known as “overpronation.” Pull with the hamstring. To create a rapid, piston-like running form, the CFE runner, after the light, quick impact of the foot, pulls the ankle and foot up with the hamstring. Imagine that you had to confine your running stride to the space of a phone booth—you would naturally develop an extremely quick, compact form to gain optimal efficiency. Practice this skill by standing barefoot and raising one leg by sliding your ankle up along the opposite leg. Perform up to 20 repetitions on each leg. Maintain proper posture and position. Proper posture, MacKenzie says, shifts the impact stress of running from the knees to larger muscles in the trunk, namely, the hips and hamstrings. The runner’s head remains up and the eyes focused down the road. With the core muscles engaged, power flows from the larger muscles through to the extremities. Practice proper position by standing with your body weight balanced on the ball of one foot. Keep the knee of your planted leg slightly bent and your lifted foot relaxed as you hold your ankle directly below your hip. In this position, your body is in proper alignment. Practice holding this position for up to 1 minute on each leg. Be patient. Choose one day a week for practicing form drills and technique. MacKenzie recommends wearing minimalist shoes to encourage proper form, but not without taking care of the other necessary work. A quick changeover from motion-control shoes to minimalist shoes is a recipe for tendon problems. Instead of making a rapid transition, ease into minimalist shoes by wearing them just one day per week, during skill work. Then slowly integrate them into your training runs as your feet and legs adapt. Your patience will pay off.

It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back around to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more co­herent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God. Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics remains the province of revelation (this, not atheism, is what Occam argued, after all). And atheism can be justified only on these grounds. The prototypical atheist, then, is Graham Greene’s commandant from The Power and the Glory, whose atheism comes from a revelation of the absence of God. The only real atheism must be grounded in a world-making vision. The favorite quote of many an atheist, from the Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, belies this revelatory aspect: “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity -- sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness -- because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

In 1835 the Academy of Sciences began publishing its weekly bulletin (the Comptes rendus). Here was a virgin dumping ground for Cauchy, and he began swamping the new publication with notes and lengthy memoirs- sometimes more than one a week. Dismayed at the rapidly mounting bill for printing, the Academy passed a rule, in force today, prohibiting the publication of an article over four pages long. This cramped Cauchy’s luxuriant style, and his longer memoirs, including a great one of 300 pages on the theory of numbers, were published elsewhere.

Ernst Mayr asserted that “it would be difficult to refute the claim that the Darwinian revolution was the greatest of all intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind.” Stephen Jay Gould called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought. Richard Dawkins inquired what common ground we could find for conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence, and answered “evolution”—because it is “a universal truth” that is common throughout the cosmos.

Community like this is what church was meant to be, what it should be,” Justin says. “But unfortunately, it is often not what the church is.” “What does ‘church’ mean to you, Patrick?” Christie asks. If I’m honest with myself, church is what we have been experiencing for the past several miles, but how do I best express this? “I think I want to start with what it’s not,” I say. As I pause to gather my thoughts, the sound of our steps seems to drive the words into my mouth. “Church is not a building for worship or a place to learn theories about religious doctrine. It’s not about why ‘we’ are right and ‘they’ are wrong, or how to talk to ‘those people.’” “Okay, so what is it then?” “It is an existence grounded in loving God and loving others—regardless of race, creed, sexual preference, or one’s history of pain, abuse, or addiction—and drawing them into the truth.” “What truth?” she asks. “The truth that God’s love is more powerful than any darkness we can face.

