Lack Of Comprehension Quotes

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know—even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction—than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information.

You may not agree with a woman, but to criticize her appearance — as opposed to her ideas or actions — isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all you. Insulting a woman’s looks when they have nothing to do with the issue at hand implies a lack of comprehension on your part, an inability to engage in high-level thinking. You may think she’s ugly, but everyone else thinks you’re an idiot.

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet: 'You Walt Whitman-ing, Edna St. Vincent Millay! Go Emily Dickinson your mom!' 'Thanks for the advice, you pathetic piece of E.E. Cummings, but I think I'm gonna pass.' 'You Robert Frost-ing Nikki Giovanni! Get a life, nerd. You're a virgin.' 'Hey bro, you need to go outside and get some fresh air into you. Or a girlfriend.' I need to get a girlfriend into me? I think that shows a fundamental lack of comprehension about how babies are made.

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.

All empires fall, eventually.” “But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.[”]

it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

... I succeeded at math, at least by the usual evaluation criteria: grades. Yet while I might have earned top marks in geometry and algebra, I was merely following memorized rules, plugging in numbers and dutifully crunching out answers by rote, with no real grasp of the significance of what I was doing or its usefulness in solving real-world problems. Worse, I knew the depth of my own ignorance, and I lived in fear that my lack of comprehension would be discovered and I would be exposed as an academic fraud -- psychologists call this "imposter syndrome".

You are heir to a heavenly fortune, the sole beneficiary of an infinite spiritual trust fund, a proverbial goldmine of sacred abundance beyond all common measure or human comprehension. But until you assert your rightful inheritance of this blessed gift, it will remain unclaimed and forever beyond your reach.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book: When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language. And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books. So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. [5] The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, [6] until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown. Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party — all these may also impose a simple structure on life.

Woman's fear of the female Self, of the experience of the numinous archetypal Feminine, becomes comprehensible when we get a glimpse - or even only a hint – of the profound otherness of female selfhood as contrasted to male selfhood. Precisely that element which, in his fear of the Feminine, the male experiences as the hole, abyss, void, and nothingness turns into something positive for the woman without, however, losing these same characteristics. Here the archetypal Feminine is experienced not as illusion and as maya but rather as unfathomable reality and as life in which above and below, spiritual and physical, are not pitted against each other; reality as eternity is creative and, at the same time, is grounded in primeval nothingness. Hence as daughter the woman experiences herself as belonging to the female spiritual figure Sophia, the highest wisdom, while at the same time she is actualizing her connection with the musty, sultry, bloody depths of swamp-mother Earth. However, in this sort of Self-discovery woman necessarily comes to see herself as different from what presents itself to men -as, for example, spirit and father, but often also as the patriarchal godhead and his ethics. The basic phenomenon - that the human being is born of woman and reared by her during the crucial developmental phases - is expressed in woman as a sense of connectedness with all living things, a sense not yet sufficiently realized, and one that men, and especially the patriarchal male, absolutely lack to the extent women have it. To experience herself as so fundamentally different from the dominant patriarchal values understandably fills the woman with fear until she arrives at that point in her own development where, through experience and love that binds the opposites, she can clearly see the totality of humanity as a unity of masculine and feminine aspects of the Self.

The only way to heal yourself was to understand. Understand the love or the hate or the cowardice, or the impulsiveness, the lack of will of the one who hurt you--the circumstances that twisted them, the influences that warped them. And when you forgot yourself and saw the others with pitying comprehension, saw their tortured motives, a white, healing peace descended upon you. Your betrayal became an impersonal one, like a bridge giving way when you crossed it, lightning, a motor collision--you were in the way and you were damaged--that was all. It wasn't meant for you. When you understood, you were released into a new freedom and wisdom.

The old lady continued, "We women, my child, are often very simple. But that any female would lack reason to such a degree that she would start reasoning with a man--that is beyond my comprehension! She has lost the battle, my dear child, she has lost the battle before it began! No, if a woman will have her way with a man she must look him square in the eye and say something of which it is impossible for him to make any sense whatsoever and to which he is at a loss to reply. He is defeated at once.

We are literally Two Americas, remarkably out of touch with each other— the fortunate living the American Dream but lacking any practical comprehension of how the other half are suffering, month in and month out, unaware of the enervating toll of economic despair on the unfortunate half, many of whom just two or three years before had counted themselves among the fortunate.

