Invoke Change Quotes

You invoke a new future when you envision your past in the light of your present.

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.

The keeper of silence has tremendous control. What she keeps sealed away can never be harmed so long as it remains hidden. Silence is a power, yes, but when does silence turn upon its keeper and become the captor? When does it inhibit the natural impulse to speak, the urge to sing, the longing to contribute? So many wait for the express invitation to speak, for some permission to be granted, to be coaxed into contributing. But what if this invitation never comes? When does silence stop us from fulfilling our purpose, or making connections with others? When does silence stop a healthy disagreement, like the one that names an injustice and invokes change? When is silence being complicit, when it should be calling on a revolution waiting to happen?

We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you very, very much.

Like antidepressants, a substantial part of the benefit of psychotherapy depends on a placebo effect, or as Moerman calls it, the meaning response. At least part of the improvement that is produced by these treatments is due to the relationship between the therapist and the client and to the client's expectancy of getting better. That is a problem for antidepressant treatment. It is a problem because drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry, not because of the psychological factors. But it is not a problem for psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are trained to provide a warm and caring environment in which therapeutic change can take place. Their intention is to replace the hopelessness of depression with a sense of hope and faith in the future. These tasks are part of the essence of psychotherapy. The fact that psychotherapy can mobilize the meaning response - and that it can do so without deception - is one of its strengths, no one of its weaknesses. Because hopelessness is a fundamental characteristic of depression, instilling hope is a specific treatment for it it. Invoking the meaning response is essential for the effective treatment of depression, and the best treatments are those that can do this most effectively and that can do without deception.

I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community, and also, why not?, this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration. I would like to fly on a broomstick and dance in the moonlight with other pagan witches in the forest, invoking earth forces and howling demons; I want to become a wise old crone, to learn ancient spells and healers' secrets. It is no small thing, this design of mine. Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and can plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimensions and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition.

The blessing was from a young child’s lips, but it was the first that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles and sufferings, and troubles and changes, of his after life, he never once forgot it.

The Talmud, the compilation of discussions of Jewish Law which I have quoted earlier in this book, gives examples of bad prayers, improper prayers, which one should not utter. If a woman is pregnant, neither she nor her husband should pray, “May God grant that this child be a boy” (nor, for that matter, may they pray that it be a girl). The sex of the child is determined at conception, and God cannot be invoked to change it. Again, if a man sees a fire engine racing toward his neighborhood, he should not pray, “Please God, don’t let the fire be in my house.” Not only is it mean-spirited to pray that someone else’s house burn instead of yours, but it is futile. A certain house is already on fire; the most sincere or articulate of prayers will not affect the question of which house it is.

Olden days cannot be reversed even with the strongest incantation, but fresh days could be invoked to be fruitful in order to stop old fruitless years

Orwell’s point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that really works to achieve the opposite; i.e.,prevents the change from really occurring.

When people have absolutely no control over the things that really matter to them, they tend to do one of three things: devolve into animals and prey on others, indulging their base instincts (wolves); huddle in herds for comfort and safety from the chaos (sheep); or invoke a rigid daily routine, effecting control over those few things they can while endeavoring to change what seems an inevitable fate (sheepdogs). Over

Not until something challenges you to rise up, you shall always stay down; not until you realize your enough is enough, you shall always have enough. When you keep exerting your energy, time and attention on things which least invoke your courage to rise up and climb to the distinctive best, you shall always stay at your best with the same energy, time and attention time on the less better you because of reluctance, ignorance and fear! The lion that hunts, is always on the move! Awake, challenge and change something!

When we are taught that our anger is undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly, we learn that we are undesirable, selfish, powerless, andy ugly. When we forgo talking about anger, because it represents risk or challenge, or because it disrupts a comfortable status quo, we forgo valuable lessons about risk and challenge and the discomforts of the status quo. By naturalizing the idea that girls and women aren't angry but are sad, by instisting that they keep their anger to themselves, we render women's feelings and demands mute and with little social value. When we call our anger sadness instead of anger, we often fail to acknowledge what is wrong, specifically in a way that discourages us from imagining and pursuing change. Sadness, as an emotion, is paired with acceptance. Anger, on the other hand, invokes the possibility of change and of fighting back. What I wish I had taught my daughter in that moment was that she had every right to be angry, and subsequently demand that the adults around her pay attention to that anger. Only then can she feel she has the right to make demands on the world.

Every event in our life is determined by past actions. So every moment is as it is supposed to be. But it is possible to change one’s fate and fortunes. The dance of Prakriti can change if Purusha intervenes. For that one has to invoke Purusha through acts of determination that demonstrate desire and devotion.

Realising that Mauritius could be a valuable port of call for Dutch ships Heemskerck put a rooster and some hens ashore and planted orange and lemon seeds, invoking 'the Almighty God's blessing that He may lend His power to make them multiply and grow for the benefit of those who will visit the island after us'.

To invoke Jesus' name is to place yourself in his presence, to open yourself to his power, his energy. The prayer of Jesus' name actually brings God closer, making him more present. He is always present in some way, since he knows and loves each one of us at every moment; but he is not present to those who do not pray as intimately as he is present to those who do. Prayers a difference; 'prayer changes things.' It may or may not change our external circumstances. (It does if God sees that that change is good for us; it does not if God sees that it is not.) but it always changes our relationship to God, which is infinitely more important than external circumstances, however pressing they may seem, because it is eternal but they are temporary, and because it is our very self but they are not.

By “crime” I do not mean mere illegality, but instead a category of socially proscribed acts that: (1) threaten or harm other people and (2) violate norms related to justice, personal safety, or human rights, (3) in such a manner or to such a degree as to warrant community intervention (and sometimes coercive intervention). That category would surely include a large number of things that are presently illegal (rape, murder, dropping bricks off an overpass), would certainly not include other things that are presently illegal (smoking pot, sleeping in public parks, nude sunbathing), and would likely also include some things that are not presently illegal (mass evictions, the invasion of Iraq). The point here is that the standards I want to appeal to in invoking the idea of crime are not the state’s standards, but the community’s — and, specifically, the community’s standards as they relate to justice, rights, personal safety, and perhaps especially the question of violence. (...) Because the state uses this protective function to justify its own violence, the replacement of the police institution is not only a goal of social change, but also a means of achieving it. The challenge is to create another system that can protect us from crime, and can do so better, more justly, with a respect for human rights, and with a minimum of bullying. What is needed, in short, is a shift in the responsibility for public safety—away from the state and toward the community.

Jabez would have continued to lament in sorrow until he died with no hope of amend, if he was unwilling to change that predicaments through prayer. A person is helpless until he prays. Your situation remains when you don’t pray and disappear when you pray aright. Cancers can break off by prayers, HIV and AIDS can be handled in prayers. The horrors of abusive relationship can be dissolved by prayer. Every challenges of your life can be arrested by prayers. No condition is permanent when prayer is invoked.

It is a poor conclusion, is it not?’ he observed, having brooded awhile on the scene he had just witnessed: ‘an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.'Nelly, there is a strange change approaching; I'm in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life that I hardly remember to eat and drink. Those two who have left the room are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me; and that appearance causes me pain, amounting to agony. About HER I won't speak; and I don't desire to think; but I earnestly wish she were invisible: her presence invokes only maddening sensations. HE moves me differently: and yet if I could do it without seeming insane, I'd never see him again! You'll perhaps think me rather inclined to become so,' he added, making an effort to smile, 'if I try to describe the thousand forms of past associations and ideas he awakens or embodies. But you'll not talk of what I tell you; and my mind is so eternally secluded in itself, it is tempting at last to turn it out to another.

People often want to change a habit—one of their own or someone else’s. And one of the worst, most common mistakes when we’re trying to help someone change a habit? Invoking the dreaded “You should be able to…” • “If good health is important to you, you should be able to exercise on your own.” • “If you take this job seriously, you should be able to stick to this schedule I’ve drawn up.” • “If you want to make a sale, you should be able to bend the rules.” • “If you respect me, you should be able to do what I tell you to do, with no talking back.” • “If you respect yourself, you should be able to make time for your writing.