Quoting page 65-66: Race-conscious affirmative action is a familiar term of journalistic convenience. It identifies unambiguously the controversial element of minority preferences in distributing benefits. But it also conflates racially targeted civil rights remedies with affirmative action preferences for groups, such as Hispanics and women, given protected class status irrespective of race. … It includes nonracial as well as racial preferences, and it distinguishes such remedies, available only to officially designated protected classes, from the soft affirmative action … which emphasized special outreach programs for recruiting minorities … within a traditional liberal framework of equal individual rights for all Americans. … The architects of race-conscious affirmative action, Skrentny observes, developed their remedy in the face of public opinion heavily arrayed against it. Unlike most public policy in America, hard affirmative action was originally adopted without the benefit of any organized lobbying by the major interest groups involved. Instead, government bureaucrats, not benefiting interest groups, provided the main impetus. The race-conscious model of hard affirmative action was developed in trial-and-error fashion by a coalition of mostly white, second-tier civil servants in the social service agencies of the presidency… To Skrenty’s core irony, we may add three further ironies, first, the key to political survival for hard affirmative action was persistent support from the Republican Party… Second, the theories of compensatory justice supporting minority preference policies were devised only after the adoption of the policies themselves. Finally, affirmative action preferences which supporters rationalized as necessary to compensate African-Americans for historic discrimination, and which for twenty years were successfully defended in federal courts primarily on those grounds, soon benefited millions of immigrants newly arrived from Latin America and Asia.

Today’s children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncrasies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right. Also, to start the engine of a modern car you do just two things, turn a key and touch the starter. Everything else is automatic. The process used to be more complicated. It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic, so that a man about to turn the crank of a Model T might be seen to spit on the ground and whisper a spell.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care—about time? If so, I can’t imagine why We’ve all got time enough to cry.” —Chicago, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? “For those who think the world is obsessed with ‘time,’ the Oxford dictionary added support to the theory Thursday when they announced that the word time is the most often used noun in the English language.” —NBCNEWS.com (6/22/2016)—based on an analysis of almost three billion words culled from the Internet. With respect to knowing what time it is, or caring, the currently accepted worldwide definition of one second is: “The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.” This is measured by atomic clocks that are accurate to within one second over a period of fifteen billion years—roughly the age of the universe.

It’s funny, in theory, a mother and a father do the same thing. They nurture you, protect you, try to form you into a reasonable human being. If they do it right, they will keep your feet on the ground. If they do it wrong, they’ll stop you from flying. The difference is subtle, yet vast.

What is never discussed in standard scientific textbooks is the fact that the Lorentz transformation can just as easily be understood in absolute terms rather than relativistic terms, in which case it refutes rather than supports Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The relativistic interpretation of the Lorentz transformation abolishes the ether; the absolute interpretation preserves the ether. Einstein did not refute the alternative interpretation. No one has. It has simply become unfashionable, and no one gives any thought to it. This highlights one of the central failings of science. It rejects certain theories even though it has not falsified those theories. They have been rejected not on scientific grounds but on philosophical grounds, yet science is always keen to claim it’s not a philosophy but a method. It is of course a method supporting and enacting a philosophy

Emerging Possibilities for Space Propulsion Breakthroughs Originally published in the Interstellar Propulsion Society Newsletter, Vol. I, No. 1, July 1, 1995.  Marc. G. Millis, Space Propulsion Technology Division, NASA Lewis Research Center Cleveland, Ohio “New perspectives on the connection between gravity and electromagnetism have just emerged. A theory published in February 1994 (ref 11) suggests that inertia is nothing but an electromagnetic illusion. This theory builds on an earlier work (ref 12) that asserts that gravity is nothing other than an electromagnetic side-effect. Both of these works rely on the perspective that all matter is fundamentally made up of electrically charged particles, and they rely on the existence of Zero Point Energy. Zero Point Energy (ZPE) is the term used to describe the random electromagnetic oscillations that are left in a vacuum after all other energy has been removed (ref 13). This can be explained in terms of quantum theory, where there exists energy even in the absolute lowest state of a harmonic oscillator. The lowest state of an electromagnetic oscillation is equal to one-half the Planck constant times the frequency. If all the energy for all the possible frequencies is summed up, the result is an enormous energy density, ranging from 1036 to 1070 Joules/m3. In simplistic terms there is enough energy in a cubic centimeter of the empty vacuum to boil away Earth's oceans. First predicted in 1948, ZPE has been linked to a number of experimental observations. Examples include the Casimir effect (ref 14), Van der Waal forces (ref 15), the Lamb-Retherford Shift (ref 10, p. 427), explanations of the Planck blackbody radiation spectrum (ref 16), the stability of the ground state of the hydrogen atom from radiative collapse (ref 17), and the effect of cavities to inhibit or enhance the spontaneous emission from excited atoms (ref 18). Regarding the inertia and gravity theories mentioned earlier, they take the perspective that all matter is fundamentally constructed of electrically charged particles and that these particles are constantly interacting with this ZPE background. From this perspective the property of inertia, the resistance to change of a particle's velocity, is described as a high- frequency electromagnetic drag against the Zero Point Fluctuations. Gravity, the attraction between masses, is described as Van der Waals forces between oscillating dipoles, where these dipoles are the charged particles that have been set into oscillation by the ZPE background. It should be noted that these theories were not written in the context of propulsion and do not yet provide direct clues for how to electromagnetically manipulate inertia or gravity. Also, these theories are still too new to have either been confirmed or discounted. Despite these uncertainties, typical of any fledgling theory, these theories do provide new approaches to search for breakthrough propulsion physics.

