Internally Broken Quotes

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

The Fulcrum is not the first institution to have learned an eternal truth of humankind: No need for guards when you can convince people to collaborate in their own internment.

We must also realize that nothing happens without a purpose. Nothing. Not even broken hearts. Not even pain. That broken heart and that pain are lessons and signs for us. They are warnings that something is wrong. They are warnings that we need to make a change. Just like the pain of being burned is what warns us to remove our hand from the fire, emotional pain warns us that we need to make an internal change. We need to detach. Pain is a form of forced detachment. Like the loved one who hurts you again and again and again, the more dunya hurts us, the more we inevitably detach from it. The more we inevitably stop loving it.

People that hold onto hate for so long do so because they want to avoid dealing with their pain. They falsely believe if they forgive they are letting their enemy believe they are a doormat. What they don’t understand is hatred can’t be isolated or turned off. It manifests in their health, choices and belief systems. Their values and religious beliefs make adjustments to justify their negative emotions. Not unlike malware infesting a hard drive, their spirit slowly becomes corrupted and they make choices that don’t make logical sense to others. Hatred left unaddressed will crash a person’s spirit. The only thing he or she can do is to reboot, by fixing him or herself, not others. This might require installing a firewall of boundaries or parental controls on their emotions. Regardless of the approach, we are all connected on this "network of life" and each of us is responsible for cleaning up our spiritual registry.

Vincent Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because he thought it would get the happiness inside him. Many people thought he was mad and stupid for doing so because the paint was toxic, never mind that it was obvious that eating paint couldn't possibly have any direct correlation to one's happiness, but i never saw that. If you were so unhappy that even the maddest ideas could possibly work, like painting the walls of your internal organs yellow, then you are going to do it. It's really no different than falling in love or taking drugs. There is a greater risk of getting your heart broken or overdosing, but people still do ir everyday because there was always that chance it could make things better. Everyone has their own yellow paint.

The world slowed to the beat of an ancient, ageless drum. Celaena behold the room. The blood was everywhere. Before the bed, Nehemia's bodyguards lay with their throats cut from ear to ear, their internal organs spilling out onto the floor. And on the bed... On the bed... She could hear the shouts growing closer, reaching the room, but their words were somehow muffled, as though she were underwater, the sounds coming from the surface above. Celaena stood in the center of the freezing bedroom, gazing at the bed, and the princess's broken body atop it. Nehemia was dead.

It’s the subtle shudder when you hear the other’s person’s name. The times when you think about their smile and find it impossible to keep a straight face. It’s those small, precious moments you wish they were with you, because nothing means anything until you share it with them. More than a passion and love alone, it’s that internal alchemy that makes them part of you.

Whatever the internal mechanism that moderated the human capacity for joy, mine had long been broken beyond repair. And I knew this was a poor substitute, a base shadow cast on the cave wall, a reflection in a tarnished mirror of ordinary things like happiness, love, and hope. But there were moments, fleeting moments, lost in the responses of my body to his, when it was almost enough. And, God, I wanted, I wanted. These crumbs of bliss.

There's a simplicity and a sense of adventure to being alone, and I sometimes envy you for having it, as you explore Paris. Even when you're getting your heart broken, you can still wake up and not know what's going to happen next.

America…is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV> Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

I love balls and parties that have a high probability of ending dramatically. But I could cause an international incident - possibly a war - if I attend this celebration.

But theirs had always been a broken country. It had never been unified, not truly; it had only ever been held tightly together by steel and blood, a facade of internal unity, while factions always threated to split from within. Rin had forced those tensions to the surface, and then to their breaking point. She'd forced the Nikara to confront the greatest lie it had ever told about itself — that there had been a united Nikara Empire at all.

We are diamonds in the rough Through the thrust and toil, we come out strong We are the breath of the earth, Our wombs tell of humanity's birth We are seeds splattered on putrid soils Still we sprout, through every storm We are not here to survive, We are here to live... Inward and outward In the incandescence of our existence Yes, our voices may sometimes be broken But our spirit remains indestructible. We are women, unapologetically!

Because each nation has its own history of thieving and lies and broken faith, therefore there can only flourish international suspicion and jealousy, and international moral shame becomes anæmic to a degree of ludicrousness. The nation's bagpipe of righteous indignation has so often changed its tune according to the variation of time and to the altered groupings of the alliances of diplomacy, that it can be enjoyed with amusement as the variety performance of the political music hall.

Taken from the dedication in my debut novel Exactly 23 days. To honour all women on International Women's day. For women everywhere: When you know you are finally mended, spread the word, hold out your hand, share some love from your heart and some laughter from your soul and be there for a new member of the sisterhood who needs your help. Let's all help our sisters worldwide to stand tall and know, they can and they will recover, survive and thrive, to live the life they deserve. To all the sisters who reached out and held my hand in whatever way you could, who cried my tears with me, and laughter my laughter too, I thank every one of you. I survived.

The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown.

It isn’t just racism. Being part of an oppressed minority group—being queer or disabled, for example—can cause C-PTSD if you are made to feel unsafe because of your identity. Poverty can be a contributing factor to C-PTSD. These factors traumatize people and cause brain changes that push them toward anxiety and self-loathing. Because of those changes, victims internalize the blame for their failures. They tell themselves they are awkward, lazy, antisocial, or stupid, when what’s really happening is that they live in a discriminatory society where their success is limited by white supremacy and class stratification. The system itself becomes the abuser. When my boss said I was “different,” I thought it meant broken. Now I think it meant something else.

If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into hap-hazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, thought they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal's structure. Mental paitents are split and broken structures of this same kind.... They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, physical reality...

I do question everything. But I want to have my questions. I want to have more thoughts than my mind can hold, so many that I have to write them in fragments like a madman.

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view” that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments— scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior. ” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language.

One day, it will all make sense, it will all be revealed. Until then, we learn to live and accept our shadows, our Déjà vu's, our dreams, our intuition that takes us to places that our minds never conceived, our bodies only perceived and our souls gladly remembered. Conversations and experiences amuse me, for I am experimenting with my feelings in ways that I can only do down here. Language makes up for a very interesting, yet bizarre way of putting thoughts into spoken form for the sound to move on in other peoples' ears, but every language, every sound, every word carries with it a long history, a deep culture and the souls of the many people who have previously used it throughout the centuries. Our hearts give us direction, hope and the passion to keep moving forward.. But what we do when they're frozen, broken, torn apart by an unhealthy way of living is what gives us new strength to push forward or kills us completely. Deep inside, we feed the entities that empower the fight between our internal demons and angels. We feed them with our thoughts, our emotions, our self-talk and the external talk that we lower our shields to at times. Whether good or bad, this brings about a change internally and at times there isn't much we can do to protect ourselves. At times, we need to let things be and go along with it. Of course, we're all worried, stressed, confused and lacking direction at times and we're in the same way at peace, stable and walking in the right direction once we get things sorted. Give it some time, give it some light, give it some love. You're not very far away.

A girl should never stop thinking," she says. "Otherwise we'll become what our world thinks of us.

That broken heart and that pain are lessons and signs for us. They are warnings that something is wrong. They are warnings that we need to make a change. Just like the pain of being burned is what warns us to remove our hand from the fire, emotional pain warns us that we need to make an internal change.

The German communist party, for years the strongest outside the Soviet Union itself, was broken in a matter of a few months. Its defeat was a serious blow to the prestige of the international communist movement.11

However, revolt is the only way out of the colonial situation, and the colonized realizes it sooner or later. His condition is absolute and cries for an absolute solution; a break and not a compromise. He has been torn away from his past and cut off from his future, his traditions are dying and he loses the hope of acquiring a new culture. He has neither language, nor flag, nor technical knowledge, nor national or international existence, nor rights, nor duties. He possesses nothing, is no longer anything and no longer hopes for anything. Moreover, the solution becomes more urgent every day. The mechanism for destroying the colonized cannot but worsen daily. The more oppression increases, the more the colonizer needs justification. The more he must debase the colonized, the more guilty he feels, the more he must justify himself, etc. How can he emerge from this increasingly explosive circle except by rupture, explosion? The colonial situation, by its own internal inevitability, brings on revolt. For the colonial condition cannot be adjusted to; like an iron collar, it can only be broken.

But inside, I am not at all attractive. I am not internally appealing by Mother Nature’s standards, because I do not have a working reproductive system. Reproduction is why we exist, after all. Reproduction is required to complete the circle of life. We are born, we reproduce, we raise our offspring, we die, our offspring reproduce, they raise their offspring, they die. Generation after generation of birth, life, and death. A beautiful circle not meant to be broken. Yet . . . I am the break.

This is how we arrive at a broken-windows world: Rules are invoked but not enforced. Principles are idealized but not defended. International law is treated not as a complement to traditional geopolitical leadership but as the superior alternative to it.

Because internalizers look within themselves for reasons why things go wrong, they may not always recognize abuse for what it is. If parents don’t label their own behavior as abusive, their child won’t label it that way either. Even as adults, many people have no idea that what happened to them in childhood was abusive. As a result, they may not recognize abusive behavior in their adult relationships. For instance, Vivian hesitated to tell me about her husband’s anger, saying it was too silly and insignificant to talk about. She then sheepishly told me that he’d broken things when angry and once threw her craft project on the floor because he wanted her to keep the house neater. As it turned out, Vivian was embarrassed to tell me because she thought I’d say his behavior was normal and tell her she was making a mountain out of a molehill. Another client, a middle-aged man, recounted incidents of childhood abuse nonchalantly, with no recognition of how serious it had been. For example, he said his father once choked him until he wet himself and then locked him in the basement. Recalling that his father had once thrown a stereo set, he admitted that his father “might have had a temper.” As he spoke, his demeanor clearly indicated that he accepted this behavior as normal.

But when norms and interests come into tension, most states will side with their own interests. And yet pro-refugee rights advocacy and policy-making is dominated by a dogmatic insistence that reciting international law is the most effective way to influence state behaviour.

Subversion can only be treason if government is legitimate.  When a government has broken international law and its own internal laws it ceases to be legitimate.  At that point a man of conscience and true patriotism is honor bound to take actions intended to restore legitimate government to his country. 

How thin she is in her coffin, how sharp her nose has grown! Her eyelashes lie straight as arrows. And, you know, when she fell, nothing was crushed, nothing was broken! Nothing but that "handful of blood." A dessertspoonful, that is. From internal injury. A strange thought: if only it were possible not to bury her? For if they take her away, then... oh, no, it is almost incredible that they take her away! I am not mad and I am not raving - on the contrary, my mind was never so lucid - but what shall I do when again there is no one, only the two rooms, and me alone with the pledges? Madness, madness, madness! I worried her to death, that is what it is!

I stood backstage watching the words roll on the teleprompter. In just two months, the world had turned upside down. We’d seen a regime fall in Tunisia, broken from a longtime U.S. ally in Egypt, and intervened in Libya. History, it seemed, was turning in the direction of young people in the streets, and we had placed the United States of America on their side. Where this drama would turn next was uncertain—protests were already rattling a monarch in Bahrain, a corrupt leader in Yemen, a strongman in Syria.

Against the background of bland colors he projected an unfadable blackness. In a world of men with harrowed faces, with smashed eyes, bloody, bruised and disfigured limbs, among the fetid, broken human bodies, of which I had already seen so many, he seemed an example of neat perfection that could not be sullied: the smooth, polished skin of his face, the bright golden hair showing under his peaked cap, his pure metal eyes. Every movement of his body seemed propelled by some tremendous internal force. The granite sound of his language was ideally suited to order the death of inferior, forlorn creatures. I was stung by a twinge of envy I had never experienced before, and I admired the glittering death's-head and crossbones that embellished his tall cap. I thought how good it would be to have such a gleaming and hairless skull instead of my Gypsy face which was so feared and disliked by decent people. The officer surveyed me sharply. I felt like a squashed caterpillar oozing in the dust, a creature that could not harm anyone yet aroused loathing and disgust. In the presence of such a resplendent being, armed in all the symbols of might and majesty, I was genuinely ashamed of my appearance. I had nothing against his killing me.

Suppose it was painful," she whispers. "All that broken skin." She has been so steely I can almost forget she's in mourning.

I want to have my questions. I want to have more thoughts than my mind can hold.

A girl should never stop thinking.

All out weird shit internally overlaps like techtonic plates, and we just wait for them to grind together, brace for the earthquake.

One broken hind leg," he went on. "Three broken ribs, one at least of which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must have been jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through him. One chance in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn't a chance in ten thousand.

Police internal affairs are in the business of protecting corrupt and incompetent police officers from prosecution due to the extensive range of laws that they have blatantly broken.

We don’t like to hurt. And there is no worse pain for fallen people than facing an emptiness we cannot fill. To enter into pain seems rather foolish when we can run from it through denial. We simply cannot get it through our head that, with a nature twisted by sin, the route to joy always involves the very worst sort of internal suffering we can imagine. We rebel at that thought. We weren’t designed to hurt. The physical and personal capacities to feel that God built into us were intended to provide pleasures, like good health and close relationships. When they don’t, when our head throbs with tension and our heart is broken by rejection, we want relief. With deep passion, we long to experience what we were designed to enjoy.

When doubt is present in your consciousness it indicates a much more profound problem. The real problem is the personal lie. Everyone has one: It is a story that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we do and do not deserve in life. Your personal lie is a function of all of the broken pieces of your puzzle—all of the elements of your history, all of your experiences, all that you have been taught about yourself merging with all that you have made up about yourself. Your personal lie circulates throughout your entire being and determines how you move, or if you can move at all. It is a function of what is stored on your internal landscape, your perceptions and misconceptions about life and how you fit into the scheme of things.

What's the point of a spark of light if it stands alone? The key is, and will always be, synergy. Without it, each and every light being will forever feel broken, misplaced, and internally crippled.

