Initiation School Quotes

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.

Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.

There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Steal a fish from one guy and give it to another--and keep doing that on a daily basis--and you'll make the first guy pissed off, but you'll make the second guy lazy and dependent on you. Then you can tell the second guy that the first guy is greedy for wanting to keep the fish he caught. Then the second guy will cheer for you to steal more fish. Then you can prohibit anyone from fishing without getting permission from you. Then you can expand the racket, stealing fish from more people and buying the loyalty of others. Then you can get the recipients of the stolen fish to act as your hired thugs. Then you can ... well, you know the rest.

If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.

I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.

Maybe… they are stocking high schools across the country with hot young librarians as part of a massive literacy initiative.

It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles.

A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration.

Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.

Abuse doesn’t come from people’s inability to resolve conflicts but from one person’s decision to claim a higher status than another. So while it is valuable, for example, to teach nonviolent conflict-resolution skills to elementary school students—a popular initiative nowadays—such efforts contribute little by themselves to ending abuse. Teaching equality, teaching a deep respect for all human beings — these are more complicated undertakings, but they are the ones that count.

While liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action.

It's just a little initiation we have here at Spence - we like to torture each other. Beauty, grace, and charm my foot. It's a school for sadists with good tea-serving skills.

Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that's not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under.

It is easy to talk about changing our culture. It is quite different to put forth bold initiatives to effectuate that change. Together, we can make a difference.

If you don't know or didn't understand, ASK! It's your responsibility to find out. Research; demonstrate an unquenchable desire to know everything about your job. If something is broken or not right, take the initiative to fix it or make

Nothing said Clothes to Wear When You Want to Impress a Guy You Initially Shot Down, But Now You Realise You Like Him and Want to Get Him Back. Where was the outfit for that?

Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity for self-direction or the exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative.

Comparisons get you nowhere. They only make you ashamed of what you should be grateful for.

When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol's 'hooks' were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of the Nazi hakenkreuz, but for a boy growing up after 1945 the shock of encountering the emblem at all was a memorable one. I later learned that in the mid-1930s Kipling had caused this 'signature' to be removed from all his future editions. Having initially sympathized with some of the early European fascist movements, he wanted to express his repudiation of Hitlerism (or 'the Hun,' as he would perhaps have preferred to say), and wanted no part in tainting the ancient Indian rune by association. In its origin it is a Hindu and Jainas symbol for light, and well worth rescuing.

When reason, common sense, and decency are assaulted often enough, then personality is crippled, and human intelligence disintegrates or is warped. The barrier between truth and lies is effectively destroyed. . . . Schooled in such a climate, fearful and deprived of any intellectual initiative, Homo Sovieticus could never be more than a mouthpiece for the party’s ideas and slogans, not so much a human being then, as a receptacle to be emptied and filled as party policy dictated.

From the primary school till he leaves the university a young man does nothing but acquire books by heart without his judgment or personal initiative being ever called into play.

Oh,” Jace said carelessly, as if he hadn’t been waiting out here for the express purpose of seeing Simon off. He looked up, golden gaze casual, then looked away. “You.” Being too cool for school was Jace’s thing. Simon supposed he must have understood and been fond of it, once. “Hey, I figured I wasn’t going to get the chance to ask this again. You and me,” Simon said. “We’re pretty tight, aren’t we?” Jace looked at him for a moment, face very still, and then bounded to his feet and said: “Absolutely. We’re like this.” He crossed two of his fingers together. “Actually, we’re more like this.” He tried to cross them again. “We had a little bit of initial tension, as you may later recall, but that was all cleared up when you came to me and confessed that you were struggling with your feelings of intense jealousy over my—these were your words—stunning good looks and irresistible charm.” “Did I,” said Simon. Jace clapped him on the shoulder. “Yeah, buddy. I remember it clearly.” “Okay, whatever. The thing is … Alec’s always really quiet around me,” Simon said. “Is he just shy, or did I tick him off and I don’t remember it? I wouldn’t like to go away without trying to make things right.” Jace’s expression took on that peculiar stillness again. “I’m glad you asked me that,” he said finally. “There is something more going on. The girls didn’t want me to tell you, but the truth is—

Copyright: a system of monopoly privilege over the expression of ideas that enables government to stop consumer-friendly economic development and reward uncompetitive and legally privileged elites to fleece the public through surreptitious use of coercion.

Property taxes' rank right up there with 'income taxes' in terms of immorality and destructiveness. Where 'income taxes' are simply slavery using different words, 'property taxes' are just a Mafia turf racket using different words. For the former, if you earn a living on the gang's turf, they extort you. For the latter, if you own property in their territory, they extort you. The fact that most people still imagine both to be legitimate and acceptable shows just how powerful authoritarian indoctrination is. Meanwhile, even a brief objective examination of the concepts should make anyone see the lunacy of it. 'Wait, so every time I produce anything or trade with anyone, I have to give a cut to the local crime lord??' 'Wait, so I have to keep paying every year, for the privilege of keeping the property I already finished paying for??' And not only do most people not make such obvious observations, but if they hear someone else pointing out such things, the well-trained Stockholm Syndrome slaves usually make arguments condoning their own victimization. Thus is the power of the mind control that comes from repeated exposure to BS political mythology and propaganda.

The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

Can social progress be made without government? It's like saying 'can happiness be achieved without the initiation of violence? Can romance be achieved without rape? Can profitability be achieved without theft? Can economic growth be achieved without the mass indebted enslavement and counterfeiting of the federal reserve?'.

Maybe it’s not even his master plan; maybe it’s, like, the American Library Association’s master plan, and they are stocking high schools across the country with hot young librarians as part of a massive literacy initiative.

I gaped at what I saw next. She yanked his arm off and ate it. Gross! I knew she was hungry, but that was just...well, against the school rules for one thing.

Recall that the minimum wage was initially conceived as a method to exclude undesirables from the workforce.