If we suppose that we have equally empirically adequate models, can the virtue of simplicity be used to rule out this alternative theory? Only if simplicity could really be shown to be a criterion of truth or likelihood. For one committed to a metaphysical view about the simplicity of the universe, the greater parsimony in postulation of entities might be indicative of the greater likelihood of truth of the simpler theory, but this is now relative to the truth of the metaphysical view. But if one has no grounds for this metaphysical view, metaphysics and method are operating in the service of politics.

The Catholic Church allowed the publication of his work, but Calvin and Luther (who called Copernicus an ass) condemned it on scriptural grounds. Some of the technical difficulties with Copernicus’s theory were dealt with by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who thus made the heliocentric theory more plausible. Kepler, however, was persecuted by the Protestants in Tubingen and had to flee to the Jesuits for protection in 1596.

whereas the Franks fought at a disadvantage in every respect, because of the weight of their armor and the unevenness of the ground. Eggihard, the King's steward; Anselm, Count Palatine; and Roland, Governor of the March of Brittany, with very many others, fell in this engagement.

Newton, a devout Puritan believer, has anecdote that when he claimed that no disciple had God, he refused to claim atheism, saying, "Do not speak disrespectfully about God, I am studying God." He paid much attention to the Bible and had an eschatological belief that the Saints would resurrect and live in heaven and reign with Christ invisibly. And even after the day of judgment, people would continue to live on the ground, thinking that it would be forever, not only for a thousand years. According to historian Steven Snowovell, he thought that the presence of Christ would be in the distant future centuries after, because he was very pessimistic about the deeply rooted ideas that denied the Trinity around him. He thought that before the great tribulation came, the gospel activity had to be on a global scale. 카톡pak6 텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】 믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다. 24시간 문의상담과 서울 경기지방은 퀵으로도 가능합니다 믿고 주문하시면좋은인연으로 vip고객님으로 모시겠습니다. 원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 구입문의 도와드릴수있습니다 ☆100%정품보장 ☆총알배송 ☆투명한 가격 ☆편한 상담 ☆끝내주는 서비스 ☆고객님 정보 보호 ☆깔끔한 거래 포폴,에토미,알약수면제 판매하고있습니다 Newton studied alchemy as a hobby, and his research notes were about three books. Newton served as a member of parliament on the recommendation of the University of Cambridge, but his character was silent and unable to adapt to the life of a parliamentarian. When he lived in the National Assembly for a year, the only thing he said was "Shut the door!" In Newton's "Optics" Volume 4, he tried to introduce the theory of unification that covered all of physics and solved his chosen tasks, but he went out with a candle on his desk, and his private diamond threw a candle There is a story that all of his research, which has not been published yet, has turned to ashes. Newton was also appointed to the president of the Minting Service, who said he enjoyed grabbing and executing the counterfeiters. Newton was a woman who was engaged to be a young man, but because he was so engaged in research and work he could not go on to marriage, and he lived alone for the rest of his life. He regarded poetry as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." [6] Newton was talented in crafting inventions by hand (for reference, Newton's craftsmanship was so good at his childhood that when he was a primary school student he was running his own spinning wheel after school, A child who throws a stone and breaks down a spinning wheel, so there is an anecdote that an angry Newton scatters the child.) He said he created a lantern fountain that could be carried around as a student at Cambridge University. Thanks to this, it was said that students who were going to attend the Thanksgiving ceremony (Episcopal Mass) were able to go to the Anglican Church in the university easily. Newton lost 20,000 pounds due to a South Sea company stock discovery, when "I can calculate the movement of the celestial body, but I can not measure the insanity of a human being" ("I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men ").