Interior turmoil arises when we realize that we may have hurt, degraded, or frightened someone with our many outbursts. We’ll feel some sense of release with the expression of our strong emotions, but we’ll be disappointed about our poor relating skills or ashamed about our lack of control. Expressing strong emotions at others can damage our ego structure and our sense of self-esteem. Then, our lowered self-esteem tends to make us less able to manage our emotions properly the next time, and we tend to slide into an almost uncontrollable habit of flinging our strong emotions all over the place. We become trapped in a cycle of attacks and retreats, enmeshment and isolation, and explosions and apologies. Our internal checks and balances seem to get broken, and we become emotionally volatile.

The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German's blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying. In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death. Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

Co-commitment is made possible when two people deal with their sense of responsibility and integrity. Being alive to the full range of your feelings, speaking the truth at the deepest level of which you are capable, and learning to keep agreements: all of these actions are required to master a co-committed relationship. When these three requirements are met, the real intimacy begins to unfold. A co-committed relationship may look like magic, but it really is composed of tiny moments of choice. Choosing to tell the truth. Noticing that you are projecting, and finding the courage to take responsibility. Choosing to feel rather than go numb. Choosing to communicate about a broken agreement. Choosing to support your partner as he or she goes through deep feeling. Ultimately, once these skills are practiced and internalized, the relationship flows effortlessly. Once your nervous system learns to stay at a high level of aliveness and does not need to numb itself by lying, breaking agreements, and hiding feelings, the creativity starts to flow.

One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelessness is what most frightened Lila in the course of her life. The loss of those boundaries in her brother, whom she loved more than anyone in her family, had frightened her, and the disintegration of Stefano in the passage from fiancé to husband terrified her. I learned only from her notebooks how much her wedding night had scarred her and how she feared the potential distortion of her husband’s body, his disfigurement by the internal impulses of desire and rage or, on the contrary, of subtle plans, base acts. Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter.

The world needs a janitor, to clean its stains of barbarianism - the world needs a mechanic, to fix its broken conscience in the fog of socio-cultural conditioning - the world needs a plumber, to fix its internal plumbing that carries courage, compassion and acceptance. And mark you, it doesn't matter whatsoever, of what color your collar is, what matters above everything else, is that - are you responsible, and then, are you committed and courageous enough to act on that responsibility!

These people all thought they knew him. They believed he was a whore, and sometimes he thought he was too. But he really wasn’t. Every partner he’d ever had broken it off with him when they couldn’t handle him at his worst points. A lot of partners won’t stick around when they hear the phrase “I have bipolar disorder” come out of someone’s mouth, so he didn’t tell them, just telling them he was moody. Of course, they all liked him when he was happy. It was when he wasn't that things went bad.

If internal pain showed on the outside I'd be in ICU for the rest of my life. No amount of stitches could staunch the bleeding of my broken heart. The sadness dilutes my blood. I'd never scab, I'd bleed to death. Then, finally, the pain would end. I'm

Often it’s not the initial protective reaction that’s the problem—it’s all the hopelessness and fear that rush in afterward and create enduring negative overrides. If I could help them manage their expectations, the endless protective chain reaction would be broken.

And then he saw the tears begin to slide down her bruised face. “How badly are you hurt?” He should have checked her chart on the way in, but he'd wanted to get out of sight as quickly as possible. “Nothing interesting,” she said, sounding faintly disgruntled. “Just a sprained ankle and some bruises. It's my heart.” “Your heart?” he echoed, panicked. “Do you have internal injuries...?” “It's broken,” she said, soft, plaintive, the tears still sliding down her face. He muttered a curse. It was just the drugs talking, but he could feel his own heart twist inside. She lay in the middle of the wide hospital bed, but she was looking very small, and he simply climbed up beside her, pulling her into his arms with exquisite care, not wanting to hurt her any more. She let out a small sound, and for a moment he thought it was a cry of pain, but then she moved closer, putting her face against his shoulder, and he could feel her crying. “I missed you,” she said, her voice muffled. “I know.” He held her gently—she suddenly felt fragile, and he'd almost been too late.

How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing: 1. The biological term is depression, but you don't have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it's a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset. 2. Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don't have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.) 3. Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you're sick with a generic bug. 4. You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon. 5. The literal translation of the word depression: you are broken and devalued and have no further use. 6. No one refurbishes broken robots. 7. Please self-terminate.

So it was that the Red Tower put into production its new, more terrible and perplexing, line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stages of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight and insistently grew back should one attempt to clip them. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long, deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough, igneous forms were sent a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual's death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in a gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling 'hands' were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused upon for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of a kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.

I noticed Xander had subtly adjusted his posture. He slouched slightly to the side, let his head hang, and then looked up through his bangs to gaze at something in the middle distance. Uber James Dean. Xander managed to pull it off as if he was looking at nothing, just having deep thoughts about the far away adventures he would be having if he wasn’t stuck waiting for a flowered suitcase at Hopkins International. I casually let my eyes slide across the room. There had to be cute girls somewhere close at hand. Otherwise Xander wouldn’t have broken out his middle distance gazing Tyrone Power eyes.

We face the crowd near the fence and raise our fists. Like I’ve seen in old pictures of the Olympics in 1968, and the NoDAPL protests that have been going on for years, and women in India fighting for justice for rape victims, and the teens—just like me—at the March for Our Lives. It’s a simple gesture, and a beautiful one. It calls out through dusty pages of history and echoes from those whose shoulders I stand on—the ones who were hosed down but never retreated, who were beaten but persisted, and the ones whose voices were locked behind walls but whose spirits were never broken. The people united will never be defeated.

heart bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender. Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a

The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.

Depression starts from a deeply rooted idea, that as a human being, you are a sinner. Even if you are agnostic, atheistic, or a mystic, sin is a belief that you have violated some internal law of ethics, which causes an inability to regain your divine state of love. It is Fault. Disobedience to a higher power, god, or archetype is another definition from separation of peace of mind. Even if the god or archetype cannot be proven, it still exists in your mind, thus fault is real in your mind. It's the idea that you have broken an internal rule that separates you from delivery of a promise. This creates depression, which is a long standing feeling of pain due to permanent loss. It is not short term loss. It is complete loss that can never be returned. When you birthed yourself into this reality, you were vast, elegant, exquisite, intelligent, infinite, and beautiful beyond understanding. You came into this time and space matrix to gain a soul, and that required a lot of experience. Experience is painful. Experience is expansive. Close the door by accepting the loss.

Our leaders may proffer various explanations about protecting us from terrorism, but the fact is that these leaders are worshiping a monstrous deity. Through the Oligarchical Cartels, as well as Corporatism (such as the Rockefeller Corporations) and through the Queen of England personally, a deliberate depopulation policy is being enacted. They are using substances such as depleted uranium in various United States international conflicts which result in severe birth defects. This increases the death rate through various radiation induced diseases, causing the men and women to become infertile. The result is that the family is broken apart, and the species becomes weak. Therefore, reproduction is severely reduced.

Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying. It’s an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead. And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states. In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes. For instance, a dead cat. And that becomes our reality. But then things get really weird. Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there’s a branch. One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one. And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there’s an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse—where everything that can happen will happen.

It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment broken or warped by tropical heat. Once again the French seemed fated to provide the most memorably unlucky participants. Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements. Unluckier

A “right of nations” which is valid for all countries and all times is nothing more than a metaphysical cliché of the type of ”rights of man” and “rights of the citizen.” Dialectic materialism, which is the basis of scientific socialism, has broken once and for all with this type of “eternal” formula. For the historical dialectic has shown that there are no “eternal” truths and that there are no “rights.” ... In the words of Engels, “What is good in the here and now, is an evil somewhere else, and vice versa” – or, what is right and reasonable under some circumstances becomes nonsense and absurdity under others. Historical materialism has taught us that the real content of these “eternal” truths, rights, and formulae is determined only by the material social conditions of the environment in a given historical epoch.

All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear. When you hear stereotypes about Black people who can't swim or are afraid of dogs, it's because for so many generations, they were afraid of swimming across bodies of water to flee, or afraid of dogs because they were scared of being chased. Those fears are epigenetic - they burrow deep into the subconscious, creating an internal paradigm of rules that you forget can be broken. Systemic oppression created walls that can feel impossible to scale, but so, too, does the inherited belief that you are victim. People hold on to that victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity. Nobody's going to take that away from them. It runs too deeply to take out and examine under the light.

The Chinese ideograph for forbearance is a heart with a sword dangling over it, another instance of language's brilliant way of showing us something surprising and important fossilized inside the meaning of a word. Vulnerability is built into our hearts, which can be sliced open at any moment by some sudden shift in the arrangements, some pain, some horror, some hurt. We all know and instinctively fear this, so we protect our hearts by covering them against exposure. But this doesn't work. Covering the heart binds and suffocates it until, like a wound that has been kept dressed for too long, the heart starts to fester and becomes fetid. Eventually, without air, the heart is all but killed off, and there's no feeling, no experiencing at all. To practice forbearance is to appreciate and celebrate the heart's vulnerability, and to see that the slicing or piercing of the heart does not require defense; that the heart's vulnerability is a good thing, because wounds can make us more peaceful and more real—if, that is, we are willing to hang on to the leopard of our fear, the serpent of our grief, the boar of our shame without running away or being hurled off. Forbearance is simply holding on steadfastly with whatever it is that unexpectedly arises: not doing anything; not fixing anything (because doing and fixing can be a way to cover up the heart, to leap over the hurt and pain by occupying ourselves with schemes and plans to get rid of it.) Just holding on for hear life. Holding on with what comes is what makes life dear. ...Simply holding on this way may sound passive. Forbearance has a bad reputation in our culture, whose conventional wisdom tells us that we ought to solve problems, fix what's broken, grab what we want, speak out, shake things up, make things happen. And should none of this work out, then we are told we ought to move on, take a new tack, start something else. But this line of thinking only makes sense when we are attempting to gain external satisfaction. It doesn't take into account internal well-being; nor does it engage the deeper questions of who you really are and what makes you truly happy, questions that no one can ignore for long... Insofar as forbearance helps us to embrace transformative energy and allow its magic to work on us... forbearance isn't passive at all. It's a powerfully active spiritual force, (67-70).

Vitale also argues that New York’s crime drop is no different from elsewhere: “There is very little support for the idea that Broken Windows policing in and of itself is responsible for the crime drop. The crime drop is a national and international phenomenon, and it’s been happening in cities that never had Broken Windows policing,” he says. More straw men. No one has ever claimed that Broken Windows efforts were uniquely responsible for the crime drop. But they were part of a related set of strategies that catapulted New York far ahead of the competition. New

So it was that the Red Tower put into production its terrible and perplexing line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight, every night like clockwork. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough igneous forms were set a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual's death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling "hands" were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused upon for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of the kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.

It was inevitable that the United States should take the position that the North Korean Communist State must now be destroyed for its lawlessness and that all Korea should be united under the government of the Taehan Minkuk. Actually, the Communist world had not broken the law, for one of the continuing tragedies of mankind is that there is no international law. The Communist world had tried to probe, a gambit, and had been strongly checked. And the Communists would regard an American move to punish the “law-breaker” not so much as justice but as a United States gambit of its own.

I have been in movement spaces for a long time and we have a way of doing things that is so steeped in critique that I have often wondered if we would strangle movement before it could blossom. Sometimes I think we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, and sometimes I think we do it to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn't work out. Critique, alone, can keep us from having to pick up the responsibility of figuring out solutions. Sometimes I think we need to liberate ourselves from critique, both internal and external, to truly give change a chance.

By not burning their poppy fields to the ground but instead maintaining a security umbrella that international development agencies could safely work under as they improved these ordinary people's lives, we would win their 'hearts and minds' in the classic manifestation of a successful counter-insutgency operation. [...] Maybe our Western values world somebe instilled in these people. But in country where the average life expectancy was 42 and with the price of that life coming in contrasting cheap at $10 plus the bonus of martyrdom, or alien values might just as equally not be snapped up.

The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.

Our Europe cannot perish. Her religion - which is also mine - has in it those victorious energies of defense which neither merchants nor philosophers can understand, and which are yet the prime condition of establishment. Europe, though she must always repel attacks from within and from without, is always secure; the soul of her is a chivalric. And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. She will not dissolve by expansion, nor be broken by internal strains. She will not suffer that loss of unity which would be for all her members death, and for her history and meaning and self an utter oblivion. She will certainly remain.

Homophobia and the closet are allies. Like an unhealthy co-dependent relationship they need each other to survive. One plays the victim living in fear and shame while the other plays the persecutor policing what is ‘normal’. The only way to dismantle homophobia is for every gay man and lesbian in the world to come out and live authentic lives. Once they realise how normal we are and see themselves in us….the controversy is over. It is interesting to think what would happen though....on a particularly pre-determined day that every single gay man and lesbian came out. Imagine the impact when, on that day, people all around the world suddenly discovered their bosses, mums, dads, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, doctors, neighbours, colleagues, politicians, their favourite actors, celebrities and sports heroes, the people they loved and respected......were indeed gay. All stereotypes would immediately be broken.....just by the same single act of millions of people…..and at last there would no longer be need for secrecy. The closet would become the lounge room. How much healthier would we be emotionally and psychologically when we could all be ourselves doing life without the internal and societal negatives that have been attached to our sexual orientation.

IN THE PRESENCE OF MY ENEMIES, I FIND REST! Evil exist in plain sight, and so does the divine light. One is hidden, and the other the world accepts with delight. Darkness has risen publicly while the Divine hides his lights in plain sight. The lights communicate intuitively, working internally, paralleling their energy and waiting on the divine green light to rise. Everyone is waiting for someone to come and lead them out of the darkness. The sleepers will not accept the lights when they arrive, maybe because of who they are, but the divine power will dominate. A new earth will come, and the old will pass away until another cycle is set in motion.

wounded by the son of Venus; and for Mrs Plornish there was no such music at the Opera as the small internal flutterings and chirpings wherein he would discharge himself of these ditties, like a weak, little, broken barrel-organ, ground by a baby. On his 'days out,' those flecks of light in his flat vista of pollard old men,' it was at once Mrs Plornish's delight and sorrow, when he was strong with meat, and had taken his full halfpenny-worth of porter, to say, 'Sing us a song, Father.' Then he would give them Chloe, and if he were in pretty good spirits, Phyllis also—Strephon he had hardly been up to since he went into retirement—and then would Mrs Plornish declare she did

When children have shame-based parents, they identify with them. This is the first step in the child’s internalizing shame because the children carry their parent’s shame. ABANDONMENT: THE LEGACY OF BROKEN MUTUALITY Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one’s authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically. Children cannot know who they are without reflective mirrors. Mirroring is done by one’s primary caregivers and is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes the loss of mirroring. Parents who are shut down emotionally (all shame-based parents) cannot mirror and affirm their children’s emotions.

