Imperative Work Quotes

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

The most important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative, and the second disastrous.

The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry--is not even a "subject"--but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.

Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering.

It’s absolutely imperative that you speak forth the Word concerning you, because until you do, it will have no power and it won’t work!

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.

Women have always had to be #creative about making limited resources work to sustain themselves and their families. They understand what it means to make the hard decisions and to just get on with it. That is why it is imperative for women not just to be the ones dusting off the table but, crafting its legs for our world to stand on.

Sebastian's life was governed by a code of such imperatives. 'I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,' 'I have to stay in bed until the sun works round the windows,' 'I've absolutely got to drink champagne tonight.

Do not let your thoughts take flight, flutter, and climb. Simply cleave and cling to Christ. It is imperative to remain solely with the Person of Christ. If you have that, you have all; but if you lose that, you have lost all.

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.

So in the development of your Marketing Strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams, forget about your visions, forget about your interests, forget about what you want—forget about everything but your customer!

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect.

I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate words that ring true.

It is therefore imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and, at the same time, integrally connected to the well-being of others.

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very violently taught that they owe all to their parents, and the parents are not slow in foreclosing the mortgage. But the home is not a debtor's prison - to girls any more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents calls for extermination. Do they in truth do all for their children; do their children owe all to them? Is nothing furnished in the way of safety, sanitation, education, by that larger home, the state? What could these parents do, alone, in never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity. These lingering vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be left behind. Ancestor-worship has had victims enough. Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and both have duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home.

The imperative is to better oneself not through any intellectual or emotional growth, but through physical remaking. Such media encourage young girls to believe that good looks rather than good works are at the centre of the good life. What makes these messages particularly attractive to young women is that they constantly return to the language of empowerment and opportunity.

Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of "credit", shot through with bad faith, [the mortgage broker's] work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the general rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life.

thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Strategy is important. Execution is imperative. However, the most overlooked aspect in team sports, and what most coaches and leaders fail to grasp, is the fact that it is your culture that will determine whether your strategy works and is sustainable. It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.

Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or revenge, and fills up our existence with their power.

The team needs to learn how to work together, align around the right imperatives, and develop their unique chemistry.

perhaps most individuals live in a diluted social morality and need the rigorous ethical imperative of vision and requirement

but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to perform.

If there was ever a time to create, it is now!

Defining the Future Fosters Commitment Within Your Team by Imbuing Its Work with Purpose

It wasn't always imperative to get 'Excellent'. Sometimes it was healthy to have something to work towards.

Engineers ... are not superhuman. They make mistakes in their assumptions, in their calculations, in their conclusions. That they make mistakes is forgivable; that they catch them is imperative. Thus it is the essence of modern engineering not only to be able to check one's own work but also to have one's work checked and to be able to check the work of others.

Life being what it is, you won't get your names right the first time. In this situation you may well be tempted to leave it—after all it's only a name. That is the work of the evil demon Obfuscatis; don't listen to him. If you see a badly named method, it is imperative that you change it. Remember your code is for a human first and a computer second. Humans need good names.

This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumes the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non- enjoyment of the works.

regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought

Not the least cause for today’s temporal crisis is the absolute value attached to the vita activa. This leads to an imperative to work, which degrades the human being into an animal laborans. The hyperkinesia of everyday life deprives human existence of all contemplative elements and of any capacity for lingering. It leads to a loss of world and time. So-called strategies of deceleration do not overcome this temporal crisis; they even cover up the actual problem. What is necessary is a revitalization of the vita contemplativa. The temporal crisis will only be overcome once the vita activa, in the midst of its crisis, again incorporates the vita contemplativa.

This place of stuck—“I have to” and “I can’t”—feels familiar from my spiritual work. We’re told to simply “let go”—but when we try to do this, we often seem to get more deeply tangled in the willful web of resistance. In spite of injunctions to the contrary, “letting go” doesn’t appear to be something we have conscious control over. Why can’t we just let go into the loving arms of the universe? What is this holding back that seems so essential—so imperative?

I work at T-Town, which is about ninety-nine percent men, and all of them either are alpha personalities or think they are. That said, what we have here is the standard dynamic for sexual tension. I'm moderately good-looking. I have big boobs, and I get hit on by everyone from the pastor of my church to baristas at Starbucks, and by every single guy at T-Town except for my boss and the range master. I don't blame them and I don't judge them. It's part of the procreative drive hardwired into us, and we haven't evolved as a species far enough exert any genuine control over the biological imperative. You, on the other hand, are a very good-looking man of prime breeding age. Old enough to have interesting lines and scars--and stories to go with them--and young enough to be a catch. You probably get laid as often as you want to, and you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times women have said no to you. Maybe--and please correct me if I've strayed too far into speculation--being an agent of a secret government organization has led you to buy into the superspy sex stud propaganda perpetuated by James Bond films." "My name is Powers," I said. "Austin Powers." She ignored me and plowed ahead. "We're in the middle of a crisis. We may have to work closely together for several days, or even several weeks. Close-quarters travel, emotions running high, all that. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not spend the next few days living inside a trite office romance cliche. That includes everything from mild flirtation to sexual innuendo and double entendre and the whole ball of wax." She sipped her Coke. The ball landed in my court with a thump.

Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or revenge, and fills up our existence with their power.

Poverty is not a natural conclusion. It is an intervention. We are not poor because we are inferior as a group of people; we are poor because it is imperative to the global economy that a limitless supply of labor exist. The labor must be cheap and disposable.

A clear differentiation of the conscious man from his unconscious is imperative, since only by the assimilation of conscious standpoints will clarity and understanding be gained, but never by a process of reduction to the unconscious backgrounds, sidelights, quarter-tones.

order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion. Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order.

The west, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention, Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem — which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.” It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West” as some readers might rush to suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam, continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas, regardless of religion.

natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion. Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order.

The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives.

You miss the idea of him. There you go. Was that so hard? “That goes away, too,” says your friend. Through the magic of the biological imperative, his brain has been reprogrammed. He has been forced to gloss over his own romantic carnage so that he might once again start down that road of procreation. He has nineteen layers of skin; you have three-fourths of a layer. They’re all like this, the recovered. Sometimes you want to hop across the table, curl up in their laps, and beg to be made one of them. How does it work? Hypnosis? A chip in the neck? A radioactive spider with Xanax venom?