For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled." If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far: Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals. Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts. Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings – identical to the gnomes of medieval theory – with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings – who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith – with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus. Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid. Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones. Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact – if one applies the deffinitions strictly – nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.

This is not just a fanciful supposition: there is indirect yet significant evidence for it. It comes from the farther reaches of contemporary consciousness research. Stanislav Grof found that in deeply altered states of consciousness, many people experience a kind of consciousness that appears to be that of the universe itself. This most remarkable of altered-state experiences surfaces in individuals who are committed to the quest of apprehending the ultimate grounds of existence. When the seekers come close to attaining their goal, their descriptions of what they regard as the supreme principle of existence are strikingly similar. They describe what they experience as an immense and unfathomable field of consciousness endowed

He was reasonably kind to the slaves, but he did subscribe to the theory that it was most profitable to treat them like animals—one pair of pants, one shirt, boughs on the ground for a bed, the cheapest food—and work them to death, replacing them with new bodies bought at a bargain from his family’s ships. While they lived he did not abuse them, and whenever he found one of his overseers doing so, he discharged him: “Treat your slaves decently and they not only live longer, but they also work better while they do live.” An Espivent slave who started healthy survived about nine years, and since he paid for his cost in five years, he represented a profitable investment.

The fourth place on my list goes to the subversion of the Western culture of rationality by phenomenological analysis, which placed all theory on the pretheoretical ground of “atmosphere.” The key figure to remember here is Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who quite unmistakably belongs to the movement that started with the three already-mentioned attacks on pure theory.

Clearly, if one can’t prove that the coronavirus even exists and that the testing for this imaginary virus is bogus, then the world has been led wildly astray. If the test for the coronavirus is inaccurate and misleading, as is the case, then there are no grounds for believing the reports about the number of Covid-19 cases, the number of Covid-19 deaths, or any other statistics coming from the orthodox medical institutions. If the testing is bogus, then the coronavirus emperor has no clothes.

That was just one of many weird things we have done. Even weirder to me than that, was the fact that we all talked about- like how it would be for one of us to die… if we would. Sex, drinking, and death were the main topics most nights. Yet that nightfall I do not remember how it came up in the conversations, other than Kenneth complaining that I got to sit in the front seat- aka ‘shotgun’ with Jenny after the party I guess I was where he thought he should be, and you know that wearing a seatbelt is for pussies. I do remember us talking about what a bucket let would be, yet to me, I thought mine was almost complete. The rap music was so loud, that we were yelling at one other just to overhear. Jenny kept going through her I-phone to change the song and text her other friends and boys, her phone was in her right hand in her lap. One reason I sat there is that- I was the one that was meant to pick the music so she could drive. I remember hearing the lyric- ‘To the window to the walls…’ the song was ‘Get Low!’ However, Jenny was so high, and Maddie was singing in the back to the words making her hands go in-between the front seats, and that was comical because she is as white as they come. I remember that is when we started shouting our theory on death and the afterlife, or if there is one. I thought there was… yet I was not sure. We were all gathering what those would be. Jenny was bitching about how it could be and going to be, in the ground, and like her beautiful body is going to be eaten away overtime in her sealed casket. That made my skin crawl. We were all like you’re going to die you’re not going to feel anything dumb ass. Then Maddie said my dying wish is to hook up with Lizzy, Sam, and others all at the same time and never stop. Hey, why not they were both very sexy hot girls. I could see that fantasy of doing it until death. I was a little pissed that I was not one of the girls in that scenario but it's her death wish not mine. Yet this is kind of surprising to me because Maddie was never that way at all. Like she has a boyfriend of two years. However, their love life was always on again and off again. The makeup hookups are all that kept them together… I think...? (#- Hashtag: Wcw- Women crush Wednesday)

According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is untenable. All things and events, whether material, mental, or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective independent existence. To possess such independent, intrinsic existence would imply that things and events are somehow complete unto themselves and are therefore entirely contained.