The pressure was terrible. She thought she would split apart. But the only thing more terrible than the feeling itself was that obliteration didn’t come, that she kept on hurting. She had never felt anything so sharp. Before she had only thought this grief theoretical, a grief that exceeded what words could describe. The only thing that came close was the Classical Chinese phrase “斷腸,” because although the words translated figuratively meant “a broken heart,” 腸 meant literally all one’s internal organs and viscera, and for a heart to break meant that everything felt twisted and ripped apart and spilled onto the sand. A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.

I did not want a war, nor did I bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiations. After it had broken out, I did everything to assure victory. Since the three greatest powers on earth, together with many other nations, were fighting against us, we finally succumbed to their tremendous superiority. I stand up for the things that I have done, but I deny most emphatically that my actions were dictated by the desire to subjugate foreign peoples by wars, to murder them, to rob them, or to enslave them, or to commit atrocities or crimes. The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, its happiness, its freedom, and its life. And for this I call on the Almighty and my German people to witness. (31 August 1946)

All of us—employers, parents, schools, government agencies, and interns themselves—are complicit in the devaluing of work, the exacerbation of social inequality, and the disillusionment of young people in the workplace that are emerging as a result of the intern boom. Informal, barely studied, and little regulated, internships demand our scrutiny. We need a view of the entire sprawling system and its history, a glimpse of its curious blend of privilege and exploitation; we need to hear from interns themselves, and also from those who proffer internships, the people who sell them, the few who work to improve them, an the many who are unable to access them at all. only then can we consider ethical, legal alternatives to a system that is broken, a practice that is often poisonous.

Chapter One: The Dawn and the Dread Heartbeat, heartbeat comes from Valhallan way, To meet down in judgment, to ply its trade. Two →swords← to join in worthy cross, Actions to be rendered, one to be lost. She did come now from ’yond northern slope, A day of reckoning did she again once hope. A devout meeting was her qwesterly bane, To stay her hand was to go insane. St. Kari of the Blade to meet her past, A wicked enemy, peerless of match. Rode Kari she her charger on down, Past the Dead Land where Gaul sat crowned. A killing job, yea, she desired to lastly kill, To set things right so her heart might lie still. Upon the mist and roaring plain, She entered in, a soul uncontained. A fierce wind in deed, and forever freed, Enemies she annihilhates (’tis hur’ creed). Her own advanced guard of a sort, Multitudes to follow in her report. Know this Valkyrie from on cold, An ancient maiden soft and bold. A warrior spirit from Ages past, A fragmented mind like broken glass. Solid in stature this eternal framed being, Yet crippled within from internaled bleedings. A sword saint so refined in the poetic art, A noble character yet with a banshee’s heart. Rhythmed horse now to the beats, Kari emboldened amid the sleet. Beyond the mountain she does come, Unto southern fields wherein rules hot sun. Far from that murderous Deadlands ground, The land up swells; the dead still abound. Traverses she those bygones of leprous civilizations Those cities crumbled by the exhalted of oblivions. Stark traces etched now bare in the land, That are no more again, save dust in the hand. A cool stream now in desert sans (Does more good when one is damned). Stopped she her mount to admire the flow, A lovely stream with skeletons packed below. Blue air whisps; dragon flied motion. Flintsteel striking!!! Sparked of commotion. Cold water chortles rushtish with tint, Told of past carnage, it whetted her glint. Fallen warriors, they are no more, Swirls and eddies mark their discord. Gurgled shouts slung and gathered, Faces glazed while steel lathered. Refreshing though it was to her mouth, She smelled an air; she flared about. Came up that ridge of loud, sanded hill, Below a man and his half-score of kills. Kari’s eyes waxed in smug contempt, Possibilities ran deep with no repent . . . On Kari, Valkyrie, Cold Steel Eternity Vol. II

Later we will look in more detail at how the Long Telegram and NSC-68 should shape the plan to destroy our jihadist enemies today, but for now consider this passage from Kennan’s original secret cable:         In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi[,] that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken. . . . Kennan was writing about the USSR, but this description of a fanatical enemy incapable of living in peace with America applies word for word to the jihadist organizations behind all the major terrorist atrocities from 9/11 to the San Bernardino massacre.

bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender. Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

Many of the urban poor have been crippled and broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards, and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers— our “internal colonies”, as Malcom X called them— mobilization will be difficult. Many African Americans, especially the urban poor, are in prison, on probation, or living under some kind of legal restraint. Charges can be stacked against them, and they have little hope for redress in the courts, especially as 97 percent of all federal cases and 94 percent of all state cases are resolved by guilty pleas rather than trials. A New York Times editorial recently said that the pressure employed by state and federal prosecutors to make defendants accept guilty pleas, which often include waiving the right to appeal to a higher court, is “closer to coercion” than to bargaining.

Dissimilar from acquiring riches and fame, which are largely products of providence, we self-manufacture our own lot of goodness. If we ground everything we do upon a moral principle and especially love, affection, and compassion, we might not accomplish all the goals that we hoped to achieve, but we will not be hampered with unyielding regret or remorse for the effort expended. If we approach each stage in life with true passion, then each step along a broken or straight path is at least honest. If we honor the commitments that we make to ourselves and act to honor all our personal obligations with other people by devoting our entire intelligence, drive, and vital life force, and do not waste our effort on greedy, wanton, or wasteful activities, we shall grow stronger. Judicious deployment of personal resources ensures that we shall experience a sense of renewal at each important milepost along the way. If we maintain our vow of faith and love people freely, an internal lightness will guide us in our time of uncertainly.

If the British navy acted in response to every foretold movement of the German fleet, it risked revealing to Germany that its codes had been broken. In a secret internal memorandum, Admiral Oliver wrote that “the risk of compromising the codes ought only to be taken when the result would be worth it.” But what did “worth it” mean? Some of the men within Room 40 contended that much useful information was stockpiled and never used because the Admiralty staff—meaning Dummy Oliver—had an obsessive fear of revealing the Mystery. For the first two years of the war, even the commander in chief of the British fleet, Sir John Jellicoe, was denied direct access to Room 40’s decrypted intercepts, although he would seem to have been the one officer in the fleet most likely to benefit from the intelligence they conveyed. In fact, Jellicoe would not be formally introduced to the secret of Room 40, let alone given regular access to its intelligence, until November 1916, when the Admiralty, sensing bruised feelings, agreed to let him see a daily summary, which he was to burn after reading.

1 tablespoon flaked sea salt, like Maldon 2 pieces of salmon fillet with skin on, ⅓ pound each Olive oil Freshly ground black pepper and lemon wedges, for serving Scatter the salt evenly over a dry, well-seasoned 10-inch cast-iron pan. A stainless steel pan will also work. If you’re using a stainless steel pan instead of cast iron, brush the pan lightly with oil before adding the salt. Place the pan over medium-high heat for 3 minutes. While the pan heats, dry the fish fillets well with paper towels and lay them flat on a large plate. Brush with olive oil on both sides. Place the fish into the hot pan, skin side down. Turn the heat down slightly if the crackle sounds too loud and sputtery. Cover with a lid. If you don’t have a lid that fits your pan, a metal baking sheet will do the job. Cook without moving the fillets for 3 to 5 minutes, until the skin is brown and crisp, and releases easily from the pan. Flip the fillets and cook them uncovered for another 2 to 4 minutes, depending on their thickness. The fish is done when the flesh deep inside is still faintly translucent and the internal temperature reads 125 degrees. Serve with freshly ground black pepper and lemon wedges. Serves 2.

Despite international calls for Chernobyl to be decommissioned at once, it endured a very gradual demise. On October 11th, 1991, just five years after the Unit 4 explosion, there was a third major accident at the plant, this time at Unit 2. Prior to the event, the Unit had been taken offline following another accident - this time a fire in its section of the turbine hall, which had broken out during minor turbogenerator repair work. After extinguishing the blaze, the generator had been isolated and its turbine coasted down to about 150 rpm when a faulty breaker switch closed, reconnecting it to the grid. The turbine rapidly sped up to 3000 rpm in under 30 seconds, then, according to a 1993 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “the influx of current to TG-4 overheated the conductor elements and caused a rapid degradation of the mechanical end joints of the rotor and excitation windings. A centrifugal imbalance developed and damaged generator bearings 10 through 14 and the seal oil system, allowing hydrogen gas and seal oil to leak from the generator enclosure. Electrical arcing and frictional heat ignited the leaking hydrogen and seal oil creating hydrogen flames 8 meters high, and dense smoke which obstructed the visibility of plant personnel. When the burning oil reached the busbar of the generator it caused a three-phase 120,000-amp short circuit.”265

If the hunger for paradise is wired into your heart (and it is), either you will realize that this present life has been designed as a preparation for the paradise to come, or you will do your best and work your hardest to turn the present moment into the paradise it will never be. You and I live in a broken world that right now will not be the paradise we seek. You and I are flawed people, living with flawed people, and collectively we have no ability whatsoever to deliver paradise to one another. Every place you go and every created thing you handle has been damaged by the fall. This simply is not and won’t be the paradise you seek. For all who have placed their trust in the Savior, paradise is a secure reality. The paradise for which your heart longs is coming, but you will not experience it right here, right now. No, God has chosen to keep you in this broken world in order to use its brokenness to prepare you for what is to come. The brokenness you live in the middle of, and the difficulties you face there, are not in the way of God’s good plan for you; they are an important ingredient in it. Right now, God is not so much working to change your surroundings but to change you so that you are ready for the new surroundings he has planned and purchased for you in his grace. Simply said, either you are waiting by faith for the paradise to come, or you are working with your hands to build paradise in the here and now. Looking for paradise in the here and now is another ingredient of the money madness inside many of us and has overtaken the culture around us. We frenetically spend on material things, physical experiences, and new locations in the search of a piece of paradise. Our hearts long for the freedom from external difficulty and internal emptiness that we so often feel. We instinctively know that there must be more, that this can’t be it. Deep within us we feel like we’re missing something. So in our eternity amnesia we don’t lift up our eyes to look afar and consider the glories that are coming. No, we open our wallets and look around at what may have the potential to give us the paradise we are seeking. And because nothing can deliver it, we spend from thing to thing to thing, hoping that the next thing will deliver. But we don’t end up with paradise. We end up with houses that are bigger and more luxurious than we need, cars that are more identity markers than means of transportation, a pile of possessions, many of which lie unused, amassed debt, and wallets that are empty. But the paradise that we’ve spent to get has eluded us. Sure, budgets are helpful, but only if they are a piece of handling our money with eternity in view. When it comes to money, the PMP that lives inside us and that has captured our culture just cannot work. It will cause you to spend too much, it will tempt you to spend unwisely, and for all of your investment, it will leave you empty in the end.

I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.

You wonder what had happened, when a feller like that, in a place like that, talked of a childhood that might have as easily belonged to a millionaire, a lawyer, a schoolteacher, you. You had to think he was defective somehow, or had fucked up not once, not twice, but again and again, a peculiar resolve to his life. That was the thing, that resolve. We didn’t credit it. You looked at him and your brain said he was on the losing end of one of the two bargains that America made with you. There was the romantic one, that of the rambler, the man out seeking his destiny, living by his wits, all that horseshit. Then there was the classical American dare, that you could risk all, take an internal grudge and make of it a billion dollars and get a monumental tomb in the bargain. But the truth was neither. America was a grindstone. She used those notions as twin abrasives to wear you down into a dutiful drudge walking the straight and narrow. But there was something in the hearts of the some men, some of whom became Fritz, that wouldn’t accept that. These men in crummy bars, some of them, most of them, they were main-chance fellers. You could take ten of these wrecks and offer them a salesman’s job, a dozen white shirts and ties, forty Gs a year and perks, a neat house on a quiet street, a yard, a car, a dog, a wife, an expense account, a Chinese laundryman, membership in a church, grandkids who’d bounce on their knees, and you’d be lucky if one or two took you up on it. And those two would be the most defeated, the most broken and worn down. Take the same ten and offer them eight dollars a day to be litter bearers on a great adventure, a hike after a lost civilization, a one in hundred shot at survival, a one in thousand shot at a fabulous fortune of jewels and gold, and if you provided rum along the way, nine of the ten would sign up. I guarantee it. I guarantee too that the one or two who took the salesman’s job—within a year or two or three, he’d be fucking up again and again, no matter how many chances you gave him. He’s a main-chance feller, and even if he didn’t have the brains or the luck to make it work, he still couldn’t abide the line others toed, even if he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his life but the miserable American two step—toe the line, fuck up, toe the line, fuck up....