Certain words make people frown; certain words make people smile; certain words make people cautious; certain words make people ponder; certain words give people relief; certain words increase tension; certain words bring doubt; certain words give hope; certain words challenge gut; ; certain words empower courage; certain words increase fear; certain words invoke anger; certain words can trigger massacre; certain words can bring peace; Words can change thought, mood, actions and atmosphere in the twinkling of an eye... Not until we get to know how to truly present our daily deeds through our words, we shall always do good and in the end cancel every good deed we have done with just some simple words!

Just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls "relentlessly pleasant." This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance. Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused... and smile. No wonder women don't negotiate as much as men. It's like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels. So what should we do? Should we play by the rules that others created? Should we figure out a way to put on a friendly expression while not being too nice, displaying the right levels of loyalty and using "we" language? I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end. It is also true, as any good negotiator knows, that having a better understanding of the other side leads to a superior outcome. So at the very least, women can enter these negotiations with the knowledge that showing concern for the common good, even as they negotiate for themselves, will strengthen their position.

States. It was not easy for Chinese to get into the country. In 1882 Congress had passed a law suspending the entry of Chinese laborers and “all persons of the Chinese race” except officials, teachers, students, tourists, and merchants, at the same time formally prohibiting the naturalization of Chinese. The 1882 Act was the culmination of decades of anti-Chinese propaganda and discrimination. In 1852 California Governor John Bigler described Chinese immigrants as “contract coolies, avaricious, ignorant of moral obligations, incapable of being assimilated and dangerous to the welfare of the state.” In 1854 the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a white man for killing a Chinese miner by invoking Section 14 of the California Criminal Act, which specified that “no Black or mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.” In support of the decision Chief Justice Hugh Murray declared that “to let Chinese testify in a court of law would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship. And then we might see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” In 1879 the California State constitution prohibited corporations and municipal works from hiring Chinese and authorized cities to remove Chinese from their boundaries.1 My father never told us how he got around the restrictions of the Exclusion Act, and we knew better than to probe because it was generally understood that the distinction between being here legally and illegally was a shadowy one.

In Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel makes a useful comparison between the rhetoric abusive men employ to justify beating up their girlfriends, wives, or children and the publicly traded justifications for widespread racism. He writes: During the first few years that I worked with men who are violent I was continually perplexed by their inability to see the effects of their actions and their ability to deny the violence they had done to their partners or children. I only slowly became aware of the complex set of tactics that men use to make violence against women invisible and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These tactics are listed below in the rough order that men employ them.… (1) Denial: “I didn’t hit her.” (2) Minimization: “It was only a slap.” (3) Blame: “She asked for it.” (4) Redefinition: “It was mutual combat.” (5) Unintentionality: “Things got out of hand.” (6) It’s over now: “I’ll never do it again.” (7) It’s only a few men: “Most men wouldn’t hurt a woman.” (8) Counterattack: “She controls everything.” (9) Competing victimization: “Everybody is against men.” Kivel goes on to detail the ways these nine tactics are used to excuse (or deny) institutionalized racism. Each of these tactics also has its police analogy, both as applied to individual cases and in regard to the general issue of police brutality. Here are a few examples: (1) Denial. “The professionalism and restraint … was nothing short of outstanding.” “America does not have a human-rights problem.” (2) Minimization. Injuries were “of a minor nature.” “Police use force infrequently.” (3) Blame. “This guy isn’t Mr. Innocent Citizen, either. Not by a long shot.” “They died because they were criminals.” (4) Redefinition. It was “mutual combat.” “Resisting arrest.” “The use of force is necessary to protect yourself.” (5) Unintentionality. “[O]fficers have no choice but to use deadly force against an assailant who is deliberately trying to kill them.…” (6) It’s over now. “We’re making changes.” “We will change our training; we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.” (7) It’s only a few men. “A small proportion of officers are disproportionately involved in use-of-force incidents.” “Even if we determine that the officers were out of line … it is an aberration.” (8) Counterattack. “The only thing they understand is physical force and pain.” “People make complaints to get out of trouble.” (9) Competing victimization. The police are “in constant danger.” “[L]iberals are prejudiced against police, much as many white police are biased against Negroes.” The police are “the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” Another commonly invoked rationale for justifying police violence is: (10) The Hero Defense. “These guys are heroes.” “The police routinely do what the rest of us don’t: They risk their lives to keep the peace. For that selfless bravery, they deserve glory, laud and honor.” “[W]ithout the police … anarchy would be rife in this country, and the civilization now existing on this hemisphere would perish.” “[T]hey alone stand guard at the upstairs door of Hell.

Thought experiments aren’t oracles. They can’t tell you what’s true or fair or what decision you should make. If you notice that you would be more forgiving of adultery in a Democrat than a Republican, that reveals you have a double standard, but it doesn’t tell you what your standard “should” be. If you notice that you’re nervous about deviating from the status quo, that doesn’t mean you can’t decide to play it safe this time anyway. What thought experiments do is simply reveal that your reasoning changes as your motivations change. That the principles you’re inclined to invoke or the objections that spring to your mind depend on your motives: the motive to defend your image or your in-group’s status; the motive to advocate for a self-serving policy; fear of change or rejection.

Peace cannot require Palestinians to acquiesce to the denial of what was done to them. Neither can it require Israeli Jews to view their own presence in Palestine as illegitimate or to change their belief in their right to live there because of ancient historical and spiritual ties. Peace, rather, must be based on how we act toward each other now. It is unacceptable for a Palestinian to draw on his history of oppression and suffering to justify harming innocent Israeli civilians. It is equally unacceptable for an Israeli to invoke his belief in an ancient covenant between God and Abraham to justify bulldozing the home and seizing the land of a Palestinian farmer. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which proposes a political framework for a resolution to the conflict in Ireland, and which was overwhelmingly endorsed in referendums, sets out two principles from which Palestinians and Israelis could learn. First “[i]t is recognized that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society.” Second, whatever political arrangements are freely and democratically chosen for the governance of Northern Ireland, the power of the government “shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of civil, political, social, and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities.” Northern Ireland is still a long way from achieving this ideal, but life has vastly improved since the worst days of “the Troubles” and it is a paradise on earth compared to Palestine/Israel.

The myth of redemptive violence is, in short, nationalism become absolute. This myth speaks for God; it does not listen for God to speak. It invokes the sovereignty of God as its own; it does not entertain the prophetic possibility of radical judgment by God. It misappropriates the language, symbols, and scriptures of Christianity. It does not seek God in order to change; it embraces God in order to prevent change. Its God is not the impartial ruler of all nations but a tribal god worshiped as an idol. Its metaphor is not the journey but the fortress. Its symbol is not the cross but the crosshairs of a gun. Its offer is not forgiveness but victory. Its good news is not the unconditional love of enemies but their final elimination. Its salvation is not a new heart but a successful foreign policy. Its usurps the revelation of God's purposes for humanity in Jesus. It is blasphemous. It is idolatrous.

And Satan spoke unto a certain prince, saying: 'Fear not to use the sword, for the wise men have deceived you in saying that the world would be destroyed thereby. Listen not to the counsel of weaklings, for they fear you exceedingly, and they serve your enemies by staying your hand against them. Strike, and know that you shall be king over all.' "And the prince did heed the word of Satan, and he summoned all of the wise men of that realm and called upon them to give him counsel as to the ways in which the enemy might be destroyed without bringing down the wrath upon his own kingdom. But most of the wise men said, 'Lord, it is not possible, for your enemies also have the sword which we have given you, and the fieriness of it is as the flame of Hell and as the fury of the sun-star from whence it was kindled.' " 'Then thou shalt make me yet another which is yet seven times hotter than Hell itself,' commanded the prince, whose arrogance had come to surpass that of Pharaoh. "And many of them said: 'Nay, Lord, ask not this thing of us; for even the smoke of such a fire, if we were to kindle it for thee, would cause many to perish.' "Now the prince was angry because of their answer, and he suspected them of betraying him, and he sent his spies among them to tempt them and to challenge them; whereupon the wise men became afraid. Some among them changed their answers, that his wrath be not invoked against them. Three times he asked them, and three times they answered: 'Nay, Lord, even your own people will perish if you do this thing.' But one of the magi was like unto Judas Iscariot, and his testimony was crafty, and having betrayed his brothers, he lied to all the people, advising them not to fear the demon Fallout. The prince heeded this false wise man, whose name was Blackeneth, and he caused spies to accuse many of the magi before the people. Being afraid, the less wise among the magi counseled the prince according t pleasure, saying: "The weapons may be used, only do not exceed such-and-such a limit, or all will surely perish.