Without miracles, the Kingdom of God is reduced to words, concepts and good works. Perceived through this paradigm, the Lions, Rotary and Moose clubs would be the ones contending for first place. While words, concepts and works are important, it is imperative that we demonstrate the power of our great King.

We know of ESB's potential for mind control largely through the work of Jose Delgado. One signal provoked a cat to lick its fur, then continue compulsively licking the floor and bars of its cage. A signal designed to stimulate a portion of a monkey's thalamus, a major midbrain center for integrating muscle movements, triggered a complex action: The monkey walked to one side of the cage, then the other, then climbed to the rear ceiling, then back down. The animal performed this same activity as many times as it was stimulated with the signal, up to sixty times an hour, but not blindly— the creature still was able to avoid obstacles and threats from the dominant male while carrying out the electrical imperative. Another type of signal has made monkeys turn their heads, or smile, no matter what else they were doing, up to twenty thousand times in two weeks. As Delgado concluded, "The animals looked like electronic toys." 
Even instincts and emotions can be changed: In one test a mother giving continuous care to her baby suddenly pushed the infant away whenever the signal was given. Approach-avoidance conditioning can be achieved for any action simply by stimulating the pleasure and pain centers in an animal's or person's limbic system. 
Eventual monitoring of evoked potentials from the EEG, combined with radio-frequency and microwave broadcasts designed to produce specific thoughts or moods, such as compliance and complacency, promises a method of mind control that poses immense danger to all societies —tyranny without terror.

For Cumming the Christian and feminine imperative of service far outweighed superficial notions of female delicacy. Employing one dimension of feminine ideology to dismiss another, Cumming despaired of her southern sisters, inhibited by false claims of modesty and respectability from undertaking desperately needed hospital work.45

The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing".

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game. These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict. What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, "The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go in to heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives.

Much of what it takes to succeed in school, at work, and in one’s community consists of cultural habits acquired by adaptation to the social environment. Such cultural adaptations are known as “cultural capital.” Segregation leads social groups to form different codes of conduct and communication. Some habits that help individuals in intensely segregated, disadvantaged environments undermine their ability to succeed in integrated, more advantaged environments. At Strive, a job training organization, Gyasi Headen teaches young black and Latino men how to drop their “game face” at work. The “game face” is the angry, menacing demeanor these men adopt to ward off attacks in their crime-ridden, segregated neighborhoods. As one trainee described it, it is the face you wear “at 12 o’clock at night, you’re in the ‘hood and they’re going to try to get you.”102 But the habit may freeze it into place, frightening people from outside the ghetto, who mistake the defensive posture for an aggressive one. It may be so entrenched that black men may be unaware that they are glowering at others. This reduces their chance of getting hired. The “game face” is a form of cultural capital that circulates in segregated underclass communities, helping its members survive. Outside these communities, it burdens its possessors with severe disadvantages. Urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson highlights the cruel dilemma this poses for ghetto residents who aspire to mainstream values and seek responsible positions in mainstream society.103 If they manifest their “decent” values in their neighborhoods, they become targets for merciless harassment by those committed to “street” values, who win esteem from their peers by demonstrating their ability and willingness to insult and physically intimidate others with impunity. To protect themselves against their tormentors, and to gain esteem among their peers, they adopt the game face, wear “gangster” clothing, and engage in the posturing style that signals that they are “bad.” This survival strategy makes them pariahs in the wider community. Police target them for questioning, searches, and arrests.104 Store owners refuse to serve them, or serve them brusquely, while shadowing them to make sure they are not shoplifting. Employers refuse to employ them.105 Or they employ them in inferior, segregated jobs. A restaurant owner may hire blacks as dishwashers, but not as wait staff, where they could earn tips.

Like Plato, Kant believed that human beings have a dual nature: part animal and part rational. The animal part of us follows the laws of nature, just as does a falling rock or a lion killing its prey. There is no morality in nature; there is only causality. But the rational part of us, Kant said, can follow a different kind of law: It can respect rules of conduct, and so people (but not lions) can be judged morally for the degree to which they respect the right rules. What might those rules be? Here Kant devised the cleverest trick in all moral philosophy. He reasoned that for moral rules to be laws, they had to be universally applicable. If gravity worked differently for men and women, or for Italians and Egyptians, we could not speak of it as a law. But rather than searching for rules to which all people would in fact agree (a difficult task, likely to produce only a few bland generalities), Kant turned the problem around and said that people should think about whether the rules guiding their own actions could reasonably be proposed as universal laws. If you are planning to break a promise that has become inconvenient, can you really propose a universal rule that states people ought to break promises that have become inconvenient? Endorsing such a rule would render all promises meaningless. Nor could you consistently will that people cheat, lie, steal, or in any other way deprive other people of their rights or their property, for such evils would surely come back to visit you. This simple test, which Kant called the “categorical imperative,” was extraordinarily powerful. It offered to make ethics a branch of applied logic, thereby giving it the sort of certainty that secular ethics, without recourse to a sacred book, had always found elusive.

In each of the following chapters, dealing in turn with policing and repression, culture and propaganda, religion and education, the economy, society and everyday life, racial policy and antisemitism, and foreign policy, the overriding imperative of preparing Germany and its people for a major war emerges clearly as the common thread. But that imperative was neither rational in itself, nor followed in a coherent way. In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the regime emerge; the Nazi's headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich's eventual destruction. How and why this should be so is one of the major questions that run through this book and binds its separate parts together. So do many further questions: about the extent to which the Third Reich won over the German people; the manner in which it worked; the degree to which Hitler, rather than broader systematic factors inherent in the structure of the Third Reich as a whole, drove policy onward; the possibilities of opposition, resistence, and dissent or even non-conformity to the dictates of National Socialism under a dictatorship that claimed the total allegiance of all its citizens; the nature of the Third Reich's relationship with modernity; the ways in which its policies in different areas resembled, or differed from, those pursued elsewhere in Europe and beyond during the 1930s; and much more besides.

Don’t you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we’re talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work’s formal imperative.’ ‘I’m outta film,’ said the mestizo cameraman.