You will always be my teachers, just as much or more than I am yours. Do not think – nor let anyone convince you – that because of your age or your lack of experience that you do not hold wisdom beyond comprehension. You are wise enough to change the entire world in this movement, right now. Just as you are.

Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.

Judging the intellect of others where comprehension is lacking, is like a mutt judging the groom of Best in Show.

If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.

Everyone and everything oppresses me, chokes and maddens me; I am troubled by a crushing physical sense of other people's lack of comprehension.

She smiled with a feigned lack of comprehension (Hogwarts?), he met it with one of sympathetic realization (Muggle), and they both moved on.

You may not agree with a woman, but to criticize her appearance — as opposed to her ideas or actions — isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all you. Insulting a woman’s looks when they have nothing to do with the issue at hand implies a lack of comprehension on your part, an inability to engage in high-level thinking. You may think she’s ugly, but everyone else thinks you’re an idiot.

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

Though Moltke was working with subordinates who were totally lacking in comprehension for whatever strategic plans he may have entertained and who on occasion abused the independence granted them, those plans were sufficiently flexible to accommodate errors; that is, a large safety margin was left to ensure that mistakes would not develop into catastrophes.

That's the whole point of being human, to accept each other despite lacking comprehension.

We are not all. We are defined within a greater definition, and this greater definition eludes comprehension, because we are lacking. Incapable. Insufficient.

Hamlet' dwarfs 'Hamilton' - it dwarfs pretty much everything - but there's a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare's longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It's not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible. 'Hamilton' is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: 'I will never understand you,' says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, 'What it is like in his shoes?' Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. 'What'd I miss?' asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. 'Would that be enough?' asks Eliza in the song that defines her. 'Why do you write like you're running out of time?' asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton's drive, and all but declares that there's no way to explain it. 'Hamilton', like 'Hamlet', gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with 'words, words, words,' only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend.

Christians and Jews often taunted the Arabs about their polytheistic beliefs and their lack of an overarching creed and an afterlife. Consequently, a sense of religious inferiority arose among the desert dwellers, along with a pent-up desire for a comprehensive belief system of their own.

Finally, a principal reason for the lack of attention to “unclean spirits” and Jesus’ “acts of power” in the Gospel stories is surely the modern “scientific” frame of mind that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment reduction of reality to what was natural and comprehensible by reason.

In a life threatening situation, whether terrorism or a rockslide, what kills most people is slowness to react. Regular lives are so safe, so event-less that there is a lack of comprehension when faced with death. It's not necessarily shock. It's disbelief. It's dismissal. Civilians say to themselves, I've got this wrong, this isn't what I think. But it is, and by the time they've realized, it's too late. And of course sometimes they do in fact have it wrong. They've misread the situation, and they're left embarrassed and maybe ashamed. But....." "But they're alive," Mayes finished.

All of mankind’s problems are a result of one major dilemma. What’s this dilemma? Possession without comprehension; assignment without instruction; resources without knowledge; having everything but not knowing why. Essentially, the dilemma is that we lack understanding. Without understanding, life is an experiment, and frustration is the reward.

Asking Wolf to couples' skate is like bungee jumping without a cord-it may be the bravest thing I've ever done in my life. Or it could be the stupidest. There's only one way to find out. I look him dead in the eyes, summoning up both my courage and my sense of reckless abandon, but before I can even speak one syllable- "Oh!" he says, looking over one shoulder and dropping his hands. "Kaitlyn's free now. I gotta get over there!" He rushes off, blowing me an air kiss. My mouth should get used to falling open when he's around, either from his good looks or from his total lack of comprehension of all things polite. Did that just happen? My face in my palms, I lean on my elbows against the rail, invisible, and fall into an intoxicating state of self-pity.

Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of few observations.

I have to hand it to the patriarchy. It has been a brilliant and comprehensive strategy to keep women under control, to create so many hurdles and levels of difficulty—both overt and covert, both in the workplace and in the home, both through the tax system and the lack of services—that women must expend much of their energy just overcoming them and have little left over for battling promotion and higher wages. Exhaustion is a feminist issue.

Ah … you’ve just stumbled into one of humanity’s greatest conundrums. It’s difficult, maybe even impossible, for a good person to fully comprehend the inner workings of an evil person’s mind. Lacking that comprehension, most people assume that everyone else sees the world in the same way that they do. As a result, far too many people are easily taken in by the carefully crafted deceptions and lies that are told so convincingly by those who crave power.