MARCH 22 Eostre RENEWAL Eostre (YO-ster) is the Germanic goddess of spring. She is also called Ostara or Eastre, and her name is the origin of the word Easter, the name of the only feast day in the Christian calendar that is still tied to the moon. Eostre is a goddess of dawn, rebirth, and new beginnings. Her festival is celebrated on the first day of spring, when she is invoked at dawn with ritual fire, quickening the land, while the full moon symbolically sets behind her. Eostre’s return each spring warms the ground, preparing for a new cycle of growth. One year the goddess was late, and a little girl found a bird near death from the cold. The child turned to Eostre for help. In response a rainbow bridge appeared and Eostre came, clothed in her red robe of vibrant sunlight, melting the snows. Because the creature was wounded beyond repair, Eostre changed it into a snow hare, who then brought gifts of rainbow eggs. Hares and rainbows are sacred to her, as is the full moon, since the ancients saw the image of a hare in its markings. CONTEMPLATION Sometimes, old forms must be surrendered gracefully in order for life to be reborn in new and higher forms.

War and peace Humanity has fought many wars, But won none, Because even in peace the victors carry its scars, That they can share with no one, Because when they saw their comrade fall, They saw a friend die, When they were smashed against the pitiless wall, The human within them did die, Resurrecting a beast from within, That they try to leave behind, but it walks with them, And becomes their penance for what was not their sin, And then they spend a lifetime with this beast and with them, Whom they lost in the war, Their fellow comrades part of the same legion, And even in times of peace, in dreams the demons of war chase them far, There, where all emotions die, all sentiments sink, a death forsaken region, Where they are cursed to live forever, In the phantoms of war that chase them every day and every night, Because they have seen their fellow comrades die forever, And this aches their inward and memory invoked sight, They maybe soldiers who are meant to kill, But I wonder what they think when they see a fellow human on the other end, The enemy who they shall kill even at the cost of killing their own will, Thus is born the beast within, and for the human that it now feeds on, it is the end!

War and peace Humanity has fought many wars, But won none, Because even in peace the victors carry its scars, That they can share with no one, Because when they saw their comrade fall, They saw a friend die, When they were smashed against the pitiless wall, The human within them did die, Resurrecting a beast from within, That they try to leave behind, but it walks with them, And becomes their penance for what was not their sin, And then they spend a lifetime with this beast and with them, Whom they lost in the war, Their fellow comrades part of the same legion, And even in times of peace, in dreams the demons of war chase them far, There, where all emotions die, all sentiments sink, a death forsaken region, Where they are cursed to live forever, In the phantoms of war that chase them every day and every night, Because they have seen their fellow comrades die forever, And this aches their inward and memory invoked sight, They maybe soldiers who are meant to kill, But I wonder what they think when they see a fellow human on the other end, The enemy who they shall kill even even at the cost of killing their own will, Thus is born the beast within and for the human that it now feeds on, it is the end!

Pull approaches differ significantly from push approaches in terms of how they organize and manage resources. Push approaches are typified by "programs" - tightly scripted specifications of activities designed to be invoked by known parties in pre-determined contexts. Of course, we don't mean that all push approaches are software programs - we are using this as a broader metaphor to describe one way of organizing activities and resources. Think of thick process manuals in most enterprises or standardized curricula in most primary and secondary educational institutions, not to mention the programming of network television, and you will see that institutions heavily rely on programs of many types to deliver resources in pre-determined contexts. Pull approaches, in contrast, tend to be implemented on "platforms" designed to flexibly accommodate diverse providers and consumers of resources. These platforms are much more open-ended and designed to evolve based on the learning and changing needs of the participants. Once again, we do not mean to use platforms in the literal sense of a tangible foundation, but in a broader, metaphorical sense to describe frameworks for orchestrating a set of resources that can be configured quickly and easily to serve a broad range of needs. Think of Expedia's travel service or the emergency ward of a hospital and you will see the contrast with the hard-wired push programs.

Like stress, emotion is a concept we often invoke without a precise sense of its meaning. And, like stress, emotions have several components. The psychologist Ross Buck distinguishes between three levels of emotional responses, which he calls Emotion I, Emotion II and Emotion III, classified according to the degree we are conscious of them. Emotion III is the subjective experience, from within oneself. It is how we feel. In the experience of Emotion III there is conscious awareness of an emotional state, such as anger or joy or fear, and its accompanying bodily sensations. Emotion II comprises our emotional displays as seen by others, with or without our awareness. It is signalled through body language — “non-verbal signals, mannerisms, tones of voices, gestures, facial expressions, brief touches, and even the timing of events and pauses between words. [They] may have physiologic consequences — often outside the awareness of the participants.” It is quite common for a person to be oblivious to the emotions he is communicating, even though they are clearly read by those around him. Our expressions of Emotion II are what most affect other people, regardless of our intentions. A child’s displays of Emotion II are also what parents are least able to tolerate if the feelings being manifested trigger too much anxiety in them. As Dr. Buck points out, a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self-shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised…. The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.” The stress literature amply documents that helplessness, real or perceived, is a potent trigger for biological stress responses. Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so. People often find themselves in situations of learned helplessness — for example, someone who feels stuck in a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship, in a stressful job or in a lifestyle that robs him or her of true freedom. Emotion I comprises the physiological changes triggered by emotional stimuli, such as the nervous system discharges, hormonal output and immune changes that make up the flight-or-fight reaction in response to threat. These responses are not under conscious control, and they cannot be directly observed from the outside. They just happen. They may occur in the absence of subjective awareness or of emotional expression. Adaptive in the acute threat situation, these same stress responses are harmful when they are triggered chronically without the individual’s being able to act in any way to defeat the perceived threat or to avoid it. Self-regulation, writes Ross Buck, “involves in part the attainment of emotional competence, which is defined as the ability to deal in an appropriate and satisfactory way with one’s own feelings and desires.” Emotional competence presupposes capacities often lacking in our society, where “cool” — the absence of emotion — is the prevailing ethic, where “don’t be so emotional” and “don’t be so sensitive” are what children often hear, and where rationality is generally considered to be the preferred antithesis of emotionality. The idealized cultural symbol of rationality is Mr. Spock, the emotionally crippled Vulcan character on Star Trek.

The belief that order must be intentionally generated and imposed upon society by institutional authorities continues to prevail. This centrally-directed model is premised upon what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit,” namely, the proposition “that man is able to shape the world according to his wishes,”3 or what David Ehrenfeld labeled “the arrogance of humanism.”4That such practices have usually failed to produce their anticipated results has generally led not to a questioning of the model itself, but to the conclusion that failed policies have suffered only from inadequate leadership, or a lack of sufficient information, or a failure to better articulate rules. Once such deficiencies have been remedied, it has been supposed, new programs can be implemented which, reflective of this mechanistic outlook, will permit government officials to “fine tune” or “jump start” the economy, or “grow” jobs, or produce a “quick fix” for the ailing government school system. Even as modern society manifests its collapse in the form of violent crime, economic dislocation, seemingly endless warfare, inter-group hostilities, the decay of cities, a growing disaffection with institutions, and a general sense that nothing “works right” anymore, faith in the traditional model continues to drive the pyramidal systems. Most people still cling to the belief that there is something that can be done by political institutions to change such conditions: a new piece of legislation can be enacted, a judicial ruling can be ordered, or a new agency regulation can be promulgated. When a government-run program ends in disaster, the mechanistic mantra is invariably invoked: “we will find out what went wrong and fix it so that this doesn’t happen again.” That the traditional model itself, which is grounded in the state’s power to control the lives and property of individuals to desired ends, may be the principal contributor to such social disorder goes largely unexplored.