Only a plain wooden cross stood at the head of each pile of earth. Identity was unimportant—each of these men, coming to monastic life, had cast off all selfhood, subsumed who he was in the greater brotherhood of Christ. That was the theory, anyway. It didn’t quite work out in life. Wulfhere had sung like an angel. Andreou had been a fat gossip who had loved Theo more than God. Aethelstan’s booming laugh had carried out over the noise of his forge, and Petros had made wooden bowls of such exquisite finish that matrons scrapped over them like cats in the village market. And Leof… In death, the theory worked well. Only Cai and his brethren knew which grave was which, and with them would vanish the knowledge that Leof lay closest to the wall, sheltered by hawthorns, cradled in the sacred ground he had loved.

Perhaps to be human is to struggle one’s whole life to find some solid ground to stand on and then die never coming anywhere close. And perhaps that’s not even a bad thing. To know the true meaning of life and self is to do what with it? End the mystery? End the game? What then? Perhaps one day we will find some unifying theory of everything and perhaps somehow this will make everything better, but what are the odds that we still care about the point of life after we’ve found it? Imagine a movie in which you knew exactly why and what everything was from the start. Imagine a life, if we found a theory of everything or an equation that connected the mysteries of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, and we understood the very core of how and why the universe worked, what difference would this really make in terms of the meaning of life. Would two different people still not watch the same movie and experience and interpret two different things? We would of course all agree that it’s a movie and on how the movie works, but when it comes to meaning, there will always remain a perceptual layer completely relative to the individuals observing it. Because of this, if we found the overarching ultimate truth of existence tomorrow, half the world would not believe it, and the other half would fight for it. And as a whole, we would be no different. And if somehow the whole world did agree upon one truth, what then? Utopia? What then? The truth we seek when considering the quality and meaning of our lives is not an outward truth, not a truth that resolves the questions of the universe, but a truth that glimpses inward and assembles into a stable self that can be integrated seamlessly into our perception of the whole around us, a truth we can’t ever truly have. Truth is not even the right word here, there is no right word here. That’s the point. I sit here writing, thinking about my being, about the strange relationship I have with this life and this plane of existence. I think about how alive I feel right now while writing. How potent this moment is. How insane and beautiful it is. How important it has been to me in the past. Thinking, writing, talking, and reading about earnest experiences and attempts at living. Personally, the direct confrontation with the challenges, complexities, sufferings, and plights of the human condition have provided me with some of, if not all of the profound, potent, and beautiful moments of my life. And I wonder if I would have ever experienced any of those undeniably worthy moments if life made sense. If it didn’t hurt and overwhelm me… How beautiful would the night sky be if we knew exactly where it went and how the stars got there? Would we ever be inspired to create art and form interpretations out of this life, what would I have written about? What would I have read about? How would I have ever found love or friendship or connection with others? Why would I have ever laughed or cried? What would I be doing right now? Would there be anything to say? Anything to live or die for? I don’t feel that my life would have been any better if I had known any more of what it was all about, in fact I think it would have only worsened the whole thing, we seem to so desire certainty, and immortality, a utopic end of conflict, suffering, and misunderstanding, and yet in the final elimination of all darkness exists light with no contrast. And where there is no contrast of light there is no perception of light, at all. What we think we want is rarely what we do, if we ever got what we did, we would no longer have anything. What we really want is to want. To have something to ceaselessly chase and move towards. To feel the motion and synchronicity with the universe's unending forward movement.

An important strategy here is to actively practice separating one experience from all experiences. If you notice yourself using words like “always” or “never,” this is a sign that you are overgeneralizing. This can be painful when we generalize traits about our partner or loved ones as well. Some other important cognitive distortions include mind-reading, fortune-telling, and personalization. With mind-reading, you assume you know what others are thinking. Fortune-telling is the act of making assumptions about the future that produce negative emotion. Personalization is the act of assuming blame or fault for any situation that takes place. An example of this would be getting upset at yourself if your child gets hurt during recess at school. Take some time to write down which cognitive distortions are most prominent for you. Which ones cause you the most grief or unhealthy habits in your relationships? Follow up by using the strategies described above to return to a fair and balanced perspective. You will know you have reached this place because you will feel as though your emotional charge around the situations has lessened and you are operating from a grounded, realistic frame of mind.