I can feel the competition here, very much like the first few weeks of law school when we were terribly concerned with each other's initial progress. I nod at a few acquaintances, silently hoping they flunk the exam because they're silently hoping I Collapse too. Such is the nature of the profession.

There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, this thinking goes. Economics is a matter of acquiring and allocating, not creating. This was the view of the world’s smartest people, all top philosophers and not stupid people, for many thousands of years before the age of the enlightenment. It still is.

A school of esotericism usually arises in connection with some special realization of the Truth, which it sometimes stresses beyond its due proportion to life as a whole, but there will never be found any teaching which has the power to hold together a body of earnest seekers which has not a spark of the divine fire at its heart; therefore respect should be given to all how seek in sincerity, however far from the goal they may appear to be, and all who are engaged in the great Quest should rather try to see the vision which a brother has glimpsed than the special errors to which he has fallen victim.

Foreign princes rarely ask to see Initiates by name. And by ‘rarely’ I mean ‘never.

His prospects had gone from soaring to plummeting and there was nothing I could do for him to fix the hole that had torn in who he was.

It was hard to choose between good and best.

Revenge wasn’t what I had in mind. Protection was." "We can only do what is in our power to achieve." "In that case, we were going to have to find more power.

School never teaches you about this mangled human slime, it slays me. You spend all your time learning the capital of Surinam while these retards carve their initials in your back.

Alexander Hamilton Junior High School -- SEMESTER REPORT -- STUDENT: Joseph Margolis TEACHER: Janet Hicks ENGLISH: A, ARITHMETIC: A, SOCIAL STUDIES: A, SCIENCE: A, NEATNESS: A, PUNCTUALITY: A, PARTICIPATION: A, OBEDIENCE: D Teacher's Comments: Joseph remains a challenging student. While I appreciate his creativity, I am sure you will agree that a classroom is an inappropriate forum for a reckless imagination. There is not a shred of evidence to support his claim that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian, and even fewer grounds to explain why he even knows what the word means. Similarly, an analysis of the Constitutional Convention does not generate sufficient cause to initiate a two-hour classroom debate on what types of automobiles the Founding Fathers would have driven were they alive today. When asked on a subsequent examination, "What did Benjamin Franklin use to discover electricity?" eleven children responded "A Packard convertible". I trust you see my problem. [...] Janet Hicks Parent's Comments: As usual I am very proud of Joey's grades. I too was unaware that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian. I assumed they were all Protestants. Thank you for writing. Ida Margolis

Growing economies are built by billions of actors behaving according to their own interests, coordinated through institutions that no one in particular created. Realizing this requires humility, a trait that is in short supply among would-be dictators, politicians, and bureaucrats, which is precisely why these groups are the proven enemies of prosperity in all times and places.

The man who is an initiate of one of the great Mystery Schools never fears to let his pupils outdistance him, because he knows that it stands him in good stead with his superiors if he is constantly sending up to them aspirants who 'make good.' He therefore never tries to hold back a promising pupil, because he has no need to fear that pupil, if allowed to penetrate into the Mysteries, would spy out the nakedness of the land; he will rather bring back a report of its exceeding richness, and thereby confirm the statements of his teacher and spur his fellow pupils to yet greater eagerness.

All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night and day, studying the secrets of the human body and using available technologies to help your patients; or a would-be stockbroker or a student of high finance; or a trainee in one of the psychoanalytic schools, you are in exactly the same position as the apprentice shaman or witch doctor in tribal societies. You are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in order to be initiated into rarefied realms of secret power. You are undergoing an ordeal testing your capacities to become a master of this power. And, as is true in all initiations, there is no guarantee of success. [Magician energy]

F. Franklin the Fourth has a job with a firm rich in heritage, money and pretentiousness, a firm vastly superior to Brodnax and Speer. His sidekicks at the moment are W. Harper Whittenson, an arrogant little snot who will, thankfully, leave Memphis and practice with a mega-firm in Dallas; J. Townsend Gross, who has accepted a position with another huge firm; and James Straybeck, a sometimes friendly sort who's suffered three years of law school without an initial to place before his name or numerals to stick after it. With such a short name, his future as a big-firm lawyer is in jeopardy. I doubt if he'll make it.

I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me--and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting--into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school. My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In "Once upon a time," an "o" had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.

everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor. Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.

The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the government to get ahead in life is despicable. And even more important, this idea is a failure. Our communities are just as poor as they’ve always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home being fathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them.

I was proud to be brown in my own way. Well, I was at school; at school I was brown about the funky stuff that came with being vegetarian, like being really arrogant about it, declaring proudly to a room full of beefeaters when Mad Cow disease initially broke that it was 'Vishnu's way of telling y'all to stop eating and start worshipping'.

Imagine being part of a people who thought life was worth less than the convenience of a moment.

Dragons do not count,” the Magika said. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Because Dragons did count and anyone who thought otherwise was deeply flawed and completely untrustworthy.

In the eastern part of the Iranian world there arose various schools of Sufism, some of which contain barely disguised Zoroastrian concepts. Figures such as Rumi, Suhrawardi, Mansur al-Hallaj, Nurbakhsh, and even Omar Khayyam all convey essentially Iranian mystical thoughts in Islamic guise, often expressing themselves in their own Persian language rather than Arabic.

There's a school of wisdom about love that says the surest way to lose someone is to hold on to them too tightly -- as demonstrated over and over again by the split-ups of lovers, but also by parents and children. Although there it's more complicated by far. Lovers, initially strangers, become strangers again; the tie between parent and child pulls and twists for a lifetime, taking on the strangest forms.

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.

Monopoly is a market, or part of a market, reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more sellers by means of the initiation of physical force by the government, or with the sanction of the government. Monopoly exists insofar as the freedom of competition is violated, with the freedom of competition being understood as the absence of the initiation of physical force as the preventive of competition. Where there is no initiation of physical force to violate the freedom of competition, there is no monopoly. The freedom of competition is violated only insofar as individuals are excluded from markets or parts of markets by means of the initiation of physical force. Monopoly is thus a market or part of a market reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more sellers by means of the initiation of physical force. It is thus something imposed upon the market from without—by the government. (Private individuals—gangsters—can initiate force to reserve markets only if the government allows it and thereby sanctions it.) Thus, monopoly is not something which emerges from the normal operation of the economic system, and which the government must control.