I Can't Make You Love Me.' Bonnie Raitt." "Oh,Fiorella." I glared at him a little as I climbed down. "Was that delightful list for your benefit or mine?" Frankie grabbed my hand and, when I didn't pull away fast enough, tugged me onto his lap,where he wrapped his arms so tightly around me that I couldn't escape. Sometimes his strength still surprises me.He tickled my cheek with his nose. "Don't hate me just because I'm hateful." "I never do." Here's the thing. Frankie's taken a lot of hits in his life. He never stays down for long. "Excuse me!" The mannequin's evil twin was glaring down at us fro her sky-high bootie-heeled heights. Her NM badge told us her name was Victoria. "You cannot do that here!" she snapped. "Do what?" Frankie returned, matching lockjaw snooty for lockjaw snooty. She opened and closed her mouth, then hissed, "Canoodle!" I felt Frankie's hiccup of amusement. "Were we canoodling, snookums?" he asked me. "I rather thought we were about to copulate like bunnies." I couldn't help it; I laughed out loud. Victoria's mouth thinned into a pale line. The whole thing might have ended with our being escorted out the store's hallowed doors by security. Sadie, as she so often did, momentarily saved us from ourselves. She stomped out of the dressing room and planted herself in front of us. Ignoring the angry salesgirl completely, she muttered, "I look like a carved pumpkin!" Frankie took in the skirt, layered shirts, and jacket. "You do not, but I might have been having an overly Michael Kors moment. This will not do for a date.Take it off." He nudged me, then added, "Right here.Every last stitch of it." As soon as Sadie was back in her own clothing and coat-which got an unwilling frown of respect from Victoria; apparently even Neiman Maruc doesn't carry that line-we moved on. Sadie did better in Frankie's second choice-a lip-printed sweater dress from Betsey Johnson,but wouldn't buy it. "We're just going to a movie!" she protested. "Besides,Jared's not...not..." She gestured down at her lippy hips. "He's practical and sensible and quiet." "Oh,my God!" Frankie slapped both palms to the side of his face,and turned to me. "Sadie has a date with a Prius!" He had to invoke the sanctity of Truth or Dare before he could even get her into Urban Outfitters. "Sometimes I love you less than other times," she grumbled as he filled her arms with his last choices. "No,you don't," he said cheerfully, and sent her off to change.

One way to put the question that I want to answer here is this: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable? Part of the answer, no doubt, is that in those days everyone believed, and so the alternatives seemed outlandish. But this just pushes the question further back. We need to understand how things changed. How did the alternatives become thinkable? One important part of the picture is that so many features of their world told in favour of belief, made the presence of God seemingly undeniable. I will mention three, which will play a part in the story I want to tell. (1) The natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imagined, testified to divine purpose and action; and not just in the obvious way which we can still understand and (at least many of us) appreciate today, that its order and design bespeaks creation; but also because the great events in this natural order, storms, droughts, floods, plagues, as well as years of exceptional fertility and flourishing, were seen as acts of God, as the now dead metaphor of our legal language still bears witness. (2) God was also implicated in the very existence of society (but not described as such-this is a modern term-rather as polls, kingdom, church, or whatever). A kingdom could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than mere human man action in secular time. And beyond that, the life of the various associations which made up society, parishes, boroughs, guilds, and so on, were interwoven with ritual and worship, as I mentioned in the previous chapter. One could not but encounter counter God everywhere. (3) People lived in an “enchanted” world. This is perhaps not the best expression; it seems to evoke light and fairies. But I am invoking here its negation, Weber’s expression “disenchantment” as a description of our modern condition. This term has achieved such wide currency in our discussion of these matters, that I’m going to use its antonym to describe a crucial feature of the pre-modern condition. The enchanted chanted world in this sense is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in. People who live in this kind of world don’t necessarily believe in God, certainly not in the God of Abraham, as the existence of countless “pagan” societies shows. But in the outlook of European peasants in 1500, beyond all the inevitable ambivalences, the Christian God was the ultimate guarantee that good would triumph or at least hold the plentiful forces of darkness at bay.

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, which all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working in human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational. I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers by the small groups. Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody may understand is also an indispensible condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and traditions have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.

The notion of mental accounts is absent in traditional economic theory, which holds that wealth in general, and money in particular, should be fungible: That is, $100 in roulette winnings, $100 in salary, and a $100 tax refund should have the same significance and value to you, since each C-note could buy the same number of downloads from iTunes or the same number of burgers at McDonald’s. Likewise, $100 kept under the mattress should invoke the same feelings or sense of wealth as $100 in a bank account or $100 in U.S. Treasury securities (ignoring the fact that money in the bank, or in T-bills, is safer than cash under the bed). If money and wealth are fungible, there should be no difference in the way we spend gambling winnings or salary.

All told, three huge economic engines—the banks, the auto companies, and the stimulus bill—were in a state of play, placing more economic power in the hands of Obama and his party than any U.S. government since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been willing to invoke its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy promised on the campaign trail—to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future.

It is long settled in California that a landlord who resorts to self-help [such as removing a tenant's personal belongings and changing the locks, even though the tenant is still in legal possession of the property] instead of invoking the unlawful detainer procedure commits a forcible entry and detainer, and is liable for actual and, sometimes, punitive damages (see Jordan v Talbot (1961) 55 C2d 597), regardless of any lease provision giving the landlord the right to reenter on default (55 C2d at 604) or any lien the landlord may wish to exercise (55 C2d at 609).

Then at once “human nature” is again invoked to prove the necessity of change, for “human nature” has been thwarted or insulted by the dominant system. “Man” can no longer be defined as what suits the dominant system, when the dominant system apparently does not suit men. I

Inappropriate level of politeness – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person interjects an overly polite or unexpectedly kind or complimentary comment directed at the questioner when responding to a question. Example: Uncharacteristic use of “sir” or “ma’am” when responding to a particular question. Inappropriate question – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person responds with a question that doesn’t directly relate to the question that’s asked. Inconsistent statement – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person makes a statement that is inconsistent with what he said previously, without explaining why the story has changed. Interrogation – See Elicitation. Interview – A means of establishing a dialogue with a person to collect information that he has no reason to want to withhold. Invoking religion – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person makes a reference to God or religion as a means of “dressing up the lie” before presenting it. Example: “I swear on a stack of Bibles, I wouldn’t do anything like that.” Leading question – A question that contains the answer that the questioner is looking for. Legitimacy statement – A statement within a monologue that is designed to explain the purpose or reasoning behind what the interrogator is conveying.

Before the New Kingdom, the bestowal of “divine love” occurred by a “superior” deity upon a human, a subordination that extended down the chain of authority, passed from gods to royals, from royals to non-royal officials, from officials to their wives and relatives, etc.[538] In this regard, Doxey further relates: [Egyptologist] W.K. Simpson has studied the concept of divine love, asserting that prior to the New Kingdom, love was always bestowed by a superior upon a subordinate. Simpson’s view is certainly correct with regard to the love of gods. During the Middle Kingdom, humans always receive divine love; they are never described as “loving” a god.[539] On some occasions, such as when the king was “beloved by the people,” such love or mri could apparently be “reciprocated between superiors and subordinates” as well.[540] The clarification of the Middle and New Kingdoms indicates that this custom changed during the New Kingdom, with the use of the mry epithet becoming increasingly popular even as applied to deities. It is evident that, especially after the Hellenization of the Ptolemaic and Greco-Roman periods, various Egyptian deities became the objects of “divine love” and were themselves invoked as “beloved” or Mery. In reality, this ability to bestow mry upon even the “chief of all gods” is demonstrated as early as the New Kingdom in a hymn from the Papyrus Kairo CG 58038 (Boulaq 17), parts of which may date to the late Middle Kingdom,[541] such as the 18th Dynasty (1550-1292 BCE), and in which we find the combined god Amun-Re praised as “the good god beloved.”[542] Indeed, at P. Boulaq 17, 3.4, we find Amun-Re deemed Mry, as part of the epithet “Beloved of the Upper Egyptian and Lower Egyptian Crowns.”[543] Amun-Re is also called “beloved” in Budge’s rendering of the Book of the Dead created for the Egyptian princess and priestess Nesi-Khonsu (c. 1070-945 BCE).[544]