INTERNATIONAL LAW WAS CREATED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION BECAUSE a group of Mexicans—and one African American—gang-raped and murdered two teenaged girls in Houston, Texas.1 The crime made history in another way: It led to the most death sentences handed out for a single crime in Texas since 1949.2 Do you even know about this case? The only reason the media eventually admitted that the lead rapist, Jose Ernesto Medellin, was an illegal alien from Mexico was to try to overturn his conviction on the grounds that he had not been informed of his right, as a Mexican citizen, to confer with the Mexican consulate. Journalists have an irritating tendency to skimp on detail when reporting crimes by immigrants, a practice that will not be followed here. One summer night in June 1993, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña, who had just turned sixteen, were returning from a pool party, and decided to take a shortcut through a park to make their 11:30 p.m. curfew. They encountered a group of Hispanic men, who were in the process of discussing “gang etiquette,” such as not complaining if other members talked about having sex with your mother.3 The girls ran away, but Medellin grabbed Jennifer and began ripping her clothes off. Hearing her screams, Elizabeth came back to help her friend. For more than an hour, the five Hispanics and one black man raped the teens, vaginally, anally, and orally—“every way you can assault a human being,” as the prosecutor put it.4 The girls were beaten, kicked, and stomped, their teeth knocked out and their ribs broken. One of the Hispanic men told Medellin’s fourteen-year-old brother to “get some,” so he raped one of the girls, too. But when it was time to kill the girls, Medellin said his brother was “too small to watch” and dragged the girls into the woods.5 There, the girls were forced to kneel on the ground and a belt or shoelace was looped around their necks. Then a man on each side pulled on the cord as hard as he could. The men strangling Jennifer pulled so hard they broke the belt. Medellin later complained that “the bitch wouldn’t die.” When it was done, he repeatedly stomped on the girls’ necks, to make sure they were dead.6 At trial, Medellin’s sister-in-law testified that shortly after the gruesome murders, Medellin was laughing about it, saying they’d “had some fun with some girls” and boasting that he had “virgin blood” on his underpants.7 It’s difficult to understand a culture where such an orgy of cruelty is bragged about at all, but especially in front of women.

Waiting on God doesn’t mean sitting around and hoping. Waiting means believing he will do what he’s promised and then acting with confidence. Waiting on God is not at all like the meaningless waiting that you do at the dentist’s office. You know, he’s overbooked, so you’re still sitting there more than an hour past your scheduled appointment. You’re a man, but you’re now reading Family Circle magazine. You’ve begun to read the article titled “The 7 Best Chicken Recipes in the World.” When you’re a man and you’re getting ready to tear a chicken recipe out of Family Circle magazine because the recipe sounds so good, you know that you have been waiting too long! But waiting on God is not like that. Waiting on God is an active life based on confidence in his presence and promises, not a passive existence haunted by occasional doubt. Waiting on God isn’t internal torment that results in paralysis. No, waiting on God is internal rest that results in courageous action. Waiting is your calling. Waiting is your blessing. Every one of God’s children has been chosen to wait, because every one of God’s children lives between the “already” and the “not yet.” Already this world has been broken by sin, but not yet has it been made new again. Already Jesus has come, but not yet has he returned to take you home with him forever. Already your sin has been forgiven, but not yet have you been fully delivered from it. Already Jesus reigns, but not yet has his final kingdom come. Already sin has been defeated, but not yet has it been completely destroyed. Already the Holy Spirit has been given, but not yet have you been perfectly formed into the likeness of Jesus. Already God has given you his Word, but not yet has it totally transformed your life. Already you have been given grace, but not yet has that grace finished its work. You see, we’re all called to wait because we all live right smack dab in the middle of God’s grand redemptive story. We all wait for the final end of the work that God has begun in and for us. We don’t just wait—we wait in hope. And what does hope in God look like? It is a confident expectation of a guaranteed result. We wait believing that what God has begun he will complete, so we live with confidence and courage. We get up every morning and act upon what is to come, and because what is to come is sure, we know that our labor in God’s name is never in vain. So we wait and act. We wait and work. We wait and fight. We wait and conquer. We wait and proclaim. We wait and run. We wait and sacrifice. We wait and give. We wait and worship. Waiting on God is an action based on confident assurance of grace to come.

The Honourable Lady confuses the American people with American policy.... It is the very generosity of the American people which makes it possible for their policy-makers to confuse the trick them into believing that American is the God-father of the world. That is nonsense, and the American people should know it. If they don't get to know it, then the continuation of their present policy will make them the most despised people on earth. I know the Americans are generous. I know American policy is 'generous'. But there you have two different things. What the policy-makers expect in return for their dollar bounty is political co-operation against Russia and any other nation they like to call Red! I would remind the Honourable Lady that it is their anti-Red benevolence that is universal. In China, American capital is still spending more to create the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek than it did to assist China against Japan. With so many other nations in Europe and Asia broken by the war, American assistance with money and machinery almost means life itself. For national existence however, American policy has a price. It offers unconditional money, machinery, and arms to any nation that will denounce Russian and Communism and pronounce American as the God of all free nations. Even in defeated Italy, Germany, and Japan, American policy supports any sect that is anti-Red and anti-Russian. There is no end to this white American morality, it has its wide wide arms across the globe, its long fingers in every nation, and its loud voice in every ear,... Why talk about Russia!... If we must talk here about interference by one nation in another's affairs, let us talk of this American interference in every nation's affairs. Is there a nation on the face of the earth to-day except Russian and her so-called satellites which can hold up its head and say it is independent of the American dollar? We are all on our knees, and we won't admit it. Our American masters do not need arms and occupation; capital is enough. Capital is enough to strangle the earth if only it has the support of its victims. We are asked to support it—to bring others to their knees: France, Jugo-slavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, all of Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey and Iran. The world over, we are asked to replace so-called Communism with the dollar. That dollar means governorship by those who will sell themselves and their nation for a smell of wealth and a grip of power. Such men are international. American has no monopoly on evil and stupid men. American simply has the wealth for bigger evil. The rest of us follow her according to our own evil and our own stupidity. British policy to-day is as bad as America's despite our Socialist Government.

Sinclair James - English Communication Language in Asia Is English Language a Hindrance to Communication for Foreigners in Asia? One of the hesitations of westerners in coming to Asia is the language barrier. True, Asia has been a melting pot of different aspects of life that in every country, there is a distinct characteristic and a culture which would seem odd to someone who grew up in an entirely different perspective. Language is one of the most flourishing uniqueness of Asian nations. Although their boundaries are emphasized by mere walls which can be broken down easily, the brand of each individual can still be determined on the language they use or most comfortable with. Communication may be a problem as it is an issue which neighboring countries also encounter on each other. Message relays or even simple gestures, if interpreted wrongly can cause conflicts. Indeed, the complaints are valid. However, on the present day number of American and European visitors and the boost in tourism economies, language barriers seem to have been surpassed. Perhaps, the problem may not even exist at all. According to English Language Proficiency Test (ELPT) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS), Asian countries are not altogether illiterate in speaking and understanding the universal language. If so, there are countries which can even speak English as fluent as any native can. Take for example the Philippines. Once in Manila, the country’s capital, you will find thousands of individuals representing different nationalities. The center for business growth in the country, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has proven the literacy of the people in conversing using the international language. Clients from abroad prefer Filipinos in dealing with customers concern since they can easily comprehend grasp and explain things in English. ELPT and IELTS did not even include the Philippines in the list of the top English speaking nations in Asia since they are already considered one of the best and most fluent in this field. Other neighboring Asian countries also send their citizens to the Philippines to learn English. With a mixture of British and American English being used in everyday conversations, the Philippines has to be considered to be included in the top 5 most native English speakers. You may even be surprised to meet a young child in Manila who has not gone to school or mingled with foreigners but can speak and understand English. Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and most Asian countries, if indeed all, can also easily understand and speak English. It seems that the concern for miscommunication has completely no basis and remains a groundless issue. Maybe perhaps, those who say this just want to find a dumb excuse? Read more at: SjTravels.com

One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to the hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had a concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A gas station attendant in a neighboring village, beside the bridge over the highway to Copenhagen, had seen her go the wrong way up the exit and drive at high speed into the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to maneuver around her, but about 200 meters after the junction she collided head-on with a truck. The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 meters before the crash, while the car seemed to actually increase its speed over the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck between the road and the truck's bumper, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived. On arrival at the hospital the woman was in very critical condition, and it was twenty-four hours before she was out of serious danger. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale. Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. She was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen. Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple's home was an isolated old farmhouse in the woods seven kilometers from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. By the time he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking a lot. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used; he was not questioned further on that point. Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating room into intensive care, her husband was still in the waiting room with the sleeping boy's head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down next to him. Andreas Bark went on staring into the gray morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he was wearing a shabby leather jacket. Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realized he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. Andreas looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke.

Soon after that, Eno briefly joined a group called the Scratch Orchestra, led by the late British avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew. There was one Cardew piece that would be a formative experience for Eno—a piece known as “Paragraph 7,” part of a larger Cardew masterwork called The Great Learning. Explaining “Paragraph 7” could easily take up a book of its own. “Paragraph 7”’s score is designed to be performed by a group of singers, and it can be done by anyone, trained or untrained. The words are from a text by Confucius, broken up into 24 short chunks, each of which has a number. There are only a few simple rules. The number tells the singer how many times to repeat that chunk of text; an additional number tells each singer how many times to repeat it loudly or softly. Each singer chooses a note with which to sing each chunk—any note—with the caveats to not hit the same note twice in a row, and to try to match notes with a note sung by someone else in the group. Each note is held “for the length of a breath,” and each singer goes through the text at his own pace. Despite the seeming vagueness of the score’s few instructions, the piece sounds very similar—and very beautiful—each time it is performed. It starts out in discord, but rapidly and predictably resolves into a tranquil pool of sound. “Paragraph 7,” and 1960s tape loop pieces like Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” sparked Eno’s fascination with music that wasn’t obsessively organized from the start, but instead grew and mutated in intriguing ways from a limited set of initial constraints. “Paragraph 7” also reinforced Eno’s interest in music compositions that seemed to have the capacity to regulate themselves; the idea of a self-regulating system was at the very heart of cybernetics. Another appealing facet of “Paragraph 7” for Eno was that it was both process and product—an elegant and endlessly beguiling process that yielded a lush, calming result. Some of Cage’s pieces, and other process-driven pieces by other avant-gardists, embraced process to the point of extreme fetishism, and the resulting product could be jarring or painful to listen to. “Paragraph 7,” meanwhile, was easier on the ears—a shimmering cloud of sonics. In an essay titled “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts,” published in Studio International in 1976, a 28-year-old Eno connected his interest in “Paragraph 7” to his interest in cybernetics. He attempted to analyze how the design of the score’s few instructions naturally reduced the “variety” of possible inputs, leading to a remarkably consistent output. In the essay, Eno also wrote about algorithms—a cutting-edge concept for an electronic-music composer to be writing about, in an era when typewriters, not computers, were still en vogue. (In 1976, on the other side of the Atlantic, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were busy building a primitive personal computer in a garage that they called the Apple I.) Eno also talked about the related concept of a “heuristic,” using managerial-cybernetics champion Stafford Beer’s definition. “To use Beer’s example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer’s concept of a “heuristic” to music. Brecht’s Fluxus scores, for instance, could be described as heuristics.

In the contemporary world there are two classes of bad plans-the plans invented and put into practice by men who do not accept our ideal postulates, and the plans invented and put into practice by the men who accept them, but imagine that the ends proposed by the prophets can be achieved by wicked or unsuitable means. Hell is paved with good intentions, and it is probable that plans made by well-meaning people of the second class may have results no less disastrous than plans made by evil-intentioned people of the first class. Which only shows, yet once more, how right the Buddha was in classing unawareness and stupidity among the deadly sins. Let us consider a few examples of bad plans belonging to these two classes. In the first class we must place all Fascist and all specifically militaristic plans. Fascism, in the words of Mussolini, believes that "war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it." Again, "a doctrine which is founded upon the harmful postulate of peace is hostile to Fascism." The Fascist, then, is one who believes that the bombardment of open towns with fire, poison and explosives (in other words, modern war) is intrinsically good. He is one who rejects the teaching of the prophets and believes that the best society is a national society living in a state of chronic hostility towards other national societies and preoccupied with ideas of rapine and slaughter. He is one who despises the non-attached individual and holds up for admiration the person who, in obedience to the boss who happens at the moment to have grabbed political power, systematically cultivates all the passions (pride, anger, envy, hatred) which the philosophers and the founders of religions have unanimously condemned as the most maleficent, the least worthy of human beings. All fascist planning has one ultimate aim: to make the national society more efficient as a war machine. Industry, commerce and finance are controlled for this purpose. The manufacture of substitutes is encouraged in order that the country may be self-sufficient in time of war. Tariffs and quotas are imposed, export bounties distributed, exchanges depreciated for the sake of gaining a momentary advantage or inflicting loss upon some rival. Foreign policy is conducted on avowedly Machiavellian principles; solemn engagements are entered into with the knowledge that they will be broken the moment it seems advantageous to do so; international law is invoked when it happens to be convenient, repudiated when it imposes the least restraint on the nation's imperialistic designs. Meanwhile the dictator's subjects are systematically educated to be good citizens of the Fascist state. Children are subjected to authoritarian discipline that they may grow up to be simultaneously obedient to superiors and brutal to those below them. On leaving the kindergarten, they begin that military training which culminates in the years of conscription and continues until the individual is too decrepit to be an efficient soldier. In school they are taught extravagant lies about the achievements of their ancestors, while the truth about other peoples is either distorted or completely suppressed. the press is controlled, so that adults may learn only what it suits the dictator that they should learn. Any one expressing un-orthodox opinions is ruthlessly persecuted. Elaborate systems of police espionage are organized to investigate the private life and opinions of even the humblest individual. Delation is encouraged, tale-telling rewarded. Terrorism is legalized. Justice is administered in secret; the procedure is unfair, the penalties barbarously cruel. Brutality and torture are regularly employed.

As Charles points out, this quote gets to the heart of both nations’ problems with race: our citizens do not share a common memory. People of white European ancestry remember a history of discovery, open lands, manifest destiny, endless opportunity, and American exceptionalism. Yet communities of color, especially those with African and indigenous roots, remember a history of stolen lands, broken treaties, slavery, boarding schools, segregation, cultural genocide, internment camps, and mass incarceration.4 This is the choice that lies before us both as a nation and as individuals: Will we continue to live in denial and allow our home to be built on the weak foundation of myths and half-truths? Or will we have the courage to live up to the truth and allow God’s holy fire to burn down the old and erect a new home that can hold us all?