We felt helpless, and yet this wasn't linked to the growing inequality and social isolation of the 1980s postwelfare state. The aggressive backlash to the gains of feminism and the civil rights movements of the sixties. We needed help and felt shame for asking. We had failed in some sense of an American individualist imperative. We had an obligation to recover. The narrative of progression. This was not only for the medical-pharmaceutical establishment which required our before and after stories, but also for a culture that locates mental illness in the self and not the society. If it doesn't quite work this way, there was no acknowledgment of that. There weren't stories of the ones who don't recover, or get better and worse over and over again.

Knowledge, taken up to excess without hunger, even in opposition to any need, now works no longer as something which reorganizes, a motivation driving outwards. It stays hidden in a certain chaotic inner world, which that modern man describes with a strange pride as an 'Inwardness' peculiar to him. Thus, people say that we have the content and that only the form is lacking. But with respect to everything alive this is a totally improper contradiction. For our modern culture is not alive, simply because it does let itself be understood without that contradiction; that is, it is really no true culture, but only a way of knowing about culture. There remain in it thoughts of culture, feelings of culture, but no cultural imperatives come from it. In contrast to this, what really motivates and moves outward into action then often amounts to not much more than a trivial convention, a pathetic imitation, or even a raw grimace. At that point the inner feeling is probably asleep, like the snake which has swallowed an entire rabbit and then lies down contentedly still in the sunlight and avoids all movements other than the most essential.

The necessity of political struggle especially means confronting and contradicting those on the left who say that resistance is futile. Such people have no place in a movement for justice. For actionists who choose to work aboveground, this confrontation with detractors - and some of these detractors reject the idea of resistance of any kind - is one of the small, constant actions you can take. Defend the possibility of resistance, insist on a moral imperative of fighting for this planet, and argue for direct action against perpetrators. Despite what much of the left has now embraced, we are not all equally responsible. There are a few corporations that have turned the planet into a dead commodity for their private wealth, destroying human cultures along with it.

Brown believed that technological superiority was imperative to military dominance, and he also believed that advancing science was the key to economic prosperity. “Harold Brown turned technology leadership into a national strategy,” remarks DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising inflation and unemployment, DARPA’s budget was doubled. Microprocessing technologies were making stunning advances. High-speed communication networks and Global Positioning System technologies were accelerating at whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff programs, including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided munitions, and drones, were being pursued, in the black. Soon, Assault Breaker technology would be battle ready. From all of this work, entire new industries were forming.

Your attitude can either be your best friend who has your best interest at heart or your worst enemy who wants to see you fail, destroy your life, and be miserably unhappy. It’s imperative that you check your attitude. Make sure that your attitude is working for you, not against you. There’s limitless value in having a positive, empowered, and optimistic attitude! Choose wisely which attitude you give life to.

In this tiny interval of the twenty-first century, we, the human species, will either learn to become a life-enhancing element within the greater Earth community . . . or we will not. If we fail, humanity will be reduced to a small number, we will have forsaken our potential as a species (this time around, at least) and we will have perpetrated the extinction of many thousands of species, perhaps millions — beyond those that have already perished at our hands. And yet we now behold the possibility of a radical and foundational shift in human culture — from a suicidal, life-destroying element to a way of life worthy of our unique human potential and of Earth's dream for itself. What lies before us is the opportunity and imperative for a thorough cultural transformation — what eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning, the transition from an egocentric “Industrial Growth Society” to a soulcentric “Life-sustaining Society,” or what economist David Korten in The Great Turning calls the transition “from Empire to Earth Community.” The cultural historian Thomas Berry refers to this vital endeavor as the Great Work of our time.2 It is every person's responsibility and privilege to contribute to this metamorphosis. Transformational

It’s fun figuring out things, and it’s fun carrying out the strategies developed to “game” the intricacies of car buying and the daily trip to work. Why? As always, the function of dopamine flows from the imperatives of evolution and survival. Dopamine encourages us to maximize our resources by rewarding us when we do so—the act of doing something well, of making our future a better, safer place, gives us a little dopamine “buzz.

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy. None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation.

... by saying that the work we perform in the home is capitalist production, we are not expressing a wish to be legitimated as part of the 'productive forces,' in other words, it is not a resort to moralism. Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited. As Marx recognized, 'to be a productive laborer is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.' Thus we derive little 'self-esteem' from it. But when we say that housework is a moment of capitalist production we clarify our specific function in the capitalist division of labor and the specific forms that our revolt against it must take. Ultimately, when we say that we produce capital, we say that we can and want to destroy it, rather than engage in a losing battle to move from one form and degree of exploitation to another.

In 1994, Friedman wrote a memo marked “Very Confidential” to Raymond, Mortimer, and Richard Sackler. The market for cancer pain was significant, Friedman pointed out: four million prescriptions a year. In fact, there were three-quarters of a million prescriptions just for MS Contin. “We believe that the FDA will restrict our initial launch of OxyContin to the Cancer pain market,” Friedman wrote. But what if, over time, the drug extended beyond that? There was a much greater market for other types of pain: back pain, neck pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia. According to the wrestler turned pain doctor John Bonica, one in three Americans was suffering from untreated chronic pain. If that was even somewhat true, it represented an enormous untapped market. What if you could figure out a way to market this new drug, OxyContin, to all those patients? The plan would have to remain secret for the time being, but in his memo to the Sacklers, Friedman confirmed that the intention was “to expand the use of OxyContin beyond Cancer patients to chronic non-malignant pain.” This was a hugely audacious scheme. In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for a heavy-duty problem, but the market for the drug was naturally limited to people suffering from severe enough conditions to warrant a major tranquilizer. The beauty of the minor tranquilizers was that they were for everyone. The reason those drugs were such a success was that they were pills that you could pop to relieve an extraordinary range of common psychological and emotional ailments. Now Arthur’s brothers and his nephew Richard would make the same pivot with a painkiller: they had enjoyed great success with MS Contin, but it was perceived as a heavy-duty drug for cancer. And cancer was a limited market. If you could figure out a way to market OxyContin not just for cancer but for any sort of pain, the profits would be astronomical. It was “imperative,” Friedman told the Sacklers, “that we establish a literature” to support this kind of positioning. They would suggest OxyContin for “the broadest range of use.” Still, they faced one significant hurdle. Oxycodone is roughly twice as potent as morphine, and as a consequence OxyContin would be a much stronger drug than MS Contin. American doctors still tended to take great care in administering strong opioids because of long-established concerns about the addictiveness of these drugs. For years, proponents of MS Contin had argued that in an end-of-life situation, when someone is in a mortal fight with cancer, it was a bit silly to worry about the patient’s getting hooked on morphine. But if Purdue wanted to market a powerful opioid like OxyContin for less acute, more persistent types of pain, one challenge would be the perception, among physicians, that opioids could be very addictive. If OxyContin was going to achieve its full commercial potential, the Sacklers and Purdue would have to undo that perception.