When immigrants arrive in another country, we experience a lot of stress. We learn a new language, go to school, and work in a new environment, which is most likely some survival or transitional job initially. We probably lose social and professional status, and the overall experience is unpleasant and stressful. It sucks. I’ve been there myself. We also have less time compared with locals. For example, we have to spend time learning English - they don’t. Most likely, they can get a job with a higher pay. In our case, we most likely get a minimum-paying job first, which means we have to work more and longer hours. This means that if we want to progress in private and business life at the same rate as locals, we need to be better organized, more efficient, and more disciplined and use more effective and innovative tools and approaches. There is no other way around it. Therefore, I wanted to emphasize that we immigrants need our unique approach to dating.

It was at school in Hamhung that I received my initiation into ‘life purification time’, or self-criticism sessions. These have been a basic feature of life in North Korea since they were introduced by Kim Jong-il in 1974, and are the occasions almost everyone

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster. All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.) Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

priests. The Lords of Scorpio, being the great initiators, accepted none into the Mysteries save when the sun was in a certain degree of Taurus, symbolized by Apis, the Bull. When the Bull carried the sun between his horns, the neophytes were admitted. In geocentric astrology, this takes place when the sun is supposedly in the last decan of the Constellation of Scorpio. This is true not only in the ancient Egyptian rituals, but it is still true in the Mystery Schools. Candidates for the occult path of fire are to this day admitted only when the sun is geocentrically in Scorpio and heliocentrically in Taurus. The star group constituting the Constellation of the Scorpion closely resembles a spread eagle and is one of the reasons why that bird is sacred to Freemasonry, which is a fire cult.

God has given us the tools to build enough faith to access any door, yet He leaves us our freewill to decide when to fast, when to pray, and when to listen. When we decide to build our faith, it is something we initiate, and then in response He increases our faith so that we can experience more of His Kingdom. This is a fundamental element in our relationship with God; He gives us the choice of the relationship we want: “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you” (James 4:8 NKJV). Another way to say it would be, “The ball is in our court.

Ouspensky clearly indicates that all real initiation is self-initiation: “Systems and schools can indicate methods and ways, but no system or school whatever can do for a man the work he must do himself. Inner growth—a change of being—depends entirely upon the work a man must do on himself.”117

The late author Philip K. Dick once said that America isn't intellectual, it's anti-intellectual. Initially, I thought that was a harsh statement. But when you see intelligent people routinely branded 'nerds" and hear about the endless school shootings in the United States, it's hard not to think he had a point.

Do you know what it means to be discontented? It is very difficult to understand discontent, because most of us canalize discontent in a certain direction and thereby smother it. That is, our only concern is to establish ourselves in a secure position with well-established interests and prestige, so as not to be disturbed. It happens in homes and in schools too. The teachers don’t want to be disturbed, and that is why they follow the old routine; because the moment one is really discontented and begins to inquire, to question, there is bound to be disturbance. But it is only through real discontent that one has initiative.

Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?

The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, founded in 1947 and devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and “the American dream,” releases annual back-to-school surveys.48 Its survey for 1998 contrasted two groups of students: the “highly successful” (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the “disillusioned” (approximately 15 percent). The successful students work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the association, the successful group in the 1998 survey is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. The disillusioned students are pessimistic about their future, get low grades, and have little contact with teachers. The disillusioned group could accurately be characterized as demoralized. According to the Alger Association, “Nearly seven out of ten are male.”49

Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining public marches, reading newspapers and organizing school debates and trials. The idea was to initiate the children into the practices, cults and rituals of the Soviet system so that they would grow up to become loyal and active Communists.

In the age of the permanent campaign, politicians plan only as far as their next bid for election. They invoke children and grandchildren in public speeches, but electoral cycles of two to seven years determine which issues prevail. The result is less money for crumbling infrastructure and schools and more for any initiative that promises jobs right now.

Do you know what it means to be discontented? It is very difficult to understand discontent, because most of us canalize discontent in a certain direction and thereby smother it. That is, our only concern is to establish ourselves in a secure position with well-established interests and prestige, so as not to be disturbed. It happens in homes and in schools too. The teachers don't want to be disturbed, and that is why they follow the old routine; because the moment one is really discontented and begins to inquire, to question, there is bound to be disturbance. But it is only through real discontent that one has initiative. Do you know what initiative is? You have initiative when you initiate or start something without being prompted. It need not be anything very great or extraordinary - that may come later; but there is the spark of initiative when you plant a tree on your own, when you are spontaneously kind, when you smile at a man who is carrying a heavy load, when you remove a stone from the path, or pat an animal along the way. That is a small beginning of the tremendous initiative you must have if you are to know this extraordinary thing called creativeness. Creativeness has its roots in the initiative which comes into being only when there is deep discontent.

To do a modest bit of good while doing nothing about the larger system is to keep the painting. You are chewing on the fruit of an injustice. You may be working on a prison education program, but you are choosing not to prioritize the pursuit of wage and labor laws that would make people's lives more stable and perhaps keep some of them out of jail. You may be sponsoring a loan forgiveness initiative for law school students, but you are choosing not to prioritize seeking a tax code that would take more from you and cut their debts. Your management consulting firm may be writing reports about unlocking trillions of dollars' worth of women's potential, but it is choosing not to advise its clients to stop lobbying against the social programs that have been shown in other societies to help women achieve the equality fantasized about in consultants' reports.