We all know the internal trials of the soul react upon the body, rending its nerves and affecting its strength—“ A broken spirit drieth the bones” (Prov. 17: 22);

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Internal ugliness can be masked by external beauty only until that ugly is exposed.

Trenton’s disgusted look answered that question even as Wilhelm shook his head and said, “They’ll be almost as useless as the sword. With something that big, it probably won’t even notice unless we hit an eye.”   Which most likely still wouldn’t kill it.   The same with any attacks on the body. At most, they’d be a minor nuisance.   “That leaves one option,” Shea said in a resigned voice.   “You have a plan, then?” Witt asked, keeping an eye on their surroundings.   “Yup, but I don’t think any of you are going to like it.” Shea’s expression turned sour. If she was being honest, she didn’t like her plan either.   Trenton stared at her for several beats before he shook his head. “No, that’s crazy.”   “It’s the best option we’ve got ,” Fallon agreed, his mind already following where hers had gone.   Surprise and understanding dawned on Wilhelm and Witt’s faces as they realized what she was thinking.   “I feel like your plans get worse and worse the longer I know you—like gone ‘round the bend crazy worse,” Trenton said. To Fallon, he said, “At least tell me we’re not letting her do the honors.”   Fallon’s eyes were dark as he stared at Shea. It was obvious he wanted to order her to abandon their group and head to the Keep by herself, even at the expense of his own safety. It was just as obvious she would refuse.   “No, we’re not,” he agreed with Trenton. “One of us will do it.”   “I didn’t expect anything else.” Shea gave Fallon a half smile. “I could never make that throw. That’s why Wilhelm will do it.”   Wilhelm lifted an eyebrow. “I will?”   “Wait a minute. Why not me?” Trenton asked in outrage.   Shea ignored him to answer Wilhelm’s question. “I’m not skilled enough with a spear. Same for Witt, and the doubter over there is still recovering from cracked ribs and internal bleeding. And if we let Fallon do it, I’m pretty sure Caden would murder us all once he found out about it. That leaves you.”   “Hey!” Trenton protested.   Fallon looked like he wanted to argue, but he must have seen her point. Of the five of them, Wilhelm was the one with the best marksmanship. Beyond all of the other reasons, that was the one that counted the most and Fallon knew it.   Wilhelm stared off into the mist with a considering expression before looking sideways at Shea, his face serious and intent. “We’ll only get one chance at this.”   “Guess you’d better make the shot count, then,” she told him.   “Incoming,” Witt murmured.

Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilizing everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. To-day that is true about criminals. After a war evil passions are loosed, and, since Russia is broken, in her they can make their headquarters...

When muscle breaks itself internally, it’s growth; when it’s broken by someone externally, it’s damage.

​“Many,” sighed Ashuri, “and from various faculties. A considerable number of them are not even registered at the university. They come to register, and I ignore the fact that they are not on the roster. This year, I closed registration after seventy-five students had signed up, but in reality over a hundred attended each lecture. For purely selfish reasons, because of my age, I suppose, I refused to accept any more. I have found lately that Kabbalah has shown signs of a resurgence of interest. As a result, many charlatans earn a fine living from it.” ​Elijah remembered that he was really on his way to the library. He parted from Prof. Ashuri in his normal awkward, hesitant and apologetic manner, thanking her profusely no less than three times; he would even have bowed down to her if that was what would have enabled him to expedite his exit. However, Prof. Ashuri had one more important observation to make. ​“I hope that your interest in the Kabbalah will not infect you with that dreaded disease...” she smiled. ​“What disease do you mean?” ​“Kabbalistic literature is generally divided into three major streams. The first and most important one is the cosmological, mission-oriented one. Here we find a direct line between ourselves and the Master of the Universes, by way of His influence on all the intermediate worlds. Note the term, ‘Master of the Universes’ in the plural. In this view, there are mutual influences, going from the upper worlds to us, and from us to the upper worlds. All the commandments and all the proper intentions and all the prayers are ultimately aimed at mending those spheres, which were damaged at the time of the Creation. In the language of the Kabbalah, this means repairing those vessels which were broken. ​“The second stream is Kabbalistic-prophetic. It is an attempt to attain what is known as cleaving to God and to achieve spiritual elevation. This can be accomplished by internal meditation, which includes reciting the Holy Names, internal and external purification, combining sacred letters and repeating them over and over, singing and moving the head, and breathing techniques. This can unite one with the higher worlds. One who does this properly can reach the level of prophecy. There are even books with detailed instructions on how to actually accomplish this and how to ascend to a higher spiritual level. I often hear of students who have embarked on such a course, and it is, indeed, a disease.” ​“Don’t worry about me. And what about the third stream?” ​“The third stream is the one which has elicited the most criticism. It is referred to as Practical Kabbalah. By that, we mean people who use the Kabbalah for their own personal purposes, as a way to exploit the secret knowledge to which they have access in order to control nature and man’s fate. Practical Kabbalah appeals directly to supernatural forces and sometimes even makes them solve the problems of the one calling upon them. These include attempts to foretell the future, to converse with the dead, to heal the sick, to banish evil spirits and the evil eye, and of course to acquire wealth, respect, and/or the love of a man or a woman. That, too, is a dangerous game to play.” Prof. Ashuri laughed, but Elijah could not tell whether or not she was serious.

America’s broken politics and the intensifying US-China rivalry imperil our ability to build the international trust needed to meet the great crises of our time.

North Philly was different. What scarlet letter el barrio wore on its corners I couldn’t tell, but its motions and commerce were strictly internal. A colony on Mars couldn’t be more sealed off.

Your freedom is not restricted simply by external constraints. There's another odd kind of restriction. Your freedom gets limited by an internal reality that is a kind of brokenness or weakness or dividedness inside you. You want to stop drinking, but you can't. You want to live with a happy, cheerful, optimistic attitude, but you don't. You want to quit yelling at your kids, but you fail. You want to be the kind of person who manages anger really, really well, but you aren't. You'd like to think you have become unselfish, but you haven't. You are not free. The freedom you lack is an internal freedom, and this inner lack of freedom is much more dehumanizing, much more tragic than external constraints. This kind of freedom is internal, and it is precious. It is "soul-freedom." Remember that the soul is what integrates our parts. If our will is enslaved to our appetites, if our thoughts are obsessed with unfulfilled desires, if our emotions are slaves to our circumstances, if our bodily habits contradict our professed values, the soul is not free. The only way for the soul to be free is for all the parts of our personhood to be rightly ordered.

Many of the issues were foundational. Facebook never bothered to translate its community standards into languages spoken by tens of millions. It often used contractors to review content in other languages, and would route posts in Syrian and Iraqi Arabic to contractors in Morocco, for whom they were incomprehensible. An internal review referred to that as a failure to meet the “rock-bottom minimum” standard that contract moderators understand the language of the content they reviewed.

Internal research done in 2019 found that a little over 3 percent of American users were suffering from “serious problems with sleep, work, or relationships that they attribute to Facebook” and felt anxiety about their relationship with the product. The research suggested that roughly 10 million Americans suffered from “problematic use” of the main Facebook platform alone. “Though Facebook use may not meet clinical standards for addiction, we want to fix the underlying design issues that lead to this concern,” the researchers wrote.

Page 180: A fascinating contemporary parallel, and another example of destruction through centralization if a federal union harbors a single disproportionately large power, has been furnished by the short-lived United States of Indonesia. When it was created in December 1949, it was composed of sixteen member states of which one was so large that its subordination without its own consent was impossible … Page 183: … if our present unifiers really want union, they must have disunion first. If Europe is to be united under the auspices of the European Council, its participating great powers must first be dissolved to a degree that, as in Switzerland … none of its component units is left with a significant superiority in size and strength over the others. Page 187: This is why such attempts at international union as the European Council or the United Nations are doomed to failure if they continue to insist on their present composition. Compromising with their framework a number of unabsorbably great powers, they suffer from the deadly disease of political cancer. To save them it would be necessary to follow Professor Simons who said of the overgrown nation-states that: ‘These monsters of nationalism and mercantilism must be dismantled, both to preserve world order and to protect internal peace. Their powers to wage war and restrict world trade must be sacrificed to some supranational state or league of nations. Their other powers and functions must be diminished in favor of states, provinces, and, in Europe, small nations.’ This is, indeed, the only way by which the problem of international government can be solved. The great powers, those monsters of nationalism, must be broken up and replaced by small states; for, as perhaps even our diplomats will eventually be able to understand, only small states are wise, modest and, above all, weak enough, to accept an authority higher than their own. Page 190 But war is fortunately not the only means by which great powers can be divided. Engulfed in a swamp of infantile emotionalism, and attaching phenomenal value to the fact that they are big and mighty, they cannot be persuaded to execute their own dissolution. But, being infantile and emotional, they can be tricked into it.

... broken English is the international language of science. In international congresses the nations are distinguished not by styles of scientific research but by the emergence of different national styles in the delivery of scientific papers.

Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying. It's an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead. And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states. In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes. For instance, a dead cat. And that becomes our reality. But then things get really weird. Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there’s a branch. One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one. And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there’s an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse—where everything that can happen will happen.

Zuckerberg said he worried the leaks would discourage the tech industry at large from honestly assessing their products’ impact on the world, in order to avoid the risk that internal research might be used against them. But he assured his employees that their company’s internal research efforts would stand strong. “Even though it might be easier for us to follow that path, we’re going to keep doing research because it’s the right thing to do,” he wrote.

There was something to be said for standing up when, internally you were shattered. When your flesh was a case for broken bones and your heart beat tainted blood, but you slipped a mask over your features and became what was expected of you. Only the strongest survived the wounds dug into their souls.

17They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.

I tried to pull him into my world, instead I was pulled into the darkness of his.

Patterns of retreat are based on past experiences and an underdeveloped ability to take risks. The non-conscious pain of childhood suffering and broken attachments feels too overwhelming. We’ve become quite averse to feeling pain. We have few skills that help us cope with it and prefer to avoid things that can be predicted to cause pain. Many of us avoid intimate relationships because we are seeking to keep the injured child inside us as free from harm as possible. Emotional survival skills are very powerful and so internalized that we don’t have to think about them, we just follow their instructions.

I really don’t understand love. I was just thinking that opposites attract. Now Nero’s saying it’s all about finding someone the most like yourself internally. “So . . . you’re just really similar.” “It’s more than that,” Nero says. ”There’s the parts that are the same and the parts that fill up the holes in each other. You don’t know what’s missing inside of you until you find it in someone else.

I hope that by now, six chapters into this book, you know better. You know that men’s and women’s sexualities are made of the same parts, just organized in different ways, and you know that no two people are alike. You know that what activates your accelerator or hits your brakes is context dependent. You know that women’s sexuality is even more context sensitive than men’s, that developmental, cultural, and life history factors all profoundly shape how and when our bodies respond. You know that sex-related and sexually appealing are not the same thing. Women are not liars, in denial, or otherwise broken. They are women, rather than men, in a world that wants women to believe they can’t understand their own internal experience.

In a presentation at the AVS 62nd International Symposium and Exhibition, he used this example to explain how cartilage reabsorbs synovial fluid that leaks out.

muscle-only approach often exacerbates common muscle imbalances. For example, an exercise routine that leans on heavy pressing, rows, and lat pulldowns builds the shoulder’s internal rotation muscles while neglecting the posterior (rear) muscles. This front-biased training combined with slouching over a desk all day causes shoulder impingement and pain.

I suppose my unwavering devotion and love for my girlfriends motivated me to delve deeper into the realm of psychopathy and uncover the truth of what I experienced and managed to survive. And remember. Speelwalking. I can see myself wandering around on Barcelona streets, aware of danger but still unaware how large their web was and is. Infinite. Growing. Like Space. I feel compelled to share it with others. Timothy. Cannot. Timothy is dead. Age 16. In the Cagmayer house on the Prairie. What can I do? I tried my best and even more than I could. Devoted. Hoping in her return home. It seems that the three people I met in three consecutive years were all psychopaths from broken families, from psychopath parents. Perhaps nazi grandparents. Most likely. Fascist. Criminals. Juicy or not. This is the 21 ST century. “United colors.” “Of Benetton.” All the colors and all the “fasc-ion.” The mafia of short and evil people wasn’t only international as I thought. It is global. I only sensed it yet before. I survived a pandemic of Evil Eyes in Spain, in Europe. So far. On this planet.

Not mine but I have this hanging on the wall of my office by Anton Chekhov: "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint on the broken glass.

ADHD expert William Dodson explains that “the vast majority of adults with ADHD are not overtly hyperactive, though they are hyperactive internally.”1 For many of them, their hyperactivity feels more like an inner restlessness or agitation. They will likely worry about what may happen in the future. Like their outwardly hyperactive counterparts, they also have racing thoughts and a craving for excitement, but it occurs inwardly.

Blocking inositol triphosphate stops the wave. Inositol triphosphate receptor activation by calcium can desensitize the receptors. Inositol triphosphate is more sensitive to their receptors, but it is also less reactive than calcium and can act over many areas of the cell. Calcium and inositol triphosphate act like a hand on a faucet when they bind their receptors on the endoplasmic reticulum. After turning on the faucet, calcium flows out. The release of calcium from internal endoplasmic reticulum through these receptors results in sparks or puffs before it is sequestered back into the endoplasmic reticulum. These sparks or puffs can be amplified by neighboring endoplasmic reticulum as calcium itself releases more calcium stores. To get calcium back into the endoplasmic reticulum, energy must be used. ATP (Adenosine-5-triphosphate) is produced by the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, by using energy from the blood. ATP consumption in the cell is similar to world oil consumption. It is the voracious creation of energy and power. Believe it or not, the ion that stimulates ATP production in the mitochondria is none other than calcium. When we eat and drink, our body breaks down our foods into energy. This energy is required for the mitochondria to produce ATP. Fats and sugars are broken down into units that are eventually utilized by the mitochondria transport system. When there is not enough energy available, calcium is unable to pump back into the endoplasmic reticulum and calcium diffusion can

In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval. ... Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law. Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.