You don’t want to be stuck forcing something that won’t happen. You’ll waste your time, energy, and health on something that simply isn’t meant for you. It’s okay to move on. It’s imperative that you move on. If you don’t, you’ll prevent even better things from coming into your life. Not everything we want or strive for is meant to work out. Sometimes it’s meant to teach us a valuable skill or lesson so we can use it somewhere else. Some experiences are only for growth purposes.

Let’s take a look at how modern life goes. Mostly, it’s frenetic and at a pace that’s not conducive to reflective thought./ It’s all too fast for our human dimensions, as David Malouf put it. We don’t have time to adjust, to work out our priorities, and to reflect on whether what we’re doing when we’re running around madly is actually meaningful to us.. While we are meant to have more time (all those time-saving devices were meant to deliver just this, no?), we have less space. We are “on” 24/7. Every gap is filled. Even waiting at bus stops. We don’t leave work and unwind and stare into space for a bit, enjoying the sound of the birds, the soft dusk sunlight on fellow passenger’s faces. Nope, we must prune our social feeds./ Technology freed us up . . .to imprison us further. It’s created the imperative to go faster, to take on more ideas, and to juggle more. There are no excuses for not coming up with an answer, and immediately. Not when there’s Google./ But what if we need more time to know and to feel if it’s the right answer?

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion. Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order.

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion. Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order. If

When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former. Does destroying job security while increasing working hours really create a more productive (let alone innovative, loyal) workforce? There is every reason to believe that exactly the opposite is the case. In purely economic terms the result of neoliberal reform of labor markets is almost certainly negative—an impression that overall lower economic growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties would tend to reinforce. However it has been spectacularly effective in depoliticizing labor. The same could be said of the burgeoning growth in armies, police, and private security services. They’re utterly unproductive—nothing but a resource sink. It’s quite possible, in fact, that the very weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will itself ultimately sink it. But it’s also easy to see how, if the ultimate imperative of those running the world is choking off the possibility of any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that will be fundamentally different than the world today must be a crucial part of the neoliberal project. Antithesis Yet even those areas of science and technology that did receive massive funding have not seen the breakthroughs originally anticipated

At dinner, Morris described a debate his Moral Reasoning class had had about Kant’s categorical imperative. The idea of the categorical imperative was that moral rules were universal, with no exceptions. Lying, for example, was wrong—always, for everyone, under all circumstances. But what if an axe murderer knocked at your door and said, “Hello, sir, may I know where your children are so that I can murder them?” Were you morally justified to lie? Someone had actually asked Kant that, and Kant had said no. Morris’s Moral Reasoning section had debated it for the whole hour. I didn’t see the point of debating how I would respond to an axe murderer saying something that an axe murder would literally never say. More broadly, I mistrusted the project of trying to generalize a set of rules that would work in all circumstances. Surely, whatever rule anyone thought of, there would be some situations where it wouldn’t work. I myself had often had the experience of being prevented, by my life situation, from following some rule that made sense for everyone else. When I explained it, people would laugh and say, “How could we have thought of that?” —

With effort, he concentrated on an editorial. It told of widespread industrial unrest in the Midlands and asserted that it was imperative to pay a fair wage for a fair day’s work. Another article lamented that the huge industrial machine of England was operating at only half capacity and cried that greater new markets must be found for the productive wealth it could spew forth; more production meant cheaper goods, increased employment, higher wages. There were news articles that told of tension and war clouds over France and Spain because of the succession to the Spanish throne; Prussia was spreading its tentacles into all the German states to dominate them and a Franco-Prussian confrontation was imminent; there were war clouds over Russia and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire; war clouds over the Italian States that wished to throw out the upstart French King of Naples and join together or not to join together, and the Pope, French-supported, was involved in the political arena; there were war clouds over South Africa because the Boers – who had over the last four years trekked out of the Cape Colony to established the Transvaal and the Orange Free State – were now threatening the English colony of Natal and war was expected by the next mail; there were anti-Semitic riots and pogroms throughout Europe; Catholic were fighting against Protestants, Mohammedans against Hindus, against Catholics, against Protestants, and they fighting among themselves; there were Red Indian wars in America, animosity between the Northern and Southern states, animosity between America and Britain over Canada, trouble in Ireland, Sweden, Finland, India, Egypt, the Balkans  . . . ‘Does na matter what you read!’ Struan exploded to no one in particular. ‘The whole world’s mad, by God!

As you never tire of stating, the only moral imperative for the writer, against which there is no recourse, is to return to the literary-linguistic community to which he belongs a fresh, personal style of writing different from what previously existed and which he inherited when setting out on his task: to work on what is given, to follow accepted models is to be condemned to an impoverished insignificance, however much applause the writer gets from the public: the work of whoever does not innovate might as well not exist, for its disappearance would not affect the development of his culture at all.

There is a way to face the current ecological crisis with our eyes open, with stringent scientific knowledge, with honest sorrow over the state of life on earth, with spiritual insight, and with practical commitment. Finding such a way is more essential now than it has ever been in the history of the human species. But such work does not have to be dour (no matter how difficult) or accomplished only out of moral imperative (however real the obligation) or fear (though the reasons to fear are well founded). Our actions can rise instead from a sense of rootedness, connectedness, creativity, and delight.

The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration and the new. An efficient factory fears change because change means retooling and risk and a blip in productivity. Sure, we’ll put up with change if we have to, and welcome the predictable incremental change of productivity improvement, but please leave us alone when it comes to the word “bold.” Avoiding risk worked then but doesn’t work now. Now “what’s next?” is in fact the driving force for individuals and for organizations. Ever onward, ever faster.

Go where you can accomplish something!" seems to he the imperative that has more rationality. What is to be learned from mystical ego-lessness goes beyond this. John of the Cross speaks of the dark night that we enter into unprotected, without all the security mechanisms that we use for consolation and diversion. "Go where you are nothing" means trying to make manifest what has no lobby for its work, what exposes you in your nothingness, your inconsequentiality, and the negation of the self. And you are not to he ashamed of your nothingness. You are to let go of your fear of being nothing and he free for "the nothing that wants to he everything.