Audiences would not be so easily fooled if they would only recall that educated people were and are more likely to be Republicans, while high school dropouts are more likely to be Democrats. Hawkish right-wing Republicans, including the core supporters of Barry Goldwater in 1964, of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and of groups like the John Birch Society, come disproportionately from the most educated and affluent segments of our society, particularly dentists and physicians. So we should not be surprised that education correlates with hawkishness. At the other end of the social-status spectrum, although most African Americans, like most whites, initially supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam, blacks were always more questioning and more dovish than whites, and African American leaders—Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X—were prominent among the early opponents of the war.22

The root of all evil, the liberal insists, was precisely this interference with the freedom of employment, trade and currencies practiced by the various schools of social, national, and monopolistic protectionism since the third quarter of the nineteenth century; but for the unholy alliance of trade unions and labor parties with monopolistic manufacturers and agrarian interests, which in their shortsighted greed joined forces to frustrate economic liberty, the world would be enjoying today the fruits of an almost automatic system of creating material welfare. Liberal leaders never weary of repeating that the tragedy of the nineteenth century sprang from the incapacity of man to remain faithful to the inspiration of the early liberals; that the generous initiative of our ancestors was frustrated by the passions of nationalism and class war, vested interests, and monopolists, and above all, by the blindness of the working people to the ultimate beneficence of unrestricted economic freedom to all human interests, including their own. A great intellectual and moral advance was thus, it is claimed; frustrated by the intellectual and moral weaknesses of the mass of the people; what the spirit of Enlightenment had achieved was put to nought by the forces of selfishness. In a nutshell this is the economic liberal’s defense. Unless it is refuted, he will continue to hold the floor in the contest of arguments.

Attempted Theory #1: Hey, back to our initial question. Perhaps this is the big reason why we write fiction—as a way of understanding ourselves and the world around us. The fiction writer takes a fragment of reality and examines it from several angles until it starts to make some damn sense. By focusing life through the lens of fiction, truths are revealed and magnified and understood. Order is made from chaos. It’s like therapy but cheaper and more fun, and perhaps even more effective.

The trouble with you," Parvathi said with a wisdom beyond her years, "Is that you don't know who you want to be. Girl or boy. Chinese or Malay." "Ya-lah you!" Fatima said. "No wonder the kids in your school call you OCBC." There was a bank in Singapore called the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, or OCBC in short. So some cruel kid in school played on the initials of the bank to make fun of Peranakans. They jeered, "Orang Cina Bukan Cina." The words translated as Chinese person, not Chinese.

My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up. And admit it—you say “I’m not black” only because you know black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder. And you want none of that. Don’t deny now. What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say “Don’t call me black, I’m from Trinidad”? I didn’t think so. So you’re black, baby. And here’s the deal with becoming black: You must show that you are offended when such words as “watermelon” or “tar baby” are used in jokes, even if you don’t know what the hell is being talked about—and since you are a Non-American Black, the chances are that you won’t know. (In undergrad a white classmate asks if I like watermelon, I say yes, and another classmate says, Oh my God that is so racist, and I’m confused. “Wait, how?”) You must nod back when a black person nods at you in a heavily white area. It is called the black nod. It is a way for black people to say “You are not alone, I am here too.” In describing black women you admire, always use the word “STRONG” because that is what black women are supposed to be in America. If you are a woman, please do not speak your mind as you are used to doing in your country. Because in America, strong-minded black women are SCARY. And if you are a man, be hyper-mellow, never get too excited, or somebody will worry that you’re about to pull a gun. When you watch television and hear that a “racist slur” was used, you must immediately become offended. Even though you are thinking “But why won’t they tell me exactly what was said?” Even though you would like to be able to decide for yourself how offended to be, or whether to be offended at all, you must nevertheless be very offended. When a crime is reported, pray that it was not committed by a black person, and if it turns out to have been committed by a black person, stay well away from the crime area for weeks, or you might be stopped for fitting the profile. If a black cashier gives poor service to the non-black person in front of you, compliment that person’s shoes or something, to make up for the bad service, because you’re just as guilty for the cashier’s crimes. If you are in an Ivy League college and a Young Republican tells you that you got in only because of Affirmative Action, do not whip out your perfect grades from high school. Instead, gently point out that the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are white women. If you go to eat in a restaurant, please tip generously. Otherwise the next black person who comes in will get awful service, because waiters groan when they get a black table. You see, black people have a gene that makes them not tip, so please overpower that gene. If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.

Grant had a theory about which kinds of circumstances would call for introverted leadership. His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees. To test his idea, he and two colleagues, professors Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and David Hofman of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, carried out a pair of studies of their own. In the first study, Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts—but only when the employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent. In

Wallace would never realize his political ambitions, but he would certainly play a part in seeing that Johnson realized his. After the assassination of President Kennedy, a fingerprint was found on a cardboard box in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. It could not be linked with Oswald, any other employee of the Texas School Book Depository, or any law enforcement officer who had handled the box. Wallace’s print from his previous conviction and the one found on the box were a match, according to fingerprint expert A. Nathan Darby, former head of Austin’s police identification unit. Darby was the most experienced certified latent print examiner in America, with more than thirty-five years of military forensic and police experience. An initial comparison found a match between the two prints on fourteen unique points while Darby ultimately ascertained that the two prints had thirty-two matching points,65 far exceeding the requirement for identification and conviction. “I’m positive,” said Darby. “The finger that made the ink print also made the latent print. It’s a match.” In comparison, “the Dallas police found only three partial fingerprints of Oswald on only two of the boxes in the area.”66

The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.

a.m. Max Shepherd knew few people who loved working the graveyard shift. But for him, working nights at the institute was about as plum a job as he could have wished for. Just a year into his doctoral program, he had landed a position as research assistant to Dr. Elliot Seaborne, the noted seismologist currently heading up the Lunar Seismology Initiative. A NASA-sponsored project, the LSI was yet another component of the agency’s increasing desire to mount a return to the Moon. A new series of lunar missions had been talked about since Shepherd had been in grammar school. But since NASA had scrapped its shuttle program back in 2011, the Moon had become