Like here it was that I entered that stage when a child overcomes naivite enough to realize an adult's emotional reaction as somethimes freakish for its inconsistencies, so can, on his own reasoning canvas, paint those early pale colors of judgement, resulting from initial moments of ability to critically examine life's perplexities, in tentative little brain-engine stirrings, before they faded to quickly join that train of remembered experience carrying signals indicating existence which itself far outweighs traction effort by thinking's soon slipping drivers to effectively resist any slack-action advantage, for starting so necessitates continual cuts on the hauler - performed as if governed lifelong by the tagwork of a student-green foreman who, crushed under on rushing time always building against his excessive load of emotional contents, is forever a lost ball in the high weeds of personal developments - until, with ever changing emphasis through a whole series of grades of consciousness (leading up from root-beginnings of obscure childish inconscious soul within a world), early lack - for what child sustains logic? - reaches a point of late fossilization, resultant of repeated wrong moves in endless switching of dark significances crammed inside the cranium, where, through such hindering habits, there no longer is the flexibility for thought transfer and unloading of dead freight that a standard gauge would afford and thus, as Faustian Destiny dictates, is an inept mink, limited, being in existence firmly tracked just above the constant "T" biased ballast supporting wherever space yearnings lead the worn rails of civilized comprehension, so henceforth is restricted to mere pickups and setouts of drab distortion, while traveling wearily along its familiar Western Thinking right-of-way. But choo-choo nonsense aside, ...

When the system of mass incarceration collapses (and if history is any guide, it will), historians will undoubtedly look back and marvel that such an extraordinarily comprehensive system of racialized social control existed in the United States. How fascinating, they will likely say, that a drug war was waged almost exclusively against poor people of color—people already trapped in ghettos that lacked jobs and decent schools. They were rounded up by the millions, packed away in prisons, and when released, they were stigmatized for life, denied the right to vote, and ushered into a world of discrimination. Legally barred from employment, housing, and welfare benefits—and saddled with thousands of dollars of debt—these people were shamed and condemned for failing to hold together their families. They were chastised for succumbing to depression and anger, and blamed for landing back in prison. Historians will likely wonder how we could describe the new caste system as a system of crime control, when it is difficult to imagine a system better designed to create—rather than prevent—crime.

One could argue that people can only teach what they know. Or, looking at it from a different perspective, at some point we all lack knowledge about something until we choose or are forced to learn. Anyone committed to collective liberation must acknowledge ignorance and take up the work of comprehensive political education. For example, I have been out of my depth on disability justice and climate change, to name two topics, and so I follow the lead of people who are more knowledgeable. But this doesn’t let me off the hook: I still need to seek out knowledge on my own about these issues.

That the word "indescribable" should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. For myself, the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffocation- -but even these images are off the mark.

Love has many positionings. Cordelia makes good progress. She is sitting on my lap, her arm twines, soft and warm, round my neck; she leans upon my breast, light, without gravity; the soft contours scarcely touch me; like a flower her lovely figure twines about me, freely as a ribbon. Her eyes are hidden beneath her lashes, her bosom is dazzling white like snow, so smooth that my eye cannot rest, it would glance off if her bosom were not moving. What does this movement mean? Is it love? Perhaps. It is a presentiment of it, its dream. It still lacks energy. Her embrace is comprehensive, as the cloud enfolding the transfigured one, detached as a breeze, soft as the fondling of a flower; she kisses me unspecifically, as the sky kisses the sea, gently and quietly, as the dew kisses a flower, solemnly as the sea kisses the image of the moon. I would call her passion at this moment a naive passion. When the change has been made and I begin to draw back in earnest, she will call on everything she has to captivate me. She has no other means for this purpose than the erotic itself, except that this will now appear on a quite different scale. It then becomes a weapon in her hand which she wields against me. I then have the reflected passion. She fights for her own sake because she knows I possess the erotic; she fights for her own sake so as to overcome me. She herself is in need of a higher form of the erotic. What I taught her to suspect by arousing her, my coldness now teaches her to understand but in such a way that she thinks it is she herself who discovers it. So she wants to take me by surprise; she wants to believe that she has outstripped me in audacity, and that makes me her prisoner. Her passion then becomes specific, energetic, conclusive, dialectical; her kiss total, her embrace without hesitation.—In me she seeks her freedom and finds it the better the more firmly I encompass her. The engagement bursts. When that has happened she needs a little rest, so that nothing unseemly will emerge from this wild tumult. Her passion then composes itself once more and she is mine.” —from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_, (as written by his pseudonym Johannes the Seducer)

The benefits go beyond research and influence. We lack comprehensive historical records of internet culture and patterns of abuse. Those of us on the front lines tend to have institutional memory, but archiving this information would be extremely beneficial for tracking patterns and mechanisms in different settings. The kind of coordinated mob abuse that I went through was the same kind of abuse the women who exposed #EndFathersDay experienced was the same kind of abuse the infosec community instigated against Kathy Sierra in 2007 and so on. Some of the actors are even the same. This data could be invaluable to sociologists, technologists, and historians alike. However, due to the extremely personal nature of this information, the details of how it’s obtained, who obtains it, and what is done with it must be well thought out.