Under the model of original monotheism we can draw three basic inferences. Figure 1.4. Decay of religions First, there is one decisive change—the move away from monotheism. This change has to be seen as a falling away, perhaps best understood as decay or corruption. Human beings turn away from God to something else: other gods, spirits, nature, even themselves. Apparently the God of the sky seemed too remote. In times of personal crises—a sick child, crop failure, marital problems—people believed that they needed more immediate help. Invoking the aid of fetishes or spirits seemed more potent. Thus God receded behind other spiritual powers. In biblical terms people worshiped the creation instead of the Creator. Second, there is no clear pattern in which this departure typically takes place. Monotheism could turn into henotheism, polytheism or animism. But one thing is certain: as monotheism was left behind, ritual and magic increased. This is not to say these elements do not occur within a fairly stable monotheistic context (of course they do!). However, once human beings abandon faith in one almighty, all-knowing God, the role that they play in attempting to find their own way in a world apparently dominated by spiritual forces becomes far more central, leading to an increase in spiritual manipulation techniques, such as magic and ritual. Third, once monotheism is abandoned, change usually continues to occur. Again, there is no mandatory sequence in which things rearrange themselves, but an increase in ritual and magic is most likely to be a part of it. Every once in a while throughout history, reform movements have called a culture back to a renewed awareness of God. Zoroastrianism and Islam are clear examples of such events. When they happen, even though there may be initial enthusiasm, chances are that there will also be an increase in tension between the idealists who are promoting the return to monotheism and those who do not feel free to give up their traditional faiths. This phenomenon may give rise to a serious tension between the ideal version of the religion and how its adherents actually practice it (they usually cling to rituals and veneration of spirits). In contrast to the neat pyramid associated with the evolutionary view (fig. 1.1), monotheism carries the liability of a tendency toward magic and ritual (fig. 1.3).

Invoking the precautionary principle does not lower the required threshold for evidence to be regarded as valid, nor does it answer the most important questions about the causes and consequences of climate change.

The transformative, active side of the feminine principle accents the dynamic elements of the psyche that urge change and transformation. This active side of the feminine is similar to that divine madness of the soul described in Plato's Phaedrus, which invokes primeval forces that take us out of the limitations and conventions of social norms and the reasonable life. Eros in this sense produces ecstasy, a liberation from the conventions of the group. . . . Ecstasy may range from a momentary being taken out of oneself to a profound enlargement of personality.

There is a second practical limitation to moral outreach, namely, the persistence of ideological racism. Some of the cultural traits attributed to or associated with the ghetto poor (for example, attitudes toward authority, work, violence, parenting, sex and reproduction, school, and crime) closely resemble well-known and long-standing racist stereotypes about blacks (their supposed tendencies toward lawlessness, laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility, ignorance, stupidity, and sexual promiscuity). These stereotypes have long been invoked to justify the subordination, exploitation, and civic exclusion of blacks. An implication of the cultural divergence thesis is that ghetto conditions have produced a subgroup of blacks who, because of their cultural patterns, exhibit characteristics that racists have long maintained are “natural” to “the black race” and that these cultural traits are at least part of the explanation for why they are poor. To make matters worse, moral reform suggests that the ghetto poor are effectively incapable of altering these suboptimal traits on their own, as it calls for state intervention to change them. Moral reform programs, even voluntary ones, implicitly endorse the idea that poor blacks have personal deficiencies that they alone cannot remedy. In an era when biological racism has been largely discredited and claims that blacks are biologically inferior are not publicly acceptable, moral reform will inevitably strike many as the functional equivalent of classic racist doctrines.

Simple to develop—IDEs and other developer tools are focused on building a single application. Easy to make radical changes to the application—You can change the code and the database schema, build, and deploy. Straightforward to test—The developers wrote end-to-end tests that launched the application, invoked the REST API, and tested the UI with Selenium. Straightforward to deploy—All a developer had to do was copy the WAR file to a server that had Tomcat installed. Easy to scale—FTGO ran multiple instances of the application behind a load balancer.

For instance, if you keep taking on others’ feelings, inserting a 1 into your emotional boundary will help you put yourself first. Following are some of the meanings of the numbers 1 through 10, plus some powerful numbers above 10: 1:​Initiates and begins; invokes the Creator; brings your needs to a conclusion and puts yourself first. 2:​Represents pairing and duality; balances relationships; creates healthy liaisons; shares power. 3:​Reflects optimism; the number of creation, it brings a beginning and an end together; ends chaos. 4:​Signifies foundation and stability; provides grounding; achieves balance. 5:​Promotes and progresses; creates a space for decision-making; provides the ability to go in any direction at will. 6:​The number of service; indicates the presence of light and dark, good and evil, and the choices made between these. 7:​Represents the divine principle; opens us for love and grace, erasing doubts about the divine path. 8:​The symbol of power and infinity; establishes recurring patterns and illuminates karma; can be used to erase old and entrenched patterns or syndromes. 9:​Represents change and harmony; eliminates the old and opens us to a new cycle; can erase evil. 10:​Signifies building and starting over. The number of physical matter, it can create heaven on earth. 11:​Represents inspiration; releases personal mythology; opens us to divine powers; erases self-esteem issues. 12:​Signifies mastery over human drama; accesses own divine self, but still encompasses humanity; excellent for forgiveness. 22:​For success in anything you do. 33:​For teaching and accepting our own wisdom; invokes bravery and discipline.

But these stereotypes also poison our public discourse, distort our understanding of the real differences among us, and reduce the chances for resolving those differences even in part. These stereotypes corrode the bonds of mutual concern and respect that hold a pluralistic society together. These bonds are stretched enough by honest disagreement and simple demands for change. Once in our history they broke entirely, and some minority groups have been placed outside their protection for long periods. But generally these bonds have held. They make it unsurprising when Americans from “opposite ends of the political and cultural universe” help one another. To corrode these bonds unnecessarily is a dangerous thing. And we should have no illusions about who is most endangered. In any outbreak of intolerance, in any reduction of mutual concern and respect, the weak and oppressed will suffer more than the strong and dominant. Those who are most endangered by stereotypes and prejudice have special reasons to avoid invoking their own stereotypes and prejudices against others.10

…the only way that we can understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough, gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too fast for microscopy), is to sample early images of the objects in whatever form they take in kid-memory—and once you invoke those kid-memories, you have to live with their constant tendency to screw up your fragmentary historiography with violas of lost emotion.

When we call our anger sadness instead of anger, we often fail to acknowledge what is wrong, specifically in a way that discourages us from imagining and pursuing change. Sadness, as an emotion, is paired with acceptance. Anger, on the other hand, invokes the possibility of change and of fighting back.

The mental stress caused by negative thoughts always invokes a physical reaction somewhere.

To be free requires that we are not marionettes whose strings are pulled by physical law. Whether the laws are deterministic (as in classical physics) or probabilistic (as in quantum physics) is of deep significance to how reality evolves and to the kinds of predictions science can make. But for assessing free will, the distinction is irrelevant. If the fundamental laws can continually churn, never grinding to a halt for lack of human input and applying all the same even if particles happen to inhabit bodies and brains, then there is no place for free will. Indeed, as is affirmed by every scientific experiment and observation ever conducted, long before we humans came on the scene the laws ruled without interruption; after we arrived, they continued to rule without interruption. To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles. Shake my hand and particles constituting your hand push up and down against those constituting mine. Say hello, and particles constituting your vocal cords jostle particles of air in your throat, setting off a chain reaction of colliding particles that ripples through the air, knocking into the particles constituting my eardrums, setting off a surge of yet other particles in my head, which is how I manage to hear what you’re saying. Particles in my brain respond to the stimuli, yielding the thought that’s a strong grip, and sending signals carried by other particles to those in my arm, which drive my hand to move in tandem with yours. And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progression of particles than we can change the value of pi. Our choices seem free because we do not witness nature’s laws acting in their most fundamental guise; our senses do not reveal the operation of nature’s laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities. As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our autonomous choices. However, if we had the superhuman vision invoked earlier and were able to analyze everyday reality at the level of its fundamental constituents, we would recognize that our thoughts and behaviors amount to complex processes of shifting particles that yield a powerful sense of free will but are fully governed by physical law.