The road to recovery, according to Jung, does not require reliving childhood memories or working through old family conflicts. For unless we were the victim of some sort of trauma, of which we have yet to process, our childhood memories will not free us from our present suffering. What is needed is a new attitude – one which entails a “wholehearted dedication to life” (Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation) and which makes “the powerful urge to develop [our] own personality. . .an imperative duty” (Carl Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis) We must step off the sidelines of life and establish a uniform direction to our existence, in which we, and not others, are the final authority.

We have a saying among Black Americans which describes Momma's caution. "If you ask a Negro where he's been, he'll tell you where he's going." To understand this important information, it is necessary to know who uses this tatic and on whom it works. If an unaware person is told a part of the truth (it is imperative that the answer embody truth), he is satisfied that his query has been answered. If an aware person (one who himself uses the stratagem) is given an answer which is truthful but bears only slightly if at all on the question, he knows that the information he seeks is of a private nature and will not be handed to him willingly. Thus direct denial, lying and the revelation of personal affairs are avoided.

What is considered pathology is largely a construct and product of the times. Mental health specialists spend their careers carving out the precise parameters around certain “diagnoses,” and when two or more diagnoses start to overlap or run up against each other, people get territorial and defensive and protective. This may sound shocking or ridiculous, but it is true. So it is imperative that the language and vocabulary of neurodiversity—the understanding that there is a natural array of human brain makeups—begin to seep not only into the medical and psychiatric canon, but also into the everyday colloquial language of the public. We must ask, Why does the way you pay attention determine your work prospects and life satisfaction?

[...] the argument that rape - by violence or deception - is a good method to ensure the survival of the human species has never been convincing. Women, like men, are born with a biological imperative to procreate and they are instinctively equipped to choose males that have a chance of producing the fittest offspring, either due to superior / compatible genetics or a willingness to help raise the young. Taking this choice away from a woman undermines the basic process of mate selection and ultimately works against the survival of the species. Selfish males who sexually coerce women seldom make good fathers and providers. Their violence, neglect, and abandonment creates significant psychological and physical trauma, which is passed on to the next generation, creating a cycle of despair and destructiveness.

Legally Kidnapped: The Case Against Child Protective Services is a radical book at its core. It seeks to strike the root of the problem rather than feverishly vying for compromise. This book is a journey inside an agency that has carelessly and often unnecessarily disrupted families throughout the country. With over 400,000 children in the United States currently in the custody of this organization, it is imperative to explore the true intentions and motives behind its work (1). This is a book about Child Protective Services, assembled by a former CPS investigator who has worked to expose the agency; it is dedicated to the past, current and future victims of an agency which has hurt parents and children time and time again. Though it may seem extreme, the information divulged to you is backed by facts and experience.

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion. Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order. If an ancient Babylonian blinded his neighbour, some violence was usually necessary in order to enforce the law of ‘an eye for an eye’. When, in 1860, a majority of American citizens concluded that African slaves are human beings and must therefore enjoy the right of liberty, it took a bloody civil war to make the southern states acquiesce. However,

Like everyone else I needed occasional reassurance, a word of approval, a warning against some weakness; but I knew, somehow, what Rilke’s words now stated for me, that the underlying necessity was to ask not others but oneself for confirmation. And he specified the primary question not as “Is what I have written any good?” but rather, “Must I write?” I came at some point to recognize that when he says Herr Kappus ought to continue only if he could honestly answer “Yes,” he meant the question (for every poet) to be a perennial one, not something asked and settled once and for all. Likewise, when, in the same letter, he states that “a work of art is good only if it has grown out of necessity,” he is not merely repeating that injunction; the first imperative had to do with an initial sense of being inexorably drawn to the making of poems, while this second one demands that the poet apply the same standard to each separate work.

ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP "According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high." The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018 In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it. The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure. While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so. And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time. For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to “believe” in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with “morality.” Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

In Kerouac’s work, the search for the authentic is thus part of the dualism that marks his life and writing, a dualism between two distinct but nevertheless intertwined imperatives—domesticity and “kicks,” tradition and progressiveness, nostalgia and possibility—an ambivalence on both a personal as well as a broader sociocultural level of significance. Kerouac’s nostalgia was for an American past he romanticized and mythologized, the prewar America of the Depression, the westward expansion, and the Old West, which he imbued with “glee,” “honesty,” “spitelessness,” and “wild selfbelieving individuality.” This desire to reconnect with “old American whoopee” was at the same time intimately linked to his idyllic yet haunted youth in Lowell, Massachusetts. By locating the imperatives of individuality and innocence both in his own and America’s past, the authenticity Kerouac sought pointed him outside the social and cultural mainstream, as well as indicating a displacement from his own historical time.

I have shown [the categorial imperative] to be a futile assumption so clearly and irrefutably, that no one with a spark of judgment can possibly believe any longer in this fiction. - "well, and so [the Kantian professors have probably engaged with your critique of the categorial imperative]." - Oh no! They take good care not to venture on such slippery ground! Their ability consists in holding their tongues; silence is all they have to oppose to intelligence, earnestness, and truth. In not one of the products of their useless scribblings that have appeared since 1841, has the slightest notice been taken of my Ethics - undoubtedly the most important work on Moral Philosophy that has been published for the last sixty years - nay, their terror of me and of my truth is so great, that none of the literary journals issued by Academies or Universities has so much as mentioned [my] book. Zitto, zitto, lest the public should perceive anything: in this consists the whole of their policy. The instinct of self-preservation may, no doubt, be at the bottom of these artful tactics.

work of the Spirit is necessary in order to the complete accomplishment of the Father’s eternal purpose. Speaking hypothetically, but reverently, be it said, that if God had done nothing more than given Christ to die for sinners, not a single sinner would ever have been saved. In order for any sinner to see his need of a Saviour and be willing to receive the Saviour he needs the work of the Holy Spirit upon and within him as imperatively required. Had God done nothing more than given Christ to die for sinners and then sent forth His servants to proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ, thus leaving sinners entirely to themselves to accept or reject as they pleased, then every sinner would have rejected, because at heart every man hates God and is at enmity with Him. Therefore the work of the Holy Spirit was needed to bring the sinner to Christ, to overcome his innate opposition, and compel him to accept the provision God has made. We say “compel” the sinner, for this is precisely what the Holy Spirit does, has to do, and this leads us to consider at some length, though as briefly as possible, the parable of the “Marriage Supper.