On May 17, 1913, Domingo Rosillo and Agustín Parlá attempted the first international flights to Latin America, by trying to fly their airplanes from Key West to Havana. At 5:10 a.m., Rosillo departed from Key West and flew for 2 hours, 30 minutes and 40 seconds before running out of gas. He had planned to land at the airfield at Camp Columbia in Havana, but instead managed to squeak in at the camp’s shooting range, thereby still satisfactorily completing the flight. Parlá left Key West at 5:57 in the morning. Just four minutes later, at 6:01 a.m., he had to carefully turn back to the airstrip he had just left, since the aircraft didn’t properly respond to his controls. Parlá said, “It would not let me compensate for the wind that blew.” When he returned to Key West, he discovered that two of the tension wires to the aircraft’s elevators were broken. Two days later, Parlá tried again and left Key West, carrying the Cuban Flag his father had received from José Martí. This time he fell short and had to land at sea off the Cuban coast near Mariel. Sailors from the Cuban Navy rescued him from his seaplane. Being adventuresome, while attending the Curtiss School of Aviation in 1916, Parlá flew over Niagara Falls. In his honor, the Cuban flag was hoisted and the Cuban national anthem was played. The famous Cuban composer, pianist, and bandleader, Antonio M. Romeu, composed a song in his honor named “Parlá over the Niagara” and Agustín Parlá became known as the “Father of Cuban Aviation.

The team spent several years working on Glitch, but it never caught on with a mainstream audience. The game was shut down in 2012 due to a lack of traction. Butterfield and his team had spent nearly four years working on a failed project. It was a painful setback—but it wasn’t “game over.” While working on Glitch, the team had built an internal productivity tool to streamline communication, and it was very effective. Instead of shutting down Tiny Speck, Butterfield decided to refocus the company around the productivity tool. They would polish and retool their internal app for external distribution, selling it to other companies with a SAAS (Software as a Service) pricing model. They called the new product Slack. The early traction for Slack was outstanding. In 2014, the company (now also known as Slack) raised $42.8 million in a new round of funding from several top tier venture firms. Later that year, they raised another $120 million, valuing the company at over $1 billion.[33] Your project might fail. But if your project fails, you don’t necessarily need to abandon your underlying passion. It’s like driving. When your car stops running, you don’t give up on the prospect of ever driving again—you get a new car so you can get back on the road. Butterfield knew he had a passion for startups, and he knew that startups were tough. When his vehicle broke down, he didn’t stop driving. He took his broken car to the dump, got a new one (with far more horsepower), and slammed his foot back down on the gas pedal.

In 2004, researchers Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson published Character Strengths and Virtues, a manual with twenty-four such categories, divided into six groups: wisdom and knowledge—cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge; courage—emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal; humanity—interpersonal strengths that involve tending to and befriending others; justice—civic strengths that underlie healthy community life; temperance—strengths that protect against excess; and transcendence—strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning. 9

Trusting and entrusting; we will build a strong foundation we simply can’t have a healthy god homering mutually god satisfying marriage without trust. In a fallen world trust is the fine china of a relationship. It is beautiful when it’s there, but its surly delicate and breakable. When trust is broken it can be very hard to repair; it is trust that allows a husband and wife to face all the internal and external threats to their unite love and understanding, it is trust that allows couple to weather the difference and disarrangements that every marriage faces. It is trust allows couple to talk with honest and hope about the most personal and difficult things. There are two sides to trust; first you must do everything you can to proof yourself trustworthy. Second, you must make the decision to entrust yourself into your spouse’s care. What does it look like to engender a marriage where trust thrives? What does it look like rebuild trust when it’s been shattered? What are the characteristics of a relationship where trust is the glue?

The story was an 82 year old guy with a broken neck. He had apparently fallen in his bathroom that morning, cracking his 1st and 2nd vertebrae. I had a vague memory from medical school that this wasn't a good thing--the expression "hangman's fracture" kept bobbing up from the well of facts I do not use --but I had a much more distinct impression that this was not a case for cardiology. "And Ortho isn't taking him because?" I said wearily. "Because he's got internal organs, dude." I sighed. "So why me?" "Because they got an EKG." The MAO was clearly enjoying himself. I remembered he had recently been accepted to a cardiology fellowship. I braced myself for the punch line. "And?" "And there's ectopy on it. Ectopy." He then made a noise intended to suggest a ghost haunting something.

Agustín Parlá Orduña was among the early Cuban aviation aces. He was born in Key West, Florida, on October 10, 1887, and received his early education there. After Cuba was liberated from Spain, the family returned to Havana, where he continued his education. On April 20, 1912, he received his pilot’s license at the Curtiss School of Aviation in Miami. On July 5, 1913, when the Cuban Army Air Corps was formed, Agustín Parlá was commissioned as a captain in the Cuban Armed Forces. On May 17, 1913, Domingo Rosillo and Agustín Parlá attempted the first international flights to Latin America, by trying to fly their airplanes from Key West to Havana. At 5:10 a.m., Rosillo departed from Key West and flew for 2 hours, 30 minutes and 40 seconds before running out of gas. He had planned to land at the airfield at Camp Columbia in Havana, but instead managed to squeak in at the shooting range, thereby still satisfactorily completing the flight. Parlá left Key West at 5:57 in the morning. Just four minutes later, at 6:01 a.m., he had to carefully turn back to the airstrip he had just left, since the aircraft didn’t properly respond to his controls. Parlá said, “It would not let me compensate for the wind that blew.” When he returned to Key West, he discovered that two of the tension wires to the elevator were broken. On May 19, 1913, Parlá tried again and left Key West, carrying the Cuban Flag his father had received from José Martí. This time he fell short and had to land at sea off the Cuban coast near Mariel, where sailors rescued him from his seaplane.

it is the internal transformation that matters most. If there is one thing that has made a difference in my life, it is the courage to turn and face what wants to change within me.

There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations.

Tears came from what remaining fluids their poor broken bodies still held in reserve. Tears flowed and froze against cold dead skin—for some, their last tears, for when their internal water was depleted the dead body would process no more. And they did not know it yet; if they did, would they save their tears?

Do I care for her? No. She tried to kill me and I don't especially like what she does with her hair.

the districts were emptied out, the enclaves were broken, in this way effectively separating the “professional” revolutionaries from the riotous populations that risen up in 1969, tearing them away from the thousand complicities that had been woven. Through this maneuver, the Provisional IRA was constrained to being nothing more than an armed faction, a paramilitary group, impressive and determined to be sure, but headed toward exhaustion, internment without trial, and summary executions. The tactic of repression seems to have consisted in bringing a radical revolutionary subject into existence, and separating it from everything that made it a vital force of the Catholic community: a territorial anchorage, an everyday life, a youthfulness. And as if that wasn’t enough, false IRA attacks were organized to finish turning a paralyzed population against it

God-Centered Joy We’ve already covered a lot of ground in this book. We’ve talked about choosing the broken road that leads to God and greater strength. We’ve also explored some forks in the trail that offer more choices. When we choose well, the paths of surrender, relationship, acceptance, and trust lead us even closer to Him and His power. Now we’re standing in front of another fork. This time, we’re seeking a path that will deliver us to something we’re all looking for: joy. What’s interesting, however, is that the trail to joy is unmarked, full of rocks and overgrown weeds, and rarely traveled. As a result, whenever we arrive at this fork, we almost always choose the wrong path—and end up wondering why we’re lost. To put it in plain terms, we often think possessions and things will make us happy. Food. Sex. Money. A new dress, couch, car, home, job, or spouse. We think that if we rearrange the circumstances, everything will get better. Eventually, some of us figure out, at least some of the time, that this isn’t how it works. The external possessions and things are enticing and may offer temporary pleasure, but ultimately, they don’t make a difference. They are the wrong path. Joy springs from an internal choice—a decision of the heart about the heart. It has nothing to do with circumstances and everything to do with God and where we are going with Him. It also—and this is the part that trips us up—has little to do with what we, in all our “wisdom,” want and believe we need. The path that leads to joy is based entirely on what God desires for us. Once we begin to walk in the direction He’s pointing out to us, we discover true delight. Said another way, joy results when we focus more on God and less—as I failed to do that day in Jakarta—on ourselves.

Why can't this family let us make our own life decisions?

But the problem is that the fundamental structure of scapegoating is not broken in the acceptance of the latest “other.” If the underlying scapegoat mechanism is not decommissioned, then new “others” will always arise to protect the group from its own internal conflicts. For

US-centered Pakistan's foreign policy by its undemocratic figures caused irreparable damage and the collapse of independent international relations that resulted in even the fall of Dhaka. The US leadership always betrayed Pakistan and left it alone in difficult times. Despite that, such puppet characters are still active in all institutions of the broken and failed state without shame and regret. The state of Pakistan has yet to regain freedom and liberty; indeed, it was a dream of Iqbal and the two-nation theory of Jinnah. Unfortunately, Pakistan has faced the traitorous ones of uniform since then; Pakistan can still unquestionably be a stable country with a neutral foreign policy and peaceful reciprocal relations with neighbors rather than a one-sided strategy.

As in Schrödinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment. Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying. It’s an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead. And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states. In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes. For instance, a dead cat. And that becomes our reality. But then things get really weird. Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there’s a branch. One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one. And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time.

And, of course, Dr. Bloem is one of the leading authorities on humus, internationally." "The spread?" The eagle-looking guy was lost. "I think of it more as a dip," interjected Rachel. "Humus is a term for one of the major components of soil." The tight-haired young woman spoke clearly, shutting us all up. "Basically, it's decomposed matter. Leaves, animal remains, broken-down bark, that kind of thing." Frances chimed in, "It's what everything becomes, eventually." Rachel couldn't be stopped. "And it's yummy on a pita chip.

Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender. Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat up and turn black-and-blue, the semen goes hot with Ebola, and the nipples may bleed. In women, the labia turn blue, livid, and protrusive, and there may be massive vaginal bleeding. The virus is a catastrophe for a pregnant woman: the child is aborted spontaneously and is usually infected with Ebola virus, born with red eyes and a bloody nose. Ebola destroys the brain more thoroughly than does Marburg, and Ebola victims often go into epileptic convulsions during the final stage.

their death by starting a grass fire. The escaping animals would flounder in a swamp or rush headlong off a cliff, as at Ulm Pishkun, outside of Great Falls, Montana, only to plummet to a horrible and lingering death from broken bones and damaged internal organs. And what about the natural respect for life and the “peaceful” Indians? We hear of Custer’s cruelty and murderous rampages against helpless and innocent Native Americans, but Indian wars between Iroquois and Huron, Comanche and Chickasaw were equally vicious

An individual computer with good software is usually either fully functional or entirely broken, but not something in between. This is a deliberate choice in the design of computers: if an internal fault occurs, we prefer a computer to crash completely rather than returning a wrong result, because wrong results are difficult and confusing to deal with. Thus, computers hide the fuzzy physical reality on which they are implemented and present an idealized system model that operates with mathematical perfection.

Sometimes people just aren’t meant to live through that trauma. A shell of who they could’ve been. Broken and fighting every day not to die. I think if she had lived, she could’ve learned to be happy again. I think everyone who suffers from internal demons can find that. We're all capable. But sometimes, unseen forces take it out of everyone’s hands, and maybe that just means they were meant to find their happiness in the afterlife instead.

The Expatriate Town Clerk. How does a young man with a debilitating stammer, a harsh background of broken relationships and no qualifications make his way in this world? The inspiring and often humorous course of Ron's life provides surprising answers, moving through numerous twists and turns to the improbable international development role as Town Clerk of Lilongwe, Malawi's capital city in the heart of Africa. Running away to join the army as a teenager and subsequent deployment in Aden is followed by determined, systematic pursuit of education. All this time signs of the loss of innocence and sexual awakening appear as character is forged. After posts in the UK, adjustment to African ways proves a challenge, not least the chaotic lack of administrative structure and the snootiness of the British expatriate set. Yet new friendships and a sense of professional purpose combine to add fulfilment to the unfolding African adventure.

Yes I am broken, I am broken to my last atom. You know why? Because the entire world is on my shoulders - because humankind is my responsibility. You call it God complex, I call it humanity - you call it masochism, I call it humanity - you call it insanity, I call it humanity. Be broken to pieces for the world, and you shall develop the insight into how all the pieces fit together. Destroy all internal order for the uplift of others, and your mind will wake up to the order of wholeness. Remember, there is no creation without a broken atom, there is no civilization without a broken human.

Where is your fire?” Trenton asked, every word punctuated with another blow.   Shea kept silent and concentrated on getting out of the encounter with no internal bleeding. With the way he was hammering at her guard, he’d cause an injury if a blow landed.   “Is this the woman who convinced her men to follow her on a fool’s errand?”   Shea didn’t respond.   “Where is the spirit that drove you off a cliff onto a shadow beetle?”   He was very talkative as he drove her across the small practice ring. She envied him the ability.   “You’re weak.”   Now he was onto insults.   “You don’t belong here.”   Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’d heard that one before.   He closed with her, bearing down with his blade until her arms were shaking with the strain. His face was close to hers as their match became a test of strength. “Your stupidity is going to get everyone killed.”   Abruptly, Shea released the blade with one hand, sidestepped and launched a punch straight into his ear. His head rocked to the side and Shea, taking advantage of his distraction, grabbed his arm and hooked her leg around his before pushing with all her might.   He toppled backwards, landing hard on the ground for the first time that day. Shea didn’t wait for him to recover and kicked him in the ribs. He rolled into her legs as she prepared to do it again, bringing her to the ground with him.   She kicked, punched and wiggled her way back to standing and quickly backed up as he rose to his feet.   He didn’t look happy. Shea backed up even further.   The dark expression on his face was a bit scary. Guess she shouldn’t have kicked him when he was down. The biting probably didn’t help either. Trying to dig her fingers into his eyes had been a low blow. Even she could admit that. This was practice. Some things were just off limits.   He started for her, not even bothering to pick up his practice sword. Shea prepared to run. New energy coursed through her as she felt genuine danger rolling off Trenton.   “Test complete,” the old man crowed.   “What?” Shea asked in disbelief.   “You passed.”   “That’s it?”   The test had been difficult but not impossible. She’d been expecting impossible given the hesitation the old man showed in testing her.   “Mostly.”   That’s what she thought.