Eventually, Johanson could not argue anymore. By December 1977, he agreed with White: it was all one species. The anthropologists ascribed the size differences to sexual dimorphism (males were larger than females) and invoked the anatomical phenomenon of allometry (disproportionate changes in certain parts).

The elemental forces must be invoked and combined. Whoever controls this force will have the power to create great change. I have picked four individuals to represent the elements. You personify the element of air, for the dragon known as the cockatrice.

Change: Change is part of every human life. You change, the world changes, and slowly but surely systems change. People can help to invoke change. And without change, life would not exist. Of all change, the most powerful change lies in opening your heart wider and loving more. Love in spite of what you might not agree with and in spite of what you may not understand. To become more loving is the greatest gift. Love is the antithesis of weakness. The greatest strength will always lie in love. Love is the ultimate attractor and the greatest creator. Love is not inaction. It is a verb. It does not symbolize ignorance but instead it is action fueled by the power it holds. And the results of love will always be magic.

Before turning to Marx’s writings, we must note the radical divide that separates his position from orthodox Marxism. Marx never conceived of socialism or communism as state control of the economy. Nor did he ever endorse the notion of a single-party state that rules on behalf of the masses. His conception of the new society is thoroughly democratic, based on freely associated relations of production and in society as a whole. He was primarily concerned with freeing individuals from alienated and dehumanised social relations—not simply with increasing the productive forces so that developing societies can catch up with developed ones… [Marx] then turns to the future, writing: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free people, working with the means of production held in common” (Marx 1977: 171). This does not refer to a formal transfer of private property to collective or state entities. Transferring property deeds is a juridical relation, which does not end class domination. Marx refers to “free people” owning the means of production, which means they exert effective and not just nominal control over the labour process. And that is not possible unless the producers democratically control the labour process through their own self-activity. He then goes on to state that in this post-capitalist society, products are “directly objects of utility” and do not assume a value form. Exchange value and universalised commodity production come to an end. Producers decide how to make, distribute, and consume the total social product. One part is used to renew the means of production; the other “is consumed by members of the association as means of subsistence” (Marx 1977: 171–72). He invokes neither the market nor the state as the medium by which this is achieved. He instead envisions a planned distribution of labour time by individuals who are no longer subjected to socially necessary labour time. Abstract labour is abolished, since actual labour time—not socially necessary labour time—serves as a measure of social relations.

My Order emerged,” he breathed and the terror in his voice told me all I needed to about what had happened. “You’re not a Dragon?” I asked, my own voice cracking with fear for him. Father would have been more than furious to discover that his son was anything other than a full blooded Dragon Shifter. It was a matter of pride and respect; he ridiculed families with mixed blood, he believed wholeheartedly in the superiority of our kind. One of his sons being anything other was totally unthinkable. Xavier shook his head slowly, trying to withdraw his hand from mine as footsteps sounded on the stairs behind me but I refused to release him. “It doesn’t change anything for me,” I growled. “You’re still my brother, I don’t care if you’re a Werewolf or a Vampire or a-” “So he told you, did he?” Father’s cold voice came from the doorway behind me and the hairs along the back of my neck stood to attention in warning. Xavier snatched his hand out of mine, blinking away the evidence of the tears which hadn’t even fallen. I stood before him, placing myself between him and Father. “It doesn’t matter,” I said firmly, though the simmering rage in my father’s eyes told a very different story. “I’m the oldest. I’m the first in line anyway, Xavier never wanted to challenge me for that role so-” “Yes, I still have my Heir but I’ve lost the spare. Did he tell you exactly what Order he is?” Father snarled, his eyes changing to their Dragon form and a trail of smoke leaving his nostrils. He was so angry about this that he was battling against the urge to shift. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him look so close to the edge before. “Not yet. But surely it’s not the end of the world if-” “Shift,” Father commanded, his gaze passing me to land on my brother. Xavier got out of his chair and backed up, shaking his head in panic. His skin looked odd though, like there was light shining from within it, trying to break free. “I told you, I’ll get control of it; I won’t shift ever,” he said anxiously. “No one will ever find out that I’m-” “SHIFT!” Father bellowed, using fear to force the change on him. Xavier cried out in panic as the light beneath his skin grew to a powerful glow and he bucked forward as his Order form took over. I backed up as his form changed, giving him room to become- “Fucking hell,” I breathed, my eyes widening in panic. “My thoughts precisely,” Father hissed venomously. Xavier had transformed into a lilac Pegasus complete with golden horn and rainbow patterned wings. His coat shone with glitter in the light of my magical orbs and his wide, horsey eyes looked back at us fearfully. I stared at him with my mouth hanging open, scrambling for something, anything to say. “I... didn’t know we had any recessive Pegasus genes in the bloodline...maybe he's linked to the constellation,” I muttered, unsure what else I could say. Father hated the weaker, more common Orders. He was a Dragon through and through; he loved power, invoking fear and breathing fire. A Pegasus was about as far as you could get to the opposite end of the Order spectrum. They were flying horses who pooped glitter, granted wishes and were... cute. Xavier hadn’t even been lucky enough to have a dark coloured coat, it was lilac. Lilac! (DARIUS POV)

And if the white people don’t stand with the Negroes as they go out now, then there will be a danger that after the Negroes get something they’ll say, ‘Okay, we got this by ourselves.’ And the only way you can break that down is to have white people working alongside of you—so then it changes the whole complexion of what you’re doing, so it isn’t any longer Negro fighting white, it’s a question of rational people against irrational people.”89 The civil rights movement needed to foster this new reality, to seek, as Moses said, a “broader identification, identification with individuals that are going through the same kind of struggle, so that the struggle doesn’t remain just a question of racial struggle.” Moses also invoked the vision of the beloved community, the ideal of a universal brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind, which Martin Luther King, Jr. had eloquently proclaimed in his recent sermons.90 Moses’s position was principled and philosophical and ultimately more persuasive.

Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. One can try to choose it, but it may be that this experience of transformation deconstitutes choice at some level. I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, "Oh, I'll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I'll apply myself to the task, and I'll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me." I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one's own deliberate plan, one's own project, one's own knowing and choosing.

A Christian statesmen serving the Ottoman Empire in 1852 would have had a number of reasons to invoke the career of the Duke of Wellington. The recently deceased Wellington was an Anglo-Irish and yet rose from that disadvantaged background to become a military and diplomatic leader defending the British Empire in India and against Napoleon. Representing Britain at the Congress of Vienna, Wellington was conservative in a time of changes and challenges for England and for the European system of politics. Wellington had apparently managed to reconcile the contradictions and challenges of his position and earn a shining reputation in life and in death as a defender of the British Empire. Stephanos Vogorides, the Ottoman Christian statesman who invokes Wellington here, was almost an exact contemporary of his. [...]. He encountered perhaps even more profound challenges than Wellington, struggling to no avail to reconcile his position as an Orthodox Christian serving not the Russian or even Greek state but the Ottoman state, in the midst of the conflicts growing more intense by the day in the early 1850s.

The journaling helps because your brain stores trauma, unfinished actions, and powerful memories in areas that can trigger strong emotions and subconscious stress responses. Often these unresolved events can trigger anxiety for no apparent reason. When you convert your feelings into words, it prompts a neurologic change. MRI scans have proven that the act of speaking or writing about feelings that are top of mind can move stored experiences away from the emotional reptilian parts of the brain, where they continually recirculate up to the rational parts of the brain, where they begin to dissipate. This effect can be invoked any time you convert ideas into words, regardless of whether you are speaking, writing, or typing and regardless of any feedback you receive.