Given that our brains were shaped by natural selection, it could hardly be otherwise. Natural selection is driven by the competition among genes to be represented in the next generation. Reproduction leads to a geometric increase in descendants, and on a finite planet not every organism alive in one generation can have descendants several generations hence. Therefore organisms reproduce, to some extent, at one another’s expense. If one organism eats a fish, that fish is no longer available to be eaten by another organism. If one organism mates with a second one, it denies an opportunity at parenthood to a third. Everyone alive today is a descendant of millions of generations of ancestors who lived under these constraints but reproduced nonetheless. That means that all people today owe their existence to having winners as ancestors, and everyone today is designed, at least in some circumstances, to compete. That does not mean that people (or any other animals) house an aggressive urge that must be discharged, an unconscious death wish, a rapacious sex drive, a territorial imperative, a thirst for blood, or the other ruthless instincts that are often mistakenly equated with Darwinism.

People work, not me. I look out the window, look out the window, out the window. Outside it's winter, and it's sunny. The doors don't shut properly, they don't shut, they're old. A phone rings through the wall. How come it takes such daunting effort to do what one likes? It's daunting, daunting to begin. I find it daunting to get started, and that seems not to be a fixable thing. The road to success, the road to success. Who knows? I get tired of myself. As pleasant as I find it here, as pleasant as a I find it. Did anyone pick up? In any case, the phone stopped ringing. What works better in fiction? Past or present tense? Weekends make me cranky, I don't like them, that imperative to have a good time, do things, do something special, the notion of free time. I prefer to seek out those things while other people work. People relaxing tend to look ridiculous, like out of place, grotesque. I'm unmotivated, a little, I realize, bored, overly calm, almost comfortable. I don't like where I live anymore, I'm fed up, I'm fed up with where I live. I want, somehow, to live differently. I'd take care of it, I'd take care of that baby if he gave it to me, if he wanted to give it to me, if he wanted.

Electromagnetism is the force that causes the interaction of electrically charged particles in our world, which takes place in an electrically charged field. Other than gravity, nothing affects our existence more than electromagnetism. Electric fields, electric currents, generators, motors, batteries, transformers, magnetic fields, magnets, and the magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth are all forms of electromagnetism. It’s the force responsible for holding electrons and protons together in atoms, so it’s a building block for molecules and all life as we know it. If there’s one constant relationship in paranormal research it’s the connection between EMF and spirits, either intelligent or residual. Almost every time paranormal activity happens, there is an increase in EMF, so it’s imperative that we understand how it works with spirits and their energy. The leading theory is that ghosts emit electromagnetic energy and cause spikes in electromagnetic fields (EMF). The common belief is that they gather energy in and send EMF out. So there is a directly proportional relationship between spirits and EMF and a simultaneous inversely proportional relationship between spirits and available energy.

Completed in Arles late in 1888 and now housed in the National Gallery, London, this painting depicts the artist’s humble chair and pipe. The work was completed shortly after Gauguin’s departure from the Yellow House. The two artists had quarrelled bitterly, causing Gauguin to write to Theo, “The incompatibility of both our characters means that Vincent and I cannot live together peacefully. It is imperative that I leave.” Vincent was devastated, seeing his dreams of establishing an artists’ commune with Gauguin shatter and disappear. In response, he painted his and Gauguin’s empty chairs, symbolising the loneliness and isolation that he felt. Van Gogh’s wooden chair is more modest, with the pipe and tobacco adding to its humble image; whilst Gauguin’s more elaborate chair, holding a book and candle, suggests learning and ambition. Van Gogh’s choice of colours for his chair include yellow and violet, hinting at daylight and a metaphorical idea of hope for the future. In contrast, Gauguin’s chair is depicted in darker colours of red and green, which along with the candle, enforce the idea of night-time. Together, the pictures represent day and night, with the painting of Gauguin’s chair suggesting that the absent friend had brought light and happiness to van Gogh’s evenings.

Even here, it is only the evening that I love. The dawn gladdens me for a moment; I fancy I could fell the charm of it if the day that is to follow were not bound to be so long! I certainly have a free domain to wander in, but it is not wild and impressive enough. its features are tame, its rocks small and uninteresting, the vegetation as a rule lacks the luxuriance and profusion I like to see; one never catches here the murmur of a torrent far down in the depths; it is a land of plains. Nothing burdens me here; nothing satisfies me. I fancy, if anything, my boredom increases; simply because I have not enough to suffer. I am happier then, you think? Not a bit of it; to suffer and to be unhappy are not at all the same thing, no more than enjoyment is identical with happiness. I am delightfully circumstanced, and yet I live a melancholy life. I could not be better off than I am here: free, undistracted, well in health, unyoked from business, unconcerned about a future from which I expect nothing, and leaving behind without regret a past I have not enjoyed. But here is within me a persistent unrest, a yearning I cannot define, imperative and absorbing, which takes me out of the sphere of perishable creatures... No, it is not the yearning to love; you are mistaken there, as I once was mistaken myself. The interval is wide enough between the emptiness of my heart and the love it has so eagerly desired, but the distance between what I am and what I want to be is infinite. I do not want to enjoy possession; I want hope, I should like to know. I need limitless illusions, receding before me to keep me always under their spell. What use to me is anything that can end? The hour which will arrive in sixty years' time is already close at hand. I have no liking for anything that takes its rise, draws near, arrives and is no more. I want a good, a dream, in fact a hope that is ever in advance, ever beyond me, greater than my expectation itself, greater than the things which pass away. I would like to be pure intelligence, I would like the eternal order of the world... And yet, thirty years ago, that order was, and I had no existence. worthless and accidental creature of a day, I used not to exist, and soon I shall exist no more. I discover with surprise that my thought is greater than my being, and when I consider that my life is absurd in my own eyes, I lose my way in hopeless darkness. Truly, happier is he who fells trees and burns charcoal, and flies to holy water when the thunder peals. He lives like the brute. Nay; for he sings at his work. I shall never know his peace, and yet I shall pass like him. His life will glide along with time, but mine is led astray and hurried on by excitement and unrest, and by the phantoms of an unknown greatness.