eliminate it from their records?” Wheeler snorted his disgust. “Mr. McRyan, I’ve been cooperative with you because that’s generally my nature. I’m not looking for trouble, but I think I’ve had quite enough of your questioning. Are you a cop with any jurisdiction up here?” “Nope,” Mac responded, holding his ground. “But let me ask you a question. Do you really think that makes me less dangerous to you?” “Is that a threat?” Wheeler asked. “What do you think?” Mac retorted, glaring. Wheeler looked at Rawlings. “Sheriff, is Mr. McRyan working with your office, either officially or unofficially?” “No, Mr. Wheeler, he is not. But he is someone who is a serious person that I have to respect. He’s asking questions, interesting questions, about a case I care very much about.” “Sheriff, do you have a search warrant for my premises?” “No, I don’t, Mr. Wheeler.” “Am I or my company under investigation?” Rawlings shook his head. “Not by my office at the moment, but I remain interested in the Buller case. Four people were murdered, including two very young children. Mr. McRyan has raised certain specific issues that have once again piqued my interest in that case.” “I understood that case to be closed.” “It is perhaps not an active investigation, but it is not closed,” Rawlings replied. “There’s been no arrest. There is a theory as to what happened, but that’s all it is—a theory.” Mac looked back with a cunning smile and said, “Theories change, Mr. Wheeler. Evidence, like oil, bubbles up to the surface.” “That’s enough,” Wheeler retorted, standing up, coming around the desk, and getting into McRyan’s space. “I don’t like your tone or what either of you are accusing me or my company of.” Wheeler pointed to the door. “Sheriff, you want to get a search warrant, get a search warrant, but I think you won’t. And Mr. McRyan, if you want any more information, here’s the number for our lawyer.

As described by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of empirically based psychological intervention that focuses on mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of focusing on the present to remove oneself from feeling consumed by the emotion experienced in the moment. To properly observe yourself, begin by noticing where in your body you experience emotion. For example, think about a time when you felt really sad. You may have felt despair in your chest, or a sense of hollowness in your stomach. If you were angry, you may have felt a burning sensation in your arms. This occurs within everyone, in different variations. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University traced emotional responses in the brain to different activity signatures in the body through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. If someone recalled a painful or traumatic memory, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex became less active, and their “reptilian brain” was activated. The former areas of the brain are responsible for conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and higher functions such as sensory perception. The latter is responsible for fight-or-flight responses. This means that the bodily responses caused by your emotions provide an opportunity for you to be mindful of them. Your emotions create sensations in your body that reflect your mind. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist who studies gene expression in relation to environmental factors, released a study on epigenetics that sheds light on this matter. It revealed that an individual’s body cannot heal when it is in its sympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system, informally known as the fight-or-flight state, is triggered by certain emotional responses. This means that when we are consumed by emotion, an effective solution cannot be found until we shift our mind into reflecting on our emotions. Let’s take a moment and test this theory together. Try to focus on what you’re feeling and where, and this will ground you in the present moment. By focusing on how you are responding, you essentially remove yourself from being consumed by your emotions in that moment. This brings you back into your sensory perception and moves the response in your brain back into the cortex and neocortex. This transition helps bring you back into a more logical state where emotions are not controlling your reactions.

In particular, he singles out the black liberation (rather than the civil rights) movement, the women's movement and the youth revolt, which saw many 'turn on, tune in, drop out', partly in response to American involvement in Vietnam. Although not always committed to the same causes or principles, these different countercultural movements were unified in their opposition to the dominant culture. They criticised the unexamined grounds of the 'great American dream', with its ethos of hard work, individualism and family values. Altman argues that these various movements created a 'new consciousness', a suspicion of hypocrisy and a strong distrust of authority. [Altman]

As humans, we are not fundamentally different but fundamentally alike.5 We are one human race, not many different “races.” The very concept of race, in fact, is man-made. While it is true that there are certain differences between people groups (physiologically, for example), we have no biblical grounds for splicing humanity up into many “races.” Racial theory, in fact, owes to genuine racists, who made it up to exalt themselves and justify their evil partiality.