They cannot admire you for intellect. Granted- but there are many other qualities of which you cannot say, 'but that is not the way I am made'. So display those virtues which are wholly in your own power- integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity. Do you not see how many virtues you can already display without any excuse of lack of talent or aptitude? And yet you are still content to lag behind. Or does the fact that you have no inborn talent oblige you to grumble, to scrimp, to toady, to blame your poor body, to suck up, to brag, to have your mind in such turmoil? No, by heaven, it does not! You could have got rid of all this long ago, and only be charged- if charge there is- with being rather slow and dull of comprehension. And yet even this can be worked on- unless you ignore or welcome your stupidity. p36

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. Guidance means your source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment by moment decision making and doing. *** Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, an integrated wholeness. Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.

I need to check your vitals, hon,” she explained. It had been several hours since I’d given birth. I guess this was the routine. She felt my pulse, palpated my legs, asked if I had pain anywhere, and lightly pressed on my abdomen, the whole while making sure I wasn’t showing signs of a blockage or a blood clot, a fever or a hemorrhage. I stared dreamily at Marlboro Man, who gave me a wink or two. I hoped he would, in time, be able to see past the vomit. The nurse then began a battery of questions. “So, no pain?” “Nope. I feel fine now.” “No chills?” “Not at all.” “Have you been able to pass gas in the past few hours?” *Insert awkward ten-second pause* I couldn’t have heard her right. “What?” I asked, staring at her. “Have you been able to pass gas lightly?” *Another awkward pause* What kind of question is this? “Wait…,” I asked. “What?” “Sweetie, have you been able to pass gas today?” I stared at her blankly. “I don’t…” “…Pass gas? You? Today?” She was unrelenting. I continued my blank, desperate stare, completely incapable of registering her question. Throughout the entire course of my pregnancy, I’d gone to great lengths to maintain a certain level of glamour and vanity. Even during labor, I’d attempted to remain the ever-fresh and vibrant new wife, going so far as to reapply tinted lip balm before the epidural so I wouldn’t look pale. I’d also restrained myself during the pushing stage, afraid I’d lose control of my bowels, which would have been the kiss of death upon my pride and my marriage; I would have had to just divorce my husband and start fresh with someone else. I had never once so much as passed gas in front of Marlboro Man. As far as he was concerned, my body lacked this function altogether. So why was I being forced to answer these questions now? I hadn’t done anything wrong. “I’m sorry…,” I stammered. “I don’t understand the question…” The nurse began again, seemingly unconcerned with my lack of comprehension skills. “Have you…” Marlboro Man, lovingly holding our baby and patiently listening all this time from across the room, couldn’t take it anymore. “Honey! She wants to know if you’ve been able to fart today!” The nurse giggled. “Okay, well maybe that’s a little more clear.” I pulled the covers over my head. I was not having this discussion.

In the past, people were vaguely fearful of photographs, believing the camera's exact reproduction of their own image would steal their souls. Not only did these images survive for much longer than their subjects, they were also endowed with an aura of magic the subjects lacked. A superstition, but one whose traces can still be felt today. People sense that the photograph captures an uncanny moment in the interstices of reality, enhancing reality's eeriness, the root of which is unknown, and fixing that moment in place like a death mask. Photography differs from the art of painting in that capturing or exposing such a moment happens neither at the will of the photographer nor the one who is photographed. What is photographed is a ghost moment, clothed in matter. Photography is the dream of comprehensive meaning. Each object has parts of itself that are invisible. This territory, which neither the photographer nor the subject can govern, constitutes the secret kept by the object. Unrelated to the intention of either photographer or subject, within the magic of photography dwells a still, quiet shock. Try to imagine our house one day when we ourselves are no more. Somewhere in that house is the ghost of us, which will pass alone in front of a blind mirror, revealing our own blurred image.