I'm going to throw some suggestions at you now in rapid succession, assuming you are a father of one or more boys. Here we go: If you speak disparagingly of the opposite sex, or if you refer to females as sex objects, those attitudes will translate directly into dating and marital relationships later on. Remember that your goal is to prepare a boy to lead a family when he's grown and to show him how to earn the respect of those he serves. Tell him it is great to laugh and have fun with his friends, but advise him not to be "goofy." Guys who are goofy are not respected, and people, especially girls and women, do not follow boys and men whom they disrespect. Also, tell your son that he is never to hit a girl under any circumstances. Remind him that she is not as strong as he is and that she is deserving of his respect. Not only should he not hurt her, but he should protect her if she is threatened. When he is strolling along with a girl on the street, he should walk on the outside, nearer the cars. That is symbolic of his responsibility to take care of her. When he is on a date, he should pay for her food and entertainment. Also (and this is simply my opinion), girls should not call boys on the telephone-at least not until a committed relationship has developed. Guys must be the initiators, planning the dates and asking for the girl's company. Teach your son to open doors for girls and to help them with their coats or their chairs in a restaurant. When a guy goes to her house to pick up his date, tell him to get out of the car and knock on the door. Never honk. Teach him to stand, in formal situations, when a woman leaves the room or a table or when she returns. This is a way of showing respect for her. If he treats her like a lady, she will treat him like a man. It's a great plan. Make a concerted effort to teach sexual abstinence to your teenagers, just as you teach them to abstain from drug and alcohol usage and other harmful behavior. Of course you can do it! Young people are fully capable of understanding that irresponsible sex is not in their best interest and that it leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, rejection, etc. In many cases today, no one is sharing this truth with teenagers. Parents are embarrassed to talk about sex, and, it disturbs me to say, churches are often unwilling to address the issue. That creates a vacuum into which liberal sex counselors have intruded to say, "We know you're going to have sex anyway, so why not do it right?" What a damning message that is. It is why herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases are spreading exponentially through the population and why unwanted pregnancies stalk school campuses. Despite these terrible social consequences, very little support is provided even for young people who are desperately looking for a valid reason to say no. They're told that "safe sex" is fine if they just use the right equipment. You as a father must counterbalance those messages at home. Tell your sons that there is no safety-no place to hide-when one lives in contradiction to the laws of God! Remind them repeatedly and emphatically of the biblical teaching about sexual immorality-and why someone who violates those laws not only hurts himself, but also wounds the girl and cheats the man she will eventually marry. Tell them not to take anything that doesn't belong to them-especially the moral purity of a woman.

The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet’s followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made.

No wonder, then, that in the early stages of the development of any science different men confronting the same range of phenomena, but not usually all the same range of phenomena, describe and interpret them in different ways. What is surprising, and perhaps also unique in its degree to the fields we call science, is that such initial divergences should ever largely disappear. For they do disappear to a very considerable extent and then apparently once and for all. Furthermore, their disappearance is usually caused by the triumph of one of the pre-paradigm schools, which, because of its own characteristic beliefs and preconceptions, emphasized only some special part of the two sizable and inchoate pool of information,

We that are bred up in learning, and destinated by our parents to this end, we suffer our childhood in the grammar-school, which Austin calls magnam tyrannidem, et grave malum, and compares it to the torments of martyrdom; when we come to the university, if we live of the college allowance, as Phalaris objected to the Leontines, [Greek: pan ton endeis plaen limou kai phobou] , needy of all things but hunger and fear, or if we be maintained but partly by our parents' cost, do expend in unnecessary maintenance, books and degrees, before we come to any perfection, five hundred pounds, or a thousand marks. If by this price of the expense of time, our bodies and spirits, our substance and patrimonies, we cannot purchase those small rewards, which are ours by law, and the right of inheritance, a poor parsonage, or a vicarage of 50 l. per annum, but we must pay to the patron for the lease of a life (a spent and out-worn life) either in annual pension, or above the rate of a copyhold, and that with the hazard and loss of our souls, by simony and perjury, and the forfeiture of all our spiritual preferments, in esse and posse, both present and to come. What father after a while will be so improvident to bring up his son to his great charge, to this necessary beggary? What Christian will be so irreligious, to bring up his son in that course of life, which by all probability and necessity, coget ad turpia, enforcing to sin, will entangle him in simony and perjury, when as the poet said, Invitatus ad hæc aliquis de ponte negabit: a beggar's brat taken from the bridge where he sits a begging, if he knew the inconvenience, had cause to refuse it." This being thus, have not we fished fair all this while, that are initiate divines, to find no better fruits of our labours, [2030] hoc est cur palles, cur quis non prandeat hoc est? do we macerate ourselves for this? Is it for this we rise so early all the year long? [2031] "Leaping" (as he saith) "out of our beds, when we hear the bell ring, as if we had heard a thunderclap." If this be all the respect, reward and honour we shall have, [2032] frange leves calamos, et scinde Thalia libellos: let us give over our books, and betake ourselves to some other course of life; to what end should we study?

And then there was the illogical art of female friendship itself, the way it seemed to demand an ability to both keep and reveal secrets using precise timing. Whenever she moved to a new town, girls would take her aside at Sunday school and breathlessly confide their crushes on certain boys. She listened to these confessions, faithfully promising she would never tell. And she didn’t. Which was all wrong because it turned out she was supposed to tell. Her job as confidante was to break that confidence by telling Boy X that Girl Y thought he was cute, thus initiating a chain reaction of interest between the two parties. “Why don’t you just tell him yourself?” she’d say to these would-be friends. “He’s right there.” The girls would draw back in horror.

That is what I want our young nascent readers to become: expert, flexible code switchers -- between print and digital mediums now and later between and among the multiple future communication mediums....I conceptualize the initial development of learning to think in each medium as largely separated into distinct domains in the first school years, until a point in time when the particular characteristics of the two mediums are each well developed and internalized. That is an essential point. I want the child to have parallel levels of fluency, if you will, in each medium, just as if he or she were similarly fluent in speaking Spanish and English. In this way the uniqueness of the cognitive processes honed by each medium would be there from the start.