My self-esteem undoes at the understanding that it’s where I want to be. As tight as I can I gripped back, keen to take the soothing balm his hold proposals for my ravaged soul and his? Nothing can hold back the break of awesome feelings. Submerged like water running down on me with a feeling, I weep- my broken heart out against his firm familiar chest, yes, I cried the first time all girls do! A strangled moan escapes him. ‘Oh, Karly!’ He closes his eyes, creasing them up as he struggles with some internal mêlée. When they open, I see a flicker of resolution before his strong arms wrap around me with such a hold down on me… like a drowning me in, so I don’t go under. He crushes me against his length, his agitated heat almost scorching hot in his body heat.

In breaking with history, art has broken with all primitivism. Art may still seek plenitude and participation, therapies and ceremonies, a repeal of the dissociation of sensibility, but not routed through the past. Today the challenge to an obtuse and callous classicism is no longer mapped onto a rejection of tradition, nor does it ironically re-embrace traditions previously rejected. Now classicism, or intellectual vassalage, is internal to the present. The ancien régime targeted by modernism is no longer found in the past but rather embedded within our own society: mass culture, entertainment, the superstitions and stupidities, the half-hearted democracy, the disguised cruelty of the modern economy. It is just as in the era of religious conflict: content provides the resistance. Art is a struggle against false content. This struggle gives history its shape. Since the content of contemporary art is often topical, basically current events, there is a constant obligation to keep up the pace. This is consistent with the overall project of Enlightenment, whose successor is modernism. Within the project of emancipation, there is finally no tolerance for relativism. The Enlightenment was antirelativist; we saw that with Diderot, who did not allow historical perspective to deflect his present-tense opinions. Historicist relativism was allied instead with the neo-Christian reaction to Enlightenment. The Enlightenment critiques itself, of course, pointing out that the Enlightenment of the philosophes, or last year's enlightenment, was not enlightened enough. Ongoing self-castigation is the very shape of the Enlightenment project. However, anyone today who dares to revive the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment, namely, to take up again the illiberal call for remystification and recovery of trust in myth an ritual - anyone who dares to exit the Enlightenment - is vilified.

Today, most countries fail to comply with the 1951 Convention. Signatory states in the developed world find ever more elaborate ways to disregard or bypass the principle of non-refoulement, adopting a suite of deterrence or non-entrée policies that make it difficut and dangerous for refugees to access their territory: carrier sanctions, razor wire fences, interception en route. Signatory states in the developing world do tend to admit refugees more because of geoghraphical necessity and international pressure than law, and when they do, they still almost universally fail to implement the socio-economic rights in the Convention. And, yet, paradoxically, many of the most generous host countries in the world are not even full signatories: Jordan, Lebanon, Thailand, Nepal, and Turkey, for instance.

The Son of a vacuum Among the tall trees he sat lost, broken, alone again, among a number of illegal immigrants, he raised his head to him without fear, as nothing in this world is worth attention. -He said: I am not a hero; I am nothing but a child looking for Eid. The Turkmen of Iraq, are the descendants of Turkish immigrants to Mesopotamia through successive eras of history. Before and after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, countries crossed from here, and empires that were born and disappeared, and still, preserve their Turkish identity. Although, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Arab world, they now live in one of its countries. Kirkuk, one of the heavens of God on earth, is one of the northern governorates of Iraq in which they live. The Kurdish race is shared with them, a race out of many in Iraq. Two children of two different ethnicities, playing in a village square in Kirkuk province when the news came from Baghdad, of a new military coup. Without delay, Saddam Hussein took over the reins of power, and faster than that, Iraq was plunged into successive wars that began in 1980 with its neighbor Iran, a war that lasted eight years. Iraq barely rested for two years, and in the third, a new war in Kuwait, which did not end in the best condition as the leader had hoped, as he was expelled from it after the establishment of an international coalition to liberate it, led by the United States of America. Iraq entered a new phase of suffering, a siege that lasted more than ten years, and ended up with the removal of Saddam Hussein from his power followed by the US occupation of it in 2003. As the father goes, he returns from this road, there is no way back but from it. As the date approaches, the son stands on the back of that hill waiting for him to return. From far away he waved a longing, with a bag of dreams in his hands, a bag of candy in his pocket, and a poem of longing by a Turkmen poet who absorb Arabic, whose words danced on his lips, in his heart. -When will you come back, dad? -On the Eid, wait for me on the hill, you will see me coming from the road, waving, carrying your gifts. The father bid his son farewell to the Arab Shiite city of Basra, on the border with Iran, after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, as the homeland is calling its men, or perhaps the leader is calling his subjects. In Iraq, as in many countries of the Arab world, the homeland is the leader, and the leader is the homeland. Months passed, the child eagerly anticipating the coming of the feast, but the father hurried to return without an appointment, loaded on the shoulders, the passion reached its extent in the martyr’s chest, with a sheet of paper in his pocket on which he wrote: Every morning takes me nostalgic for you, to the jasmine flower, oh, melody in the heart, oh balm I sip every while, To you, I extend a hand and a fire that ignites in the soul a buried love, night shakes me with tears in my eyes, my longing for you has shaped me into dreams, stretching footsteps to the left and to the right, gleam, calling out for me, you scream, waking me up to the glimpse of the light of life in your face, a thousand sparkles, in your eyes, a meaning of survival, a smile, and a glace, Eid comes to you as a companion, without, life yet has no trace, for roses, necklaces of love, so that you amaze. -Where is Ruslan? On the morning of the feast day, at the door of his house, the kids asked his mother, -with tears in her eyes: He went to meet his father. A moment of silence fell over the children, -Raman, with a little gut: Aunt, do you mean he went to the cemetery? -Mother: He went to meet him at those hills.

Indefinite dependency on aid has gradually become the default long-term response to refugees.

International responses to refugee crises cannot get by on being well-intentioned: they need to be smart, too.

I led the counselor, probation officer, my teachers, my parents, and everyone else to believe that I was a good kid who’d just slipped up and made a few blunders. I made them think I was putting my all into recovery when, in reality, the only thing I was putting my best effort towards was deceiving each of them. My intellect allowed me to maintain the style of life I wanted, right underneath their noses.

sinners . . . I was angry with God . . . I drove myself mad with a desperate disturbed conscience.”4 It is not insignificant that Luther’s own father and mother were both harsh disciplinarians, but regardless of the cause, Luther had clearly internalized a crippling image of God as judge that tormented him until he discovered grace. This message of grace and forgiveness has been a life-changing one to many people over the ages since Luther rediscovered it, but it has often been tragically accompanied by a message of fear and condemnation itself. Luther, for example, preached that one must face the horrors of wrath before one could come to grace. In other words, he believed that everyone needed to be forced to go through the horrible struggle he did before they could hear about grace. Ever since then, there has been a long history of revival preachers who have proclaimed this “pre-gospel” of fear, threat, and condemnation—telling people the bad news so they could then receive the good news, wounding people first, so they could then heal those wounds. The philosophy behind this strategy is that people need to be shaken out of their complacency and made ready to respond to the gospel. This may indeed be true for some, but for others it amounts to little more than abuse, and has resulted in a hurtful image of God being hammered into their heads that has estranged them from God, and driven them away from faith. For a person struggling with moral failure, facing up to their brokenness and realizing that God loves them and died for them despite it is a crucial step towards life. But to tell a person whose sin is self-hatred that they need to face how bad and worthless they are is like making them swallow the wrong prescription medicine—what was healing to the first person,

Only those who cross the border qualify for the legal designation of 'refugee'. International agencies and the international media tend to focus mainly on those who cross borders. But those people displaced from their homes who seek sanctuary elsewhere in their country should not drop off the international agenda, and their practical needs of sanctuary often go unmet. Since mass violence occurs in states that are fragile, even though much of a country may remain safe the state is unlikley to have the capacity to cope.

Today, the world spends approximately $75bn a year on the 10 per cent of refugees who moved to developed regions and only around $5bn a year on the 90 per cent who remain in developing regions.

The current system for refugees who remain in their region of origin is a disaster. It is premised upon an almost exclusively 'humanitarian' response. A system designed for the emergency phase - to offer an immediate lifeline - ends up enduring year after year, sometimes decade after decade. External provision of food, clothing, and shelter is absolutely essential in the aftermath of having to run for your life. But over time, if it is provided as a substitute for access to jobs, education, and other opportunities, humanitarian aid soon undermines human dignity and autonomy.

The humanitarian silo model is increasingly out of touch. It fails against almost any metric. It doesn't help refugees, undermining their autonomy and dignity. It doesn't help host governments, transforming potential contributors into a disempowered and alienated generation in their midst. It doesn't help the international community, leaving people indefinitely dependent upon aid, less capable of ultimately rebulding their countries of origin, and with onward movement as their only viable rout to opportunity.

Historically, on average international wars have lasted only six months. In contrast, the average civil war has been much longer, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years. If a family are going to be refugees for over a decade, their priority is not emergency food and shelter. It is to re-establish the threads of normal famiy life, anchored materially by a capacity of whoever is the breadwinner to earn a living. The camps run by UNHCR met the basic material needs of refugees, but they provided few opportunities to earn a living. Consequently, they left families bereft of autonomy.

. It’s a weird feeling, broken. I expected to look and see bones sticking out all over my body, as normal as a broken arm or leg, but there was nothing. I have internal breaking, I thought. Everything else looked normal, skin was still white and bones were intact. That was the only way to explain it. Internal breaking.

LOOKING FOR THE KINGDOM The north shore of Kauai is one of the most beautiful places on earth, and the pastures above the cliffs overlooking Anini Beach are some of the last open lands in that paradise. From those verdant meadows you can look out on the whales and dolphins playing in the Pacific, watch the breakers roll in and crash over the reef below. It is an enchanting place that casts an Eden-like spell on even the most cynical tourist. A friend of ours has been advocating for the protection of those gorgeous meadows; he took us there last winter to see a view that may soon be available only to the very rich. The pastures have already been marked out for small five-acre “ranchettes,” each plot going for several million; add to that the home required by the development and the bill will run more than $20 million. “The young rich have discovered Kauai,” our friend told us. “Zuckerberg has a home here; so do the guys from Apple and Google. This is the place to be.” We stood there watching the gulls and frigate birds soaring on the warm updrafts, drinking in the beauty only money can apparently buy. It had been raining; a rainbow appeared over the lush cliffs to our right. The untouched beauty of the place feels like it has been held in time since the islands were formed; unblemished beauty. Forgetting what the promise means, my heart began to ache again for life as it was meant to be, and I started to scramble internally trying to figure out how we could grab our own little slice of Eden. “They are looking for the kingdom,” Stasi said. “They are trying to buy the kingdom.” And with that, the spell was broken. Suddenly the emptiness of it all became clear—not the longing for heaven on earth, but the grasping to buy it, to arrange for our piece of it apart from the palingenesia. Now, most of the human race doesn’t have the kind of money that allows them to purchase paradise—we sure don’t—but that doesn’t stop our ravenous hunger or desperate searching

Furthermore, the most important quality to maintain is spiritual centeredness. I was enamored with the praise and the rewards given to me by those who wanted me to be their cultural critic. My feet almost slipped because I lacked the centeredness of many of my Biblical Heroes. Without a proper centeredness, internal gentrification would’ve consumed Moses, Daniel, and Ester. They recognized the luxury at their disposal in the palace but they never let the luxury define them, or their calling. I still frequent the palaces of Christianity and academia. I’ve tasted their wines and I’ve learned their cultures and I know how to operate around kings and queens. I can seek the flourishing of Babylon as Jeremiah instructed without turning away from my God. Gentrification may come but I will never lose the prophetic voice in my heart. Besides, I do not like the god they have made.

God has given me power over my food choices. I hold the power—not the food. If I’m not supposed to eat it, I won’t put it in my mouth. I was made for more than being stuck in a vicious cycle of defeat. I was not made to be a victim of my poor choices. I was made to be a victorious child of God. When I am struggling and considering a compromise, I will force myself to think past this moment and ask myself, How will I feel about this choice tomorrow morning? If I’m in a situation where the temptation is overwhelming, I will have to choose to either remove the temptation or remove myself from the situation. When a special occasion rolls around, I can find ways to celebrate that don’t involve blowing my healthy eating plan. Struggling with my weight isn’t God’s mean curse on me. Being overweight is an outside indication that internal changes are needed for my body to function properly and for me to feel well. I have these boundaries in place not for restriction but to define the parameters of my freedom. My brokenness can’t handle more freedom than this right now. And I’m good with that.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that there’s one objective way to be excellent, I don’t like when an international class of moneyed people dictates the way we present local cultures,

Finally, a period of healing began for those who had lost so much. Veterans everywhere, no matter the color of their uniform or skin, licked their wounds and headed for home. Prisoners of Japanese internment camps and Jewish concentration camps alike lamented their stolen lives. And broken families around the globe mourned the loss of a generation of young men: boys who became men through valor but whose hair would never go gray; soldiers who would never bask in the glory of a victory parade, never smell the warm, milky breath of their newborn babies; sailors who would never turn their sweethearts into brides.

Celaena beheld the room. The blood was everywhere. Before the bed, Nehemia’s bodyguards lay with their throats cut from ear to ear, their internal organs spilling out onto the floor. And on the bed … On the bed … She could hear the shouts growing closer, reaching the room, but their words were somehow muffled, as though she were underwater, the sounds coming from the surface above. Celaena stood in the center of the freezing bedroom, gazing at the bed, and the princess’s broken body atop it. Nehemia was dead.