I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient’s efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses. The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others. The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a ‘cause disease’ (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered’ (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses’ like kleptomania and frotteurism [now frotteuristic disorder in the DSM-V]. (Do you know what frotteurism is? It is a mental disorder that causes people, usually men, to surreptitiously fondle women’s breasts or genitals in crowded situations such as elevators and subways.) The problem with the escalation of these kinds of diagnoses is that either we can become so adapted to our thinking and feelings instead of our environment that we will become dissociated from the whole idea that we have a problem at all; or at least, the more we become blameless, the more we become helpless in the face of our problems, thinking our problems need to be 'fixed’ by outside help before we can move forward on our own. For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and our primal impulses. In the last fifty years we have unprincipled ourselves and become what I call 'psychologized.’ Now the power struggle is between the 'expert’ and the 'disorder.’ Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don’t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about coping mechanisms. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self.

Letter to Law Enforcement Every field of human endeavor has its own unique problem. The problem with science is lack of warmth. The problem with philosophy is lack of empathy. The problem with religion is lack of reason. The problem with politics is lack of expertise. And the problem with law enforcement is not corruption, but an absolute denial of that corruption, and until you acknowledge that many of your officers are corrupt and prejudiced to the neck, you can never in a million years build a healthy relationship with the people. Prejudices thrive on biases, and biases are a part of our psyche - of the human psyche, and no matter what we do, we cannot erase them from our mind - but we do have the ability to be aware of them, and only when we are aware of them, can we choose whether or not to be driven by them. However, when you don't even acknowledge that you have biases, that you are filled with prejudice, then you are inadvertently choosing not to accept the root of all the mistakes committed by you and your fellow officers in the line of duty. A civilian may choose to stay biased and prejudiced all their life, but you as a defender of the people - as a defender of their rights, their security, their serenity - do not have the luxury to let your biases, to let your prejudices come in the way of your duty, for the moment they do, you the keeper of law and order, turn into the very cause of disorder. Therefore, it's not enough for an officer of the law to have combat training and legal knowledge, it is also imperative that you learn about biases, that you learn about the fears, insecurities and instinctual tendencies of the human mind. An officer of the law without an understanding of biases, is like a ten year old with a knife - they may feel that they have power, but they have no clue as to the real life implications of that power. Remember my friend, power that doesn't help the people, is not power but pandemic. Your combat training doesn't make you a police officer, for when enraged even an ordinary civilian can take down ten police officers - your knowledge of law doesn't make you an officer of the law, for when pushed even a mediocre college student can defeat an army of elite legal minds - what makes you a police officer is your absolute acceptance of your role in society - the role of selfless servants. Once you accept the role of selfless servants wholeheartedly, people are bound to trust you. My brave, conscientious officers of the law, if you want people to trust you, don't use the phrase "police are your friends", for it only makes you sound authoritarian, egotistical and condescending - instead, remind them "police are humans too" - acknowledge your mistakes and work towards correcting them, so that you can truly become the Caretaker of People, which is the very definition of COP.

The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow … and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of becoming 9 feet tall, and we certainly don’t want them to grow on an endless exponential curve; rather, we want them to grow to a point of maturity, and then to maintain a healthy balance. We want our crops to grow, but only until they are ripe, at which point we harvest them and plant afresh. This is how growth works in the living world. It levels off. The capitalist economy looks nothing like this. Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point. It is the definition of absurdity. We do see this pattern playing out in nature, sometimes, but only with devastating consequences: cancer cells are programmed to replicate for the sake of replicating, but the result is deadly to living systems.

If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities. Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia! But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged—not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country. There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budgets and similar programs. They are the smugly "practical" and myopic philistines in the Congress, the state legislatures, and the city halls who thought they could sit it out. The very practical choice now before them and the American people is whether we shall have a conscious and authentic democratic social revolution or more tragic and futile riots that tear our nation to shreds.

‌* When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. ‌* Mistakes, mistakes, it’s all I seem capable of at times ‌*No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment. ‌*It’s much easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it ‌*When death captures me,” the boy vowed, “he will feel my fist on his face.”. ‌*he’d turned for one last look at his family as he left the apartment. Perhaps then the guilt would not have been so heavy. No final goodbye. No final grip of the eyes. Nothing but goneness. ‌ *Wrecked, but somehow not torn into pieces. ‌*Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. ‌*“If we gamble on a Jew,” said Papa soon after, “I would prefer to gamble on a live one,” and from that moment, a new routine was born. *‌you should know it yourself—a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.” ‌*The fire was nothing now but a funeral of smoke, dead and dying, simultaneously. ‌*Even death has a heart.. ‌* In truth, I think he was afraid. Rudy Steiner was scared of the book thief’s kiss. He must have longed for it so much. He must have loved her so incredibly hard. So hard that he would never ask for her lips again and would go to his grave without them. ‌*There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone. *‌That damn snowman,” she whispered. “I bet it started with the snowman—fooling around with ice and snow in the cold down there.” Papa was more philosophical. “Rosa, it started with Adolf.” *‌There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas ‌*They were French, they were Jews, and they were you. ‌*Sometimes she sat against the wall, longing for the warm finger of paint to wander just once more down the side of her nose, or to watch the sandpaper texture of her papa’s hands. If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread out on top of it. *‌Himmel Street was a trail of people, and again, Papa left his accordion. Rosa reminded him to take it, but he refused. “I didn’t take it last time,” he explained, “and we lived.” War clearly blurred the distinction between logic and superstition. ‌*Silence was not quiet or calm, and it was not peace. ‌*“I should have known not to give the man some bread. I just didn’t think.” “Papa, you did nothing wrong.” “I don’t believe you. ‌ * I’m an idiot.” No, Papa. You’re just a man.. ‌*What someone says and what happened are usually two different things ‌* despised by his homeland, even though he was born in it ‌ *“Of course I told him about you,” Liesel said. She was saying goodbye and she didn’t even know it. ‌*Say something enough times and you never forget it ‌*robbery of his life? ‌*Those kinds of souls always do—the best ones. The ones who rise up and say, “I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.” Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places ‌*One could not exist without the other, because for Liesel, both were home. Yes, that’s what Hans Hubermann was for Liesel Meminger ‌*DEATH AND LIESEL It has been many years since all of that, but there is still plenty of work to do. I can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule it. And I remain. I carry them away.