Overall, Zinni’s rules read like an updating of how to apply the Marine Corps culture to today’s conflicts: Stay loose. Stay focused. Keep it simple. And be honest. Similar messages can be heard in many parts of the Corps, wherever there are good officers willing to seize the initiative—that is, who care more about their mission and their Marines than they do about their careers. This is how Major Davis at the Drill Instructors School summarizes the Marine Corps way of doing business: “Concentrate on doing a single task as simply as you can, execute it flawlessly, take care of your people, and go home.”That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the “doctrine”that the Army so loves to write and cite. But those four steps offer an efficient way to run any organization.

It is not from any desire to be contentious that we dissent with those who claim that “all of Masonry is in the Ritual.” We are thoroughly conversant with all the arguments advanced by that school of Masonic thought. But if they are correct, if it be true that “ALL OF MASONRY IS IN THE RITUAL,” what has Masonry to offer the initiate? In fact, why does it exist? To teach a few moral lessons which would seem to be more within the province of the Church, and which in actual practice are there given greater emphasis and, quite frankly, are better taught? To perpetuate an absurd allegory (if it have no meaning beyond the ritualistic explanation) which in itself contradicts the account found in the same Bible which Ritual proclaims to be the “Great Light of Freemasonry”?

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley learned the same thing when they recorded hundreds of hours of interactions between children and adults in forty-two families from across a wide socioeconomic spectrum and assessed the children’s development from nine months to three years. Children in well-to-do families, whose parents were typically college-educated professionals, heard an average of 2,153 words an hour spoken to them. In contrast, the children of low-income families heard an average only 616 words per hour. By their third birthday, the children in well-to-do families heard 30 million more words than economically deprived children and the amount of conversation parents had with their infants was directly proportional to IQ test scores assessed at three years of age and the performance in school of these children at ages nine and ten. (Hart and Risley 2003) The exciting part is that Hart and Risley’s research has spawned conscious parenting initiatives thanks to technology in the form of LENA (Language Environment Analysis) devices. LENA devices work like pedometers except they keep track of words rather than steps. The Thirty Million Words Initiative in Chicago is making LENA devices available to parents so they can track the numbers of words they expose their children to. After six weeks, researchers in Chicago found a 32 percent increase in the number of words the children heard. Says Dr. Dana Suskind, Director of the Thirty Million Words Initiative: “Every parent has the ability to grow their children’s brain and impact their future.” (Suskind 2013)

Over the course of the 1970s conservatives made the endangered child into a kind of political and rhetorical abstraction, a way of thinking about the country and its citizens that could help advance a wide range of policy initiatives. They opposed the counterculture on the grounds that rock and roll caused adolescents to lose respect for family life. They promoted the War on Drugs with racially tinged morality tales about addicted inner-city mothers and, crucially, the “superpredator” “crack babies” to whom those mothers supposedly gave birth. (That particular epidemic was later shown to be a myth.)40 And when Anita Bryant led a campaign to allow Dade County to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring teachers for public schools, she named the effort “Save Our Children.” The fear that tied all of these campaigns together was of the ease with which children could be victimized or else corrupted and turned against the society that was supposed to nurture them.

I felt as though the temple curtain had been drawn aside without warning and I, a goggle-eyed stranger somehow mistaken for an initiate, had been ushered into the sanctuary to witness the mystery of mysteries. I saw a phantasmagoria, a living tapestry of forms jeweled in minute detail. They danced together like guests at a rowdy wedding. They changed their shapes. Within themselves they juggled geometrical shards like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. They sent forth extensions of themselves like the flares of suns. Yet all their activity was obviously interrelated; each being's actions were in step with its neighbors'. They were like bees swarming: They obviously recognised each other and were communicating avidly, but it was impossible to know what they were saying. They enacted a pageant whose beauty awed me. As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily visible—"painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course, we all knew that life was more a process than a structure, but we tended to forget this, because a structure was so much easier to study. This film reminded me how far our static concepts still were from the actual business of living. As I thought how any one of those scintillating cells potentially could become a whole speckled frog or a person, I grew surer than ever that my work so far had disclosed only a few aspects of a process-control system as varied and widespread as life itself, of which we'd been ignorant until then.

Artists and designers have a largely shared skill set and knowledge base but the work they create, however indistinguishable in terms of technique, subject matter and visual language, is made for entirely different reasons. Attempts to define or make clear distinctions between art and design are always contestable, but at the beginning of a diagnostic process it is useful to identify a simple delineation between the two: Art An artist's practice generally emerges from their own individual concerns explored over varying durations in the studio. The work is then usually presented to a knowing public either in galleries or in designated public spaces. Design Design is largely initiated externally from the needs or desires of a client or external body. The functionality of the designed solution is as important as its desirability, craft and aesthetics. Design is in the public domain and, as such, its messages, meanings and functions are inextricably linked to the political, social and economic concerns of its audience/ user and its context.

To implement these changes, the school initially followed a more typical, top-down strategy of reform: the state sent in a consultant to implement changes. “It was an outsider who came in and talked about the civil rights movement and did touchy feely group discussions,” Guthertz recalls. “Someone else came in and for one day taught behavior management strategies that focused on controlling and penalizing students versus making changes in teaching practices that would engage and support them. That blew up at the school. The administration got rid of that program.” The issues that come with this kind of approach to school reform—“do what the district, state, or consultants say”—have been a recurring theme in the long careers of Guthertz, Roth, and McKamey. “It comes off as an attempt to hijack the effort by the teachers to think about education,” McKamey comments. “It’s the deepest disrespect. The teacher has been teaching for ten years and someone is going to come in and say, ‘I’m going to show you something.’ Most of these people have never taught in the classroom.