Rachel’s response was gentle. As far as a continuation of consciousness beyond death, she was willing to dwell in mystery, and invoked the words of Swedish oceanographer Otto Pettersson, who, at the end of his long life, told his son that he would be sustained “by an infinite curiosity as to what was to follow.” But there was one thing about which Carson did have some certainty, and that was in her sense of what she called “material immortality,” where our bodies are first broken down by decay, then resurrected physically in new cellular arrangements. She summoned the words she had penned in an early piece, “Undersea,” published in 1937 by the Atlantic Monthly. Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality.… Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change. She

We cannot but lament here over the fundamental fallacy of a system which has so unhappily divided Europe. The partizans of this system have said, We believe only in the Word of God. What abuse of words! what a strange and melancholy ignorance of Divine things! We alone believe in the Word, whilst our dear enemies are obstinately resolved to believe only in scripture; as if God could or would change the nature of things of which He is the Author, and impart to scripture the life and efficacy which it has not! The Holy Scripture—is it not then a writing? Has it not been traced with a pen and a little black liquid? Does it know what it is needful to say to one man, and what to withhold from another? Did not Leibnitz and his maid servant read in it the same words? Can this Scripture be any thing else than the image of the Word? And though infinitely venerable in this respect, if we should interrogate it, must it not keep a divine silence? If it should be attacked or insulted, can it defend itself in the absence of its Author? Glory to the truth! If the Word, eternally living, does not quicken the scripture, it will never become the word, that is to say, the life. Let others invoke then, as much as they please, the silent word; we will smile peacefully at this false god; always expecting, with a tender impatience the moment when its partisans, undeceived, will throw themselves into our arms, opened to embrace them for three centuries past.

Congregations, maybe especially congregations, are political spaces. They are intersections where power is gathered, invoked, and expressed.

Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both. ‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions. After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’. Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’. The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’. Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit, “Invoked or not invoked, God is still present.”*3

Alterations in the formula of Baptism may or may not affect its substance. Substantial changes render the Sacrament invalid ; purely accidental changes do not. It would be a substantial change, for instance, to omit all reference to the act performed, or to neglect to invoke the Three Persons of the Trinity.

The CLTS movement holds that villages can become 100 per cent open-defecation-free if social forces are used to invoke people’s disgust at open defecation and to encourage them to change together. Under CLTS, those who resist switching away from open defecation are to be shamed into compliance by their neighbours.

At the same time as suggesting the language game we clearly do not have a change in the name of God as our only way to think in New Testament terms of an earth at peace. There is Jesus! It is very hard to attribute violence to the originator of the gospel, of the good news of God’s forgiveness and love, of divine healing and welcome. Despite the fact that people refer to his action in the temple in the last days of his life as an exceptional yet conclusive ‘proof’ of Jesus’ use of violence no serious bible scholar would look on these actions divorced from his whole ministry. And because of that we have to see them as a conscious and deliberate prophetic sign-action, taking control of the temple for a brief period to show how it stood in contrast to the direct relationship with God which he proclaimed, and to make the point with a definitive emphasis. The whip he plaits in John is used to drive the animals, probably with the sound of the crack alone. No one is attacked. No one gets hurt. And very soon the situation reverts to the status quo: the authorities take back control of the temple and decide on Jesus’ suffering and death in order to control him. Overall the event is to be seen as Jesus placing himself purposely and calculatedly in the cross-hairs for the sake of the truth, much rather than doing harm to anyone else. The consequences of his actions were indeed ‘the cross’, and supremely in the situation of crucifixion Jesus does not invoke retaliation on his enemies, or threaten those who reject redemption; rather he prays for their forgiveness. No, Jesus’ whole life-story makes him unmistakably a figure of transcendent nonviolence. The problem lies elsewhere, with the way the cross is interpreted within the framework of a violent God. It is unfathomably ironic that the icon of human non-retaliation, Jesus’ cross, gets turned in the tradition into a supreme piece of vengeance—God’s ‘just’ punishment of Jesus in our place. My book, Cross Purposes, is about the way this tradition got formed and it represents just one of a constant stream of writing, gathering force at the end of the last century and continuing into this, questioning how this could be the meaning of the central symbol of Christianity.2 I think the vigor of that question can only continue to grow, while the nonviolence of Jesus’ response must at the same time stand out in greater and greater relief, in its own right and for its own sake. And for that same reason the argument at hand, of ‘No-name’ for a nonviolent God, can only be strengthened when we highlight the nonviolence of Jesus against the traditional violent concept of ‘God’. Now

It doesn’t take a farm to invoke the iron taste of leaving in your mouth. Anyone who loves a small plot of ground — a city garden, a vacant lot with some guerilla beds, a balcony of pots — understands the almost physical hurt of parting from it, even for a minor stint. I hurt every day I wake up in our city bed, wondering how the light will be changing over the front field or across the pond, whether the moose will be in the willow by the cabin again, if the wren has fledged her young ones yet and we’ll return to find the box untended. I can feel where the farm is at any point in my day, not out of some arcane sixth sense developed from years of summer nights out there with the coyotes under the stars, but because of the bond between that earth and this body. Some grounds we choose; some are our instinctive homes.

Lasting harmony between the sexes cannot be achieved through social, psychological, or political reform alone...they are not sufficient in themselves because gender reconciliation entails an inherent spiritual dimension. Gender disharmony is vast and pervasive; its symptoms are manifest in myriad ways in virtually every culture across the globe. For authentic gender reconciliation, we aspire to a comprehensive approach that includes but also transcends traditional modes of social change, invoking a larger universal intelligence or grace.

Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been willing to invoke its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy promised on the campaign trail—to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future. Imagine if there had been a powerful social movement—a robust coalition of trade unions, immigrants, students, environmentalists, and everyone else whose dreams were getting crushed by the crashing economic model—demanding that Obama do no less.

As one of the leading French anarchist thinkers and friend of Bakunin, Élisée Reclus, put it: “The external form of society must alter in correspondence with the impelling force within; there is no better established historical fact. The sap makes the tree and gives it leaves and flowers, the blood makes the man, the ideas make the society” (8). That is but one formulation of the anarchist notion of deterministic idealism, a belief that slavery and oppression must be overcome by first changing fundamental habits of the mind, which goes, of course, directly against Marxist materialism. Anarchists argue that the slave mentality can be exchanged for the revolutionary mentality if one is sufficiently exposed to the ideas of liberation and social change. (p. 49) ,... crucial to conveying the anarchist doctrine that the struggle for liberation begins in the mind and that the true subversion of authority consists in the recognition that we as individuals create the mental preconditions for the existence of bondage or freedom. (p. 50-51) But arguably, anarchism is the most misunderstood of all political theories. Although it is sometimes aligned with concepts of nihilism and terrorism, the philosophical anarchism of Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, and the Reclus brothers is essentially a pacifist, utopian, and liberal theory of voluntary association and mutual aid. The “propaganda by the deed” is not at all a recipe for terror, although some isolated anarchists have invoked this principle to justify their resort to violence, especially in Russia in the later part of the nineteenth century and in the Spanish Civil War. In general, however, anarchism’s rejection of centralized state power and institutionalized authority has ironically limited the political effectiveness of this philosophy, which stands in direct contrast to communism and socialism, both of which have traditionally embraced hierarchical structures of power. (p. 79)

Only by helping yourself first can you help the poor. Only by changing yourself first, can you change their condition. You achieve this by first removing from your mind any thoughts of poverty, for to think of something is to invoke it.

The things you’re accustomed to are dangerous. In applications intended for use within an organization, a design based on API calls works well and is easy to develop. The API call metaphor assumes away the network boundary and lets a client invoke a method on a remote computer just like it would call the API of a local code library.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says “god” stems from the Old High German, got, deriving from the Gothic guth and going back to the Teutonic gudo, which stems from two Aryan roots – one meaning to invoke, the other to pour in the sense of a molten image. Call on god and you call on an idol, according to the origin of this word. Capitalizing it doesn’t change anything.

In awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God; you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect,” is present; not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, not the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes...It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring. 1

If we too, brethren, wish to dwell not on earth but in heaven, and not to fall to the ground or into sin that pulls us down, but to reach out continuously towards the divine heights, let us fear God, abstain from everything evil, return to Him through good works, and strive by self-control and prayer to wipe out the evil accretions within us, to change our inner thoughts for the better, and, according to the Prophet, to be in labour with the spirit of salvation and bring it to birth, having as our helper, through invoking her name, the Virgin who was today bestowed upon her parents through prayer and a manner of life pleasing to God.

The job for believers is to figure out not the how or the when of resurrection, but just the what! Leave the how and the when to science and to God. True Christianity and true science are both transformational worldviews that place growth and development at their centers. Both endeavors, each in its own way, cooperate with some Divine Plan, and whether God is formally acknowledged may not be that important. As C. G. Jung inscribed over his doorway, Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit, “Invoked or not invoked, God is still present.”*3 God has worked anonymously since the very beginning—it has always been an inside and secret sort of job. The Spirit seems to work best underground. When aboveground, humans start fighting about it.

How’s it going?” People have not always greeted each other in this way: they invoked divine protection for themselves, and they did not bow before a commoner the way they bowed before a nobleman. In order for the formula “How’s it going?” to appear, we had to leave the feudal world and enter the democratic era, which presupposes a minimal degree of equality between individuals, subject to oscillations in their moods. According to one legend, the French expression “ça va?” is of medical origin: how do you defecate? A vestige of a time when intestinal regularity was seen as a sign of good health. This lapidary, standardized formality corresponds to the principle of economy and constitutes the minimal social bond in a mass society that seeks to include people from all over. But it is sometimes less a routine than a way of intimating something: we want to force the person met to situate himself, we want to petrify him, subject him to a detailed examination. What are you up to? What’s happened to you? A discreet summons that commands everyone to expose himself for what he really is. In a world that makes movement a canonical value, there is an interest in how things are going, even if we don’t know where. That’s why a “how’s it going?” that expects no answer is more human than one that is full of concern but wants to strip you bare and force you to give a moral accounting for yourself. This is because the fact of being is no longer taken for granted, and we have to pay permanent attention to our internal barometers. Are things going as well as I say, or am I embellishing them? That is why many people evade the question and move to another topic, assuming that the interlocutor is perceptive enough to discern in their “fine” a discreet depression. Then there is this terrible expression of renunciation: “Okay, I guess,” as if one had to let the days and hours pass without taking part in them. But why, after all, do things have to be going well? Asked daily to justify ourselves, it often happens that we are so opaque to ourselves that the answer no longer has any meaning other than as a formality. “You’re looking good today.” Flowing over us like honey, this compliment has the effect of a kind of consecration: in the confrontation between the radiant and the grouchy, I am on the right side. And now I am, through a bit of verbal magic, raised to the summit of a subtle and ever-changing hierarchy. But the following day another, ruthless verdict is handed down: “You look terrible today.” This observation executes me at point-blank range, deprives me of the splendid position where I thought I had taken up permanent residence. I have not proven worthy of the caste of the magnificent, I am a pariah and have to slink along walls, trying to conceal the fact that I look ill. Ultimately, “how’s it going?” is the most futile and the most profound of questions. To answer it precisely, one would have to make a scrupulous inventory of one’s psyche, considering each aspect in detail. No matter: we have to say “fine” out of politeness and civility and change the subject, or else ruminate the question during our whole lives and reserve our reply for afterward.

Thinking about oneself invokes the logic of consequence: Will I get sick? Doctors and nurses can answer swiftly with a no: I spend a lot of time in a hospital, I don’t always wash, and I rarely get sick, so this probably won’t affect me. In general, we tend to be overconfident about our own invulnerability to harm. But thinking about patients prompts a logic of appropriateness: What should a person like me do in a situation like this? It changes the calculation from a cost-benefit equation to a contemplation of values, of right and wrong: I have a professional and moral obligation to care for patients.

There are people in the world that force you to change and then there are those that invoke a change without you even realizing what has happened.

There is nothing called 'Islamic State' in religion because no State has ever been mandated over mankind by God - taking into consideration that the hearts and offices of men are different and they change. The constitution was called after all [God's Law] and not {Israel's Law} or the like. This is why the name 'Mosaic Law' for Torah is nothing but a gentile scholarship effort; it does not even show up in the Torah itself but rather in the 'Book of Joshua' - something that a Jew has no grasp of as a Pharaonic/Roman subject. However, God has allowed man to temporarily build her/his own state while warning her/him of its inevitable destruction and irrelevant context to His divine mandate over Adam's children. Spiritual slaves (to any other entity than God) are bound to materialism (e.g., countries and lands) and as a consequence thereof they try in vain to animate lifeless beings and constructions through unnatural magic (i.e., sorcery) invoking thereby the demons (i.e., satan's tribe) to assist them in creating the necessary illusions; a deception scheme which is needed to be planted in other gentiles' perceptions (as a last -yet false- hope) to illegally perpetuate the legacy of the plotters through time.

They seem to think that the terrific forces they had helped to unloose could be controlled (and composed), when it came to the making of peace, with a few kind words - that is, the mood of the world was going to change overnight from the long, strange, belligerent obscurantism to a clear, sweetly rational, cooperative spirit, without rancor, without revenge even in the hearts of the humiliated, without a memory of the months and months of life under the shadow of death.... Good-will, so they seemed to be saying, could be invoked by almost a wave of the hand....

Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching "modernization" to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: "managed democracy," "conservative modernization." Then he steps back, smiling, and says: "We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself." And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle. Elsewhere Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only "simulacrum" and "simulacra" . . . and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra," in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov's genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representations to validate tranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

The late Ken Iverson, credited with originally leading Nucor down the path to constant change and innovation, frequently used a saying still invoked daily at the company: “Anything worth doing is worth failing at.

In French, “decroissance” has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

Many people think that meditation simply means sitting and closing your eyes,” the Dalai Lama continued, closing his eyes and taking a stiff posture. “That kind of meditation even my cat can do. He sits there very calmly purring. If a rat comes by, it has nothing to worry about. We Tibetans often recite mantras so much, like Om Mani Padme Hum, a mantra invoking the name of the Buddha of Compassion, that we forget to really investigate the root causes of our suffering. Maybe my purring cat is actually reciting Om Mani Padme Hum.” The Dalai Lama laughed hard at the thought of his devout Tibetan Buddhist cat.

Ritual is a habit and/or a compulsion that at least fulfills one of the following functions: (1) to give worship to a particular divine agent; (2) to invoke remembrance of either a past or future religious event; and/or (3) a pseudo-technology that is used to control or change the believer’s environment.

Cruelty is a construct of Fae, not us. When we are perched within the sky, we are neither good nor bad. We see all, we offer answers, we guide and gift, but we may take and destroy if the choices made below us invoke it.” “So what have me and my sister done to deserve the fates you’ve offered us? What paths have we chosen that have made you curse us and the people we love?” I hissed, anger flaring hotly beneath my skin, and for a second, I could have sworn I felt a spark of fire magic within me. “Fate is unbalanced. The wrath of Clydinius wove your woes.” “Who is Clydinius?” I pressed, feeling I was on the cusp of some answer that could change everything. “Clydinius wants you to keep the broken promise, warrior of the Vega line.” “What is the promise?” I gasped, moving forward in desperation as those words circled in my head. The ones the Imperial Star had spoken too. “I’ll keep it. Just tell me what it is. How can I fix what I have no knowledge of?” “It is time for my end. My death is the gift of Fae, a gift all stars offer in their demise. It is why magic lives in your world, for my magic is your magic.” The light grew brighter and brighter, blinding me until I had to throw up a hand and shut my eyes against the glow of it. It spread into everything, flowing into the rocks, the water, me. I could feel the soul of this star spreading and shattering, the essence of it pouring out into every corner of the world.