Society would have much to gain from decriminalization. On the immediate practical level, we would feel safer in our homes and on our streets and much less concerned about the danger of our cars being burgled. In cities like Vancouver such crimes are often committed for the sake of obtaining drug money. More significantly perhaps, by exorcising this menacing devil of our own creation, we would automatically give up a lot of unnecessary fear. We could all breathe more freely. Many addicts could work at productive jobs if the imperative of seeking illegal drugs did not keep them constantly on the street. It’s interesting to learn that before the War on Drugs mentality took hold in the early twentieth century, a prominent individual such as Dr. William Stewart Halsted, a pioneer of modern surgical practice, was an opiate addict for over forty years. During those decades he did stellar and innovative work at Johns Hopkins University, where he was one of the four founding physicians. He was the first, for example, to insist that members of his surgical team wear rubber gloves — a major advance in eradicating post-operative infections. Throughout his career, however, he never got by with less than 180 milligrams of morphine a day. “On this,” said his colleague, the world-renowned Canadian physician Sir William Osler, “he could do his work comfortably and maintain his excellent vigor.” As noted at the Common Sense for Drug Policy website: Halsted’s story is revealing not only because it shows that with a morphine addiction the proper maintenance dose can be productive. It also illustrates the incredible power of the drug in question. Here was a man with almost unlimited resources — moral, physical, financial, medical — who tried everything he could think of and he was hooked until the day he died. Today we would send a man like that to prison. Instead he became the father of modern surgery.

The other important aspect of the “interoceptive inference” view is that the purpose of perceiving the body from within has little to do with figuring out what’s there. My brain couldn’t care less that my internal organs are objects with particular locations within my body. The only thing that’s important about my internal physiology is that it works, that it keeps me alive. The brain cares primarily about control and regulation of the body’s internal state. So perceptual predictions for the body’s interior are of a very different kind: they’re instrumental, they’re control-oriented, they’re not epistemic, they’re not to do with “finding out.” For me, this is suggestive of why our experiences of being a body have this nonobject-based phenomenological character, compared to our experiences of the outside world. More speculatively, there is the idea that all forms of perception, conscious and unconscious, derive from this fundamental imperative for physiological regulation. If we understand that the original (evolutionary) purpose of predictive perception was to control and regulate the internal state of the body, and that all the other kinds of perceptual prediction are built on that evolutionary imperative, then ultimately the way we perceive the outside world is predicated on these mechanisms that have their primary objective in the regulation of an internal bodily state. This idea is really important for me, because it gets away from pretheoretical associations of consciousness and perception with cognition, with language, and maybe also with social interaction—all “higher order” properties of cognition. Instead, it grounds consciousness and perception much more strongly in the basic mechanisms of life. It might not just be that life provides a nice analogy with consciousness in terms of hard problems and mysteries, but that there are actually deep obligate connections between mechanisms of life and the way we perceive, consciously and unconsciously, ourselves and the world.

Very well-why don't you make your case?" And perhaps if she listened and closely observed, she might get some hint of what, beneath the words, behind his so often impassive mask, was really going on inside him. "Your case beyond the obvious social imperatives, that is." "Difficult given my case is based on the obvious social imperatives." "Nevertheless, you might at least try to find a broader foundation." From the corner of her eye, she saw him look up as if imploring divine aid-or perhaps more prosaically asking why me?-and had to hide a smile. Eventually he lowered his head and leveled his hazel gaze at her. "All right-let's try for a broader perspective. You're a Cynster, well bred, well connected, well dowered, and more than passably attractive." She inclined her head. "Thank you, kind sir." "Don't thank me yet. You're also opinionated, willful to a fault, argumentative, and at times irrationally stubborn. Be that as it may, for some reason I don't comprehend, we managed to run along reasonably well through the last week or so, when we had a common goal. I take that as an indication that, were we to marry and jointly take on the common goal of managing my father's estate, the estate that will in time be ours, we would again find ourselves on common ground, enough at least to make a marriage work." He'd surprised her. Leaning back, she looked at him. He'd angled his shoulders into the curve of the wall, stretching one arm along the upper edge, long legs stretched out so that his boots brushed her hems. At ease, relaxed and debonair, he appeared the epitome of the sophisticated London rake, which, of course, he was. He was also an enigma. At some point during their hike through the mountains, she'd realized that no matter what he allowed her to see, there was something different, something even more attractive, beneath his polished veneer. "You'd share the responsibilities of running the estate?" She hasn't expected him to speak of such matters. "If you wished to involve yourself with it.

Change Your Look With These Top Notch Fashion Tips In fashion, there aren't any set rules. There is no one right way to be fashionable. Read a lot of different sources and then take what you've learned, pick it apart and use the tips that are best for you. Continue reading to learn great advice that you can tailor to your own wants and needs. If you like a shirt or skirt think about getting it in more than one color. Because clothes come in so many varying cuts and styles, you're likely find it difficult to find clothes that fit well for your body type. When you do just get more than one so that you can feel great more often. If you have thick or very curly hair, using a gel product will help you to create the style you desire. Work the product into towel-dried hair and then style it as you want. You can allow it to dry naturally, or use a hair drier. This is especially helpful in humid weather. In today's business world, it is imperative that men be well dressed. Therefore, it is essential to shop for top drawer clothing when buying clothes for your next interview. To begin your search, look through today's business magazines to ensure your wardrobe matches the top executives. Look for whether men are wearing cuffed pants or hemmed pants, ties with designs or solid ties as well as what type of shoe is currently in style. Skimpy tops are comfortable to wear in hot weather, but be careful if you are a big busted gal. Your figure needs good support, and you will feel more secure if you wear a sports bra under a lightweight top that has skinny straps and no shape of its own. Don't overstock your beauty kit with makeup. Just choose a few colors that match the season. Consider your needs for day and evening applications. Makeup can go bad if it's opened, just like other products. Bacteria can build on it, too. Have yourself professionally fitted for a bra. An ill-fitting brassiere is not only unflattering, but it affects how your clothing fits. Once you know your true size, buy a few bras in different styles and cuts. A plunge or demi-cup bra, a strapless bra, and a convertible bra give you versatile options. The thing about fashion is that it's a very easy topic once you get to know a little bit about it. Use the ideas you like and ignore the rest. It's okay not to follow every trend. Breaking away from the trends is better if you desire to be unique.