Christianity has been the means of reducing more languages to writing than have all other factors combined. It has created more schools, more theories of education, and more systems than has any other one force. More than any other power in history it has impelled men to fight suffering, whether that suffering has come from disease, war or natural disasters. It has built thousands of hospitals, inspired the emergence of the nursing and medical professions, and furthered movement for public health and the relief and prevention of famine. Although explorations and conquests which were in part its outgrowth led to the enslavement of Africans for the plantations of the Americas, men and women whose consciences were awakened by Christianity and whose wills it nerved brought about the abolition of slavery (in England and America). Men and women similarly moved and sustained wrote into the laws of Spain and Portugal provisions to alleviate the ruthless exploitation of the Indians of the New World. Wars have often been waged in the name of Christianity. They have attained their most colossal dimensions through weapons and large–scale organization initiated in (nominal) Christendom. Yet from no other source have there come as many and as strong movements to eliminate or regulate war and to ease the suffering brought by war. From its first centuries, the Christian faith has caused many of its adherents to be uneasy about war. It has led minorities to refuse to have any part in it. It has impelled others to seek to limit war by defining what, in their judgment, from the Christian standpoint is a "just war." In the turbulent Middle Ages of Europe it gave rise to the Truce of God and the Peace of God. In a later era it was the main impulse in the formulation of international law. But for it, the League of Nations and the United Nations would not have been. By its name and symbol, the most extensive organization ever created for the relief of the suffering caused by war, the Red Cross, bears witness to its Christian origin. The list might go on indefinitely. It includes many another humanitarian projects and movements, ideals in government, the reform of prisons and the emergence of criminology, great art and architecture, and outstanding literature.

OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign

Speaking of gendered differences in reaction and action—you’ve talked of a certain “bullying reception” to your book here in New Zealand by a certain set of older male critics. The omniscient narrator, the idea that you “had to be everywhere,” seems to have affronted some male readers, as has the length of the book. Have you experienced this reaction in the UK, too, or in Canada? Has it been a peculiarly New Zealand response, perhaps because of the necessarily small pool of literary competition here? This is a point that has been perhaps overstated. There’s been a lot written about what I said, and in fact the way I think and feel about the reviewing culture we have in New Zealand has changed a lot through reading the responses and objections of others. Initially I used the word “bullying” only to remark that, as we all learn at school, more often than not someone’s objections are more to do with their own shortcomings or failures than with yours, and that’s something that you have to remember when you’re seeing your artistic efforts devalued or dismissed in print. I don’t feel bullied when I receive a negative review, but I do think that some of the early reviewers refused to engage with the book on its own terms, and that refusal seemed to me to have a lot to do with my gender and my age. To even things out, I called attention to the gender and age of those reviewers, which at the time seemed only fair. I feel that it’s very important to say that sexism is a hegemonic problem, written in to all kinds of cultural attitudes that are held by men and women alike. As a culture we are much more comfortable with the idea of the male thinker than the female thinker, simply because there are so many more examples, throughout history, of male thinkers; as an image and as an idea, the male thinker is familiar to us, and acts in most cases as a default. Consequently female thinkers are often unacknowledged and discouraged, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by men, and sometimes by women. I am lucky, following the Man Booker announcement, that my work is now being read very seriously indeed; but that is a privilege conferred for the most part by the status of the prize, and I know that I am the exception rather than the rule. I’d like to see a paradigm shift, and I’m confident that one is on the way, but the first thing that needs to happen is a collective acknowledgment that reviewing culture is gendered—that everything is gendered—and that until each of us makes a conscious effort to address inequality, we will each remain a part of the problem, rather than a part of the solution. Protesting the fact of inequality is like protesting global warming or evolution: it’s a conservative blindness, born out of cowardice and hostility.

Early in a career that began in 1912 when he was 19 years old, Romain de Tirtoff, the Russian-born artists who called himself Erté after the french pronunciation of his initials, was regarded as a 'miraculous magician,' whose spectacular fashions transformed the ordinary into the outstanding, whose period costumes made the present vanish mystically into the past, and whose décors converted bare stages into sparkling wonderlands of fun and fancy. When his career ended with his death in 1990, Erté was considered as 'one of the twentieth-century's single most important influences on fashion,' 'a mirror of fashion for 75 years,' and the unchallenged 'prince of the music hall,' who had been accorded the most significant international honors in the field of design and whose work was represented in major museums and private collections throughout the world. It is not surprising that Erté's imaginative designs for fashion, theater, opera, ballet, music hall, film and commerce achieved such renown, for they are as crisp and innovative in their color and design as they are elegant and extravagant in character, and redolent of the romance of the pre- and post-Great War era, the period when Erté's hand became mature, fully developed and representative of its time. Art historians and scholars define Ertés unique style as transitional Art Deco, because it bridges the visual gab between fin-de-siècle schools of Symbolism, with its ethereal quality, Art Nouveau, with its high ornament, and the mid-1920s movement of Art Deco, with its inspirational sources and concise execution.

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

to say that I saw ways to connect with Americans that Barack and his West Wing advisers didn’t fully recognize, at least initially. Rather than doing interviews with big newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down with influential “mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in audience of women. Watching my young staffers interact with their phones, seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in news and chat with their high school friends via social media, I realized there was opportunity to be tapped there as well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of 2011 to promote Joining Forces and then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people increasingly spent their time. It was a revelation. All of it was a revelation. With my soft power, I was finding I could be strong. If reporters and television cameras wanted to follow me, then I was going to take them places. They could come watch me and Jill Biden paint a wall, for example, at a nondescript row house in the Northwest part of Washington. There was nothing inherently interesting about two ladies with paint rollers, but it baited a certain hook. It brought everyone to the doorstep of Sergeant Johnny Agbi, who’d been twenty-five years old and a medic in Afghanistan when his transport helicopter was attacked, shattering his spine, injuring his brain, and requiring a long rehabilitation at Walter Reed. His first floor was now being retrofitted to accommodate his wheelchair—its doorways widened, its kitchen sink lowered—part of a joint effort between a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together and the company that owned Sears and Kmart. This was the thousandth such home they’d renovated on behalf of veterans in need. The cameras caught all of it—the soldier, his house, the goodwill and energy being poured in.