Equality begins in the mind. If in our own mind we have a pedestal for the billionaire and royalty, and no place for the janitor and the bartender, then even a thousand policy reforms won't be able to equalize such a cockeyed, internally broken society.

One understands, then, why the Americans make such a show of their debt. The initiative is supposed to shame the State for its bad management and alert the citizens to an imminent collapse of the finances and public services. But the exorbitant scale of the figures robs them of all meaning. It is, in fact, just a massive advertising exercise and, indeed, the luminous billboard looks for all the world like a triumphant stock market index that has broken all records. The population contemplate it with the fascination they might accord to a world record (though few gather in front of the Beaubourg digital clock to see the run-in to the end of the century). At the same time, the people are collectively in the same situation as the Tupolev test pilot who right up to the last second could see his aircraft nose dive and crash into the ground on his internal video circuit. Did he, by some last-minute reflex, glance at the image as he died? He could have imagined himself living out his last moments in virtual reality. Did the image survive the man if only for a fraction of a second? Or was it the other way about? Does virtual reality survive the real world's catastrophic end?

In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and threatening its integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains. So, after a mass extinction event, a turnover happens, with new species appearing, the web self-repairing. Where

In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and threatening its integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains.

I'd say with the term 'internally displaced person' until I'd broken it down semantically. I was wrestling with a ghost meaning: a person whose interiority was at odds with their exteriority, who w as internally (in themselves) displaced.

Societally, we have internalized some of depression's lies - that sadness is wrong, that it is bad, that it is not valuable. That it needs to be made "better." We celebrate wellness and leave no space for sorrow, brokenness, grief, or anything other than "I'm fine" when the truth is that life is complicated, painful, and difficult. Whole humans feel a whole range of emotions, but we applaud only half of them, driving our negatively perceived emotions deep into hiding for fear of judgment. There, they are safe to fester and grow stronger, which in turn drives us to hid them more.

When extreme parts are met by Self, they lose their steam. Consequently, when one partner stays Self-led and resists the invitation to the predictable dance, the pattern is broken.

Film Review: The Shore of Angels By Mike D. X, International Film Journal In The Shore of Angels, writer and composer Sami Abouzid delivers a poetic masterpiece that swims between fantasy and emotional truth. Set against the haunting beauty of a coastal Spanish village and the mythic depths of the ocean, the film follows Antony, a soulful guitarist, and Meloria, a mermaid whose love defies worlds. What begins as a silent, magical connection becomes a sweeping tale of impossible love, sacrifice, and fate. Abouzid’s vision is as cinematic as it is heartfelt — every scene pulses with emotion and visual beauty. The storytelling is bold, the music unforgettable, and the themes deeply human. Meloria becomes an icon of longing, Antony a symbol of broken dreams. The Shore of Angels is not just a film — it’s a legend in motion. A timeless story told with rare artistic honesty. 5 stars — An unforgettable fantasy. — Mike D. X

Ultimately, I wrote a book that shows the internal and conflicting struggles of carrying child abuse cases, how those cases are experienced by Black women, and the emotional and moral toll that it takes on everyone involved.

The payments system is the heart of the financial services industry, and most people who work in banking are engaged in servicing payments. But this activity commands both low priority and low prestige within the industry. Competition between firms generally promotes innovation and change, but a bank can gain very little competitive advantage by improving its payment systems, since the customer experience is the result more of the efficiency of the system as a whole than of the efficiency of any individual bank. Incentives to speed payments are weak. Incrementally developed over several decades, the internal systems of most banks creak: it is easier, and implies less chance of short-term disruption, to add bits to what already exists than to engage in basic redesign. The interests of the leaders of the industry have been elsewhere, and banks have tended to see new technology as a means of reducing costs rather than as an opportunity to serve consumer needs more effectively. Although the USA is a global centre for financial innovation in wholesale financial markets, it is a laggard in innovation in retail banking, and while Britain scores higher, it does not score much higher. Martin Taylor, former chief executive of Barclays (who resigned in 1998, when he could not stop the rise of the trading culture at the bank), described the state of payment systems in this way: ‘the systems architecture at the typical big bank, especially if it has grown through merger and acquisition, has departed from the Palladian villa envisaged by its original designers and morphed into a gothic house of horrors, full of turrets, broken glass and uneven paving.

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

At international meetings, Americans and Brits often mistake the extraordinary privilege of being able to speak in their mother tongue for intellectual superiority. Because no one is going to disagree with them in broken English, they are rarely disabused of this notion.

I hear music coming through the wall and round the corner to find the internal door slightly cracked. I gently push it open and lean against the door frame as I watch Nate leaning over the hood of his car looking at… well, I actually have no idea in hell what he’s looking at, but I know that he looks damn good doing it.

He’s so bruised and feeble--he might have internal injuries.” “He didn’t seem so feeble as all that, a moment ago,” the housekeeper observed dryly. Kathleen turned scarlet. “He was overwrought. He didn’t know what he was doing.” “If you say so, my lady.” Mrs. Church’s slight smile faded as she continued. “I think we should save our worry for Mr. Winterborne. Just before Mr. Ravenel was carried inside, he said that Mr. Winterborne’s leg is broken and he’s also been blinded.” “Oh, no. We must find out if he wants us to send for someone.” “I would be surprised if he did,” the housekeeper said pragmatically as they entered the house. “Why do you say that?” Kathleen asked. “If he had anyone, he wouldn’t have come here alone for Christmas in the first place.

Liberia is a country on the “Pepper Coast,” which in many ways mirrors the United States. While it has not been easy, the willingness of its dedicated, hardworking people has never subsided. Hopefully their endeavor to obtain a more perfect country will continue and perhaps the day will come when they can once again take the lead in Africa to find a brighter future. During the mid-1950’s I witnessed the effects of the sudden affluence that came with the mining of gold and blood diamonds in the interior mountains of Liberia and Sierra Leonne. Although driven out of Sierra Leonne in 1954, the De Beers cartel set up a covert purchasing office in Monrovia. By 1956, there were thousands of illegal miners from both sides of the international border selling their diamonds and gold to anyone interested at places like the French Hotel on Ashmun Street or the American Bar at Mamba Point. It was always difficult to know the value of the mostly industrial diamonds, wrapped a dirty handkerchief or the glitter of what appeared to be gold in laterite clay at the bottom of a tin can. Of course there were also con-men who had nothing more than broken pieces of coke bottles to sell. It was a time when fortunes were made and lives were lost. Needless to say that Liberia was and most likely still is a risky place to be! Now, many of the lower grade diamonds from Liberia are sold directly to dealers in Sierra Leone but the more valuable stones valued at $500,000 or more, which are usually found in Sierra Leone, are smuggled into Liberia to avoid a 15% Sierra Leone tax. Sometimes diamonds are traded for gold but it’s a risky business that frequently cost people their money and sometimes even their lives.

We believe that families are the solution to the orphan crisis. We likewise believe that the global church has an incredibly important role to play in supporting vulnerable families, protecting children, and addressing the brokenness at the root of the orphan crisis.

Something was wrong with the devices themselves. Digging deep into the internal structure of the circuit boards with powerful microscopes, Simon's team had discovered broken and incorrect connections, electronic dead-ends, short circuits, and nonsensical pathways.

THE FIRST MORNING   What a joy it must have been for the first man and woman to awaken that first morning after their creation! Before them lay a beautiful garden without blemish, a harmonious creation without turmoil, an orderly environment without a weed or thorn. Most wonderful of all, they freely walked and talked with the Lord in the cool of the day. Wouldn’t you love to experience that glorious state for one morning! Eleanor Farjeon must have felt the same elation when she penned the words to her now internationally famous hymn: “Morning has broken like the first morning; Blackbird has spoken like the first bird. Praise for the singing! Praise for the Morning! Praise for them, springing fresh from the Word! Sweet the rain’s new fall sunlit from heaven, Like the first dew-fall on the first grass. Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden, Spring in completeness where his feet pass. Mine is the sunlight! Mine is the morning Born of the one light Eden saw play! Praise with elation, praise every morning, God’s recreation of the new day!”1 While we may not awaken to a perfect, pristine world in our natural bodies, we can awaken to a “brand-new day” in our minds and hearts. We can walk and talk with the Lord all day long. Each day the Lord presents to His beloved children wondrous possibilities to explore with Him. Let us always remember that He is the Creator and our loving Father. No matter what state we find ourselves in, He can create something new in us, for us, and through us. What cause for praise! His next act of creation is waiting to unfold as we yield our life to Him this morning and throughout our day!   HIS COMPASSIONS FAIL NOT. THEY ARE NEW EVERY MORNING. LAMENTATIONS 3:22-23 NKJV

slope of a valley. There is something satisfyingly eerie about a landfall – any landfall. The growing coast ahead, no matter how exhaustively charted it is, or how old and familiar its history and internal topography, looks so imaginary from this sea distance. Watching it come slowly alive, inseparable from its broken reflection in the water, you feel that you’re making it up as you go along. It’s not real. On a green hill above the town you see a fine, brand-new medieval castle – turrets, towers, keeps, drawbridges, the lot. Like a novelist toying with an invented landscape on the page, you think, that won’t wash; and, obedient to the thought, the handsome castle rubs itself out and in its place there comes up a stolid clump of gasholders or the cooling towers of a power station.

In 2007 I was hit by a delivery truck while crossing the street in Times Square. I was hospitalized for weeks, with dangerous internal bleeding and many broken bones. I was out of work for nearly two months and had to learn to walk all over again.

If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, “Hand me the wrench,” his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?”—even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that “communism just doesn’t work”): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.11 One might even say that it’s one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically. True, they don’t tend to operate very democratically. Most often they are organized around military-style top-down chains of command. But there is often an interesting tension here, because top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more

I had to have sex with any man who asked for me. I had to have sex at least three times a night, sometimes seven or eight times in one night. The majority were Americans. They like to have fun and you can’t imagine how they act. They drink a lot, they speak loudly they make fun of the girls and treat us like rubbish. I wanted to stop them behaving this way. They shouldn’t do this. It is not fair, not only for me but for all the girls in this situation.’ Her clients, she explains, were members of the UN peacekeeping forces, the SFOR or Stabilisation Force, and the UN-appointed IPTF, the International Police Task Force, policemen who had been recruited from all over the world to help the process of nation-building in Bosnia in the late 1990s. It was these men, tasked with rebuilding a broken country, who refused to help Monica when she pleaded for help.

Plenty of rules are laid out for us in our history book. They were discovered by first being broken.

20The womb forgets them, the worm feasts on them; the wicked are no longer remembered but are broken like a tree.

IS IT YOU, OR IS IT ME? For the last six months, Ricky has avoided discussing a potential problem with his wife, Elena, because he’s worried that he may be at fault. His first wife had cheated on him for a full year before he figured out what was going on. That had rocked him to the core. Not only was he devastated by her infidelity; he reeled at his own inability to spot the early-warning signs of something as serious as adultery. Ricky was slow to enter another long-term relationship: once bitten, twice shy. That explains why he dated Elena, a friend from church, for four years before convincing himself that his first marriage was a fluke and that Elena was unlike his first wife. Then he took the plunge. After three years of marriage to Elena, Ricky fell into a running debate, constantly bickering—with himself. He began to see signs that maybe something bad, even hideous, was going on behind his back, but he wasn’t sure if Elena was acting inappropriately or if he was being unnecessarily suspicious. Thus, Ricky remained silent. Clearly, Elena had changed. She appeared to be more secretive about her e-mail, quickly exiting from it when he entered their home office. She took more phone calls out of the room than ever before. As Elena successfully explained those behaviors (it was job related and thus uninteresting), a third issue drove Ricky’s internal debate to new heights. Elena had begun working a great deal more overtime. This had happened off and on throughout their relationship. But what made extended hours more troubling lately was that her new supervisor was an ex-boyfriend, and some of the late-night work was with him.

Men do this. They don't talk. They process internally, on their own, and then it's too late to work through it. He had probably broken up with you in his mind months ago.

The brain is usually quite capable of separating internal from external activity (that produced by sensory information), like keeping received and sent emails in separate folders. The theory is that hallucinations occur when this ability is compromised. If you’ve ever accidentally lumped all your emails together in the same folder you’ll know how confusing this can be, so imagine doing that with your brain functions. So the brain loses track of what’s internal and what’s external activity, and the brain isn’t good with such things. >> how blindfolded people struggle to tell the difference between apples and potatoes when eating them. >>patients who experienced hallucinations were far more sensitive to self-tickling, suggesting a compromised ability to separate internal and external stimuli. >>You walk along the street and a bus stops alongside you. This isn’t surprising because your mental model of the world recognises and knows how buses operate; you know buses stop to let passengers on and off, so you ignore this occurrence. However, if a bus pulls up outside your house and doesn’t move, this would be atypical. Your brain is now has new, unfamiliar information, and it needs to make sense of it in order to update and maintain the mental model of the world. So you investigate, and it turns out the bus has broken down. But, before you discover this, a number of other theories will have occurred to you. The bus driver’s spying on you? Someone bought you a bus? Your house has been designated as a bus depot without your knowledge? The brain comes up with all these explanations, but recognises them as very unlikely, based on the existing mental model of how things work, so they’re dismissed. Delusions result when this system undergoes alteration. A well-known type of delusion is Capgras delusion, where people genuinely believe someone close to them (spouse, parent, sibling, friend, pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor.31 Usually when you see a loved one, this triggers multiple memories and emotions: love, affection, fondness, frustration, irritation (depending on length of relationship). But suppose you see your partner and experience none of the usual emotional associations? Damage to areas of the frontal lobes can cause this to happen. Based on all your memories and experiences, your brain anticipates a strong emotional response to the sight of your partner, but this doesn’t happen. This results in uncertainty: that’s my long-term partner, I have many feelings about my long-term partner, feelings I’m now not experiencing. Why not? One way to resolve this inconsistency is the conclusion that they aren’t your partner, but a physically identical impostor. This conclusion allows the brain to reconcile the disharmony it’s experiencing, thus ending uncertainty. This is Capgras delusion.