The trouble is, many Americans have come to believe there is no middle ground—no role for government services that might be “smart” rather than “big.” Government, in whatever form, has come to be seen as the enemy. In one recent poll a third of Americans even believed that an armed rebellion might be necessary to protect their liberties from government intrusion in the near future.

I had a theory that our school was divided by how we were programmed to live. There were those of us like Kitty, Ashok, and Laurel, careful and contented, pragmatic and happy. They existed to wake up tomorrow, always a new day, because wasn't that the way we were supposed to exist as humans? To keep living. Then there were those of us who lived differently. Jordan, Miranda, and me. We charged forward. We took risks. We strived for greatness in every moment, because every night we fell asleep thinking this was it; there wasn't going to be a tomorrow. But every morning when the alarm clock went off, we would lie in our beds, shocked that despite everything we did the previous day to run our bodies into the ground, we continued to wake up. Ben was one of us. He hid it so well, and I loved him and I hated him for being this way. He pretended he was happy when he was sad. He pretended he didn't care about anything, not college, not grades, quite often, not even me. He pretended everything would magically work in his favour. He denied that he understood me at all. "Why do you have to study all the time? Why can't you come over?" he would plead on the phone. But he aced the same tests as me. He studied when no one was looking. He fretted about his future when no one was around. He worried about his worth alone, like the rest of us. pages 229-232

This is useful as a research tool and for diligent scholars of philosophy who are serious about studying Žižek’s theory of freedom. I try to condense difficult material and zero in on key passages in Žižek’s writing in order to distill a functional, serviceable philosophy of power and ideology and how it relates to freedom. Tis also means that there is no way to reify a concept such as “freedom” (because doing so would negate that which is free by trapping it in some kind of form); and also because Žižek’s work has taken so many twists and turns that it is impossible to encapsulate every single thesis he makes in the space of a single book. It would be absurd to think that I can encapsulate a thinker as wide-ranging as Žižek. A thinker and activist-philosopher, who calls himself a madman, who is not trying to be domesticated or grounded, and yet claims that he grounds his thought in “Hegel” and “Lacan.” People miss the mark as to why he does this, mistaking that there is some affinity towards the personage of a once-living corporeal being called “Hegel” or “Lacan”—rather, these are interesting historical figures because they were unique inventors of radically new methodologies. Hegel as forwarding the methodology of the dialectical process. Lacan as utilizing psychoanalysis to reveal the process of the shifting tides of desire as the ungrounded ground of truth rather than forwarding any kind of “truth” that can be stabilized in the form of propositional logic. Even these two points of reference are not enough, as most people approach Žižek’s work through these two entryways—whereas what I want to do is to show that there is something radically undomesticated about this work. When forwarding a criticism of “ground rent,” for example, he does so as a communist who totally understands that ground rent is a delusion of capitalist ideology, rather than as some so-called “Marxist”- infected economists who study ground rent try to understand it through their own reified consciousness as an actual “thing,” rather than as the force of law imposing a “stratigraphic superimposition”33 (an ideological superstructure) atop of the commons as the a priori condition of land as a thing-in-itself.

Once games required an actual place to play them, whether on the chess board or the tennis court. Even wars had battle fields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole earth and put all of space and time in play. Warfare, they say, now looks like video games. Well don’t kid yourself. War is a video game—for the military entertainment complex. To them it doesn’t matter what happens “on the ground.” The ground—the old-fashioned battlefield itself—is just a necessary externality to the game.

The scientific basis for separating neocortical from limbic brain matter rests on solid neuroanatomical, cellular, and empirical grounds. As viewed through the microscope, limbic areas exhibit a far more primitive cellular organization than their neocortical counterparts. Certain radiographic dyes selectively stain limbic structures, thus painting the molecular dissimilarity between the two brains in clean, vivid strokes. One researcher made an antibody that binds to cells of the hippocampus—a limbic component—and found that those same fluorescent markers stuck to all parts of the limbic brain, lighting it up like a biological Christmas tree, without coloring the neocortex at all. Large doses of some medications destroy limbic tissue while leaving the neocortex unscathed, a sharp-shooting feat enabled by evolutionary divergence in the chemical composition of limbic and neocortical cell membranes.