Basically, attention follows attachment. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to secure the child's attention. When attachment is weak, the attention of the child will be correspondingly difficult to engage. One of the telltale signs of a child who isn't paying attention is a parent having continually to raise his voice or repeat things. Some of our most persistent demands as parents have to do with their attention: “Listen to me,” “Look at me when I'm talking,” “Now look here,” “What did I just say?” or most simply, “Pay attention.” When children become peer-oriented, their attention instinctively turns toward peers. It goes against the natural instincts of a peer-oriented child to attend to parents or teachers. The sounds emanating from adults are regarded by the child's attention mechanisms as so much noise and interference, lacking in meaning and relevance to the attachment needs that dominate his emotional life. Peer orientation creates deficits in the child's attention to adults because adults are not top priority in the attention hierarchy of peer-oriented children. It is no accident that attention deficit disorder was initially considered a school problem, a child's failing to pay attention to the teacher. It is also no accident that the explosion in the number of diagnosed cases of attention deficit disorder has paralleled the evolution of peer orientation in our society and is worse where peer orientation is most predominant — urban centers and inner-city schools. This is not to suggest that all problems in paying attention stem from this source and that there are no other factors involved in ADD. On the other hand, not to recognize the fundamental role of attachment in governing attention is to ignore the reality of many children diagnosed with ADD. Deficits in attachments to adults contribute significantly to deficits in attention to adults. If attachment is disordered, attention will also be disordered.

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.

Our critique is not opposed to the *dogmatic procedure* of reason in its pure knowledge as science (for science must always be dogmatic, that is, derive its proof from secure *a priori* principles), but only to *dogmatism*, that is, to the presumption that it is possible to make any progress with pure (philosophical) knowledge from concepts according to principles, such as reason has long been in the habit of using, without first inquiring in what way, and by what right, it has come to posses them. Dogmatism is therefore the dogmatic procedure of pure reason, *without a preceding critique of its own powers*; and our opposition to this is not intended to defend that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, much less that skepticism which makes short work of the whole of metaphysics. On the contrary, our critique is meant to form a necessary preparation in support of metaphysics as a thorough science, which must necessarily be carried out dogmatically and strictly systematically, so as to satisfy all the demands, no so much of the public at large, as of the Schools. This is an indispensable demand for it has undertaken to carry out its work entirely *a priori*, and thus to carry it out to the complete satisfaction of speculative reason. In the execution of this plan, as traced out by the critique, that is, in a future system of metaphysics, we shall have to follow the strict method of the celebrated Wolff, the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers. He was the first to give an example (and by his example initiated, in Germany, that spirit of thoroughness which is not yet extinct) of how the secure course of a science could be attained only through the lawful establishment of principles, the clear determination of concepts, the attempt at strictness of proof and avoidance of taking bold leaps in our inferences. He was therefore most eminently qualified to give metaphysics the dignity of a science, if it had only occurred to him to prepare his field in advance by criticism of the organ, that is, of pure reason itself―an omission due not so much to himself as to the dogmatic mentality of his age, about which the philosophers of his own, as well as of all previous times, have no right to reproach one another. Those who reject both the method of Wolff and the procedure of the critique of pure reason can have no other aim but to shake off the fetters of *science* altogether, and thus to change work into play, certainty into opinion and philosophy into philodoxy." ―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 28-29

Sky's The Limit" [Intro] Good evening ladies and gentlemen How's everybody doing tonight I'd like to welcome to the stage, the lyrically acclaimed I like this young man because when he came out He came out with the phrase, he went from ashy to classy I like that So everybody in the house, give a warm round of applause For the Notorious B.I.G The Notorious B.I.G., ladies and gentlemen give it up for him y'all [Verse 1] A nigga never been as broke as me - I like that When I was young I had two pair of Lees, besides that The pin stripes and the gray The one I wore on Mondays and Wednesdays While niggas flirt I'm sewing tigers on my shirts, and alligators You want to see the inside, I see you later Here comes the drama, oh, that's that nigga with the fake, blaow Why you punch me in my face, stay in your place Play your position, here come my intuition Go in this nigga pocket, rob him while his friends watching And hoes clocking, here comes respect His crew's your crew or they might be next Look at they man eye, big man, they never try So we rolled with them, stole with them I mean loyalty, niggas bought me milks at lunch The milks was chocolate, the cookies, butter crunch 88 Oshkosh and blue and white dunks, pass the blunts [Hook: 112] Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on Just keep on pressing on Sky is the limit and you know that you can have What you want, be what you want Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on Just keep on pressing on Sky is the limit and you know that you can have What you want, be what you want, have what you want, be what you want [Verse 2] I was a shame, my crew was lame I had enough heart for most of them Long as I got stuff from most of them It's on, even when I was wrong I got my point across They depicted me the boss, of course My orange box-cutter make the world go round Plus I'm fucking bitches ain't my homegirls now Start stacking, dabbled in crack, gun packing Nickname Medina make the seniors tote my Niñas From gym class, to English pass off a global The only nigga with a mobile can't you see like Total Getting larger in waists and tastes Ain't no telling where this felon is heading, just in case Keep a shell at the tip of your melon, clear the space Your brain was a terrible thing to waste 88 on gates, snatch initial name plates Smoking spliffs with niggas, real-life beginner killers Praying God forgive us for being sinners, help us out [Hook] [Verse 3] After realizing, to master enterprising I ain't have to be in school by ten, I then Began to encounter with my counterparts On how to burn the block apart, break it down into sections Drugs by the selections Some use pipes, others use injections Syringe sold separately Frank the Deputy Quick to grab my Smith & Wesson like my dick was missing To protect my position, my corner, my lair While we out here, say the Hustlers Prayer If the game shakes me or breaks me I hope it makes me a better man Take a better stand Put money in my mom's hand Get my daughter this college grant so she don't need no man Stay far from timid Only make moves when your heart's in it And live the phrase sky's the limit Motherfuckers See you chumps on top [Hook]