We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com

Johnny Rotten slouches at the front of the stage, propped up on the mike stand. He's leaning so far forward he looks as if he might topple into the empty space in front of the audience. · His face is pale and his body is twisted into such an awkward ugly shape he looks deformed. He looks ordinary, about the same age as us, the kind of boy I was at comprehensive school with. He's not a flashy star like Marc Bolan or David Bowie, all dressed up in exotic costumes, he's not a virtuoso musician like Eric Clapton or Peter Green, he's not even a macho rock-and-roll pub-band singer – he's just a bloke from Finsbury Park, London, England, who’s pissed off. Johnny sneers at us in his ordinary North London accent, his voice isn't trained and tuneful, it's a whiny cynical drawl, every song delivered unemotionally. There's no fake American twang either. All the things I'm so embarrassed about, John's made into virtues. He's unapologetic about who he is and where he comes from. Proud of it even. He's not taking the world's lack of interest as confirmation that he’s wrong or worthless. I look up at him twisting and yowling and realise it's everyone else who's wrong, not him. How did he make that mental leap from musically untrained, state-school-educated, council estate boy, to standing on stage in front of a band? I think he's brave. A revolutionary. He's sending a very powerful message, the most powerful message anyone can ever transmit. Be yourself.

There are some people who throw down a book after having read it, as one leaves a bottle after having drank the wine from it. There are others who read books with a pencil in their hands, and they mark the most striking passages. Afterward, in the hours of rest, in the moments when one needs a stimulant from within and one searches for harmony, sympathy of a thing apparently so dead and strange as a book is, they come back to the marked passages, to their own thoughts, more comprehensible since an author expressed them; to their own sentiments, stronger and more natural since they found them in somebody else's words. Because ofttimes it seems to us—the common readers—that there is no difference between our interior world and the horizon of great authors, and we flatter ourselves by believing that we are 'only less daring, less brave than are thinkers and poets, that some interior lack of courage stopped us from having formulated our impressions. And in this sentiment there is a great deal of truth. But while this expression of our thoughts seems to us to be a daring, to the others it is a need; they even do not suspect how much they are daring and new. They must, according to the words of a poet, "Spin out the love, as the silkworm spins its web." That is their capital distinction from common mortals; we recognize them by it at once; and that is the reason we put them above the common level. On the pages of their books we find not the traces of the accidental, deeper penetrating into the life or more refined feelings, but the whole harvest of thoughts, impressions, dispositions, written skilfully, because studied deeply. We also leave something on these pages. Some people dry flowers on them, the others preserve reminiscences. In every one of Sienkiewicz's volumes people will deposit a great many personal impressions, part of their souls; in every one they will find them again after many years.

The modem European is characterized by two apparently opposite traits: individualism and the demand for equal rights; that I have at last come to understand. The individual is an extremely vulnerable piece of vanity: conscious of how easily it suffers. This vanity demands that every other shall count as its equal, that it should be only inter pares. In this way a social race is characterized in which talents and powers do not diverge very much. The pride that desires solitude and few admirers is quite beyond comprehension; a really "great" success is possible ony through the masses, indeed one hardly grasps the fact any more that a success with the masses is always really a petty success: because pulchrum est paucorum hominum (Beauty belongs to the few) All moralities know nothing of an "order of rank" among men; teachers of law nothing of a communal conscience. The principle of the individual rejects very great human beings and demands, among men approximately equal, the subtlest eye and the speediest recognition of a talent. And because everyone has some kind of talent in such late and civilized cultures - and therefore can expect to receive back his share of honor - there is more flattering of modest merits today than ever before: it gives the age a veneer of boundless fairness. Its unfairness consists in a boundless rage, not against tyrants and public flatterers even in the arts, but against noble men, who despise the praise of the many. The demand for equal rights (i.e. to be allowed to sit in judgment on everything and everyone) is anti-aristocratic. Equally strange to the age is the vanished individual, the absorption in a great type, the desire not to be a personality - which constituted the distinction and ambition of many lofty men in earlier days (the greatest poets among them); or "to be a city" as in Greece, Jesuitism, Prussian officer corps and bureaucracy, or to be a pupil and continuator of great masters - for which non-social conditions and a lack of petty vanity are needed.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers… Parents and other passengers read on Kindles… Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing… As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago… My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading… Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19thand 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts… Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of “geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.

In April, Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, M.D., an upstate New York physician and early HCQ adopter, reproduced Dr. Didier Raoult’s “startling successes” by dramatically reducing expected mortalities among 800 patients Zelenko treated with the HCQ cocktail.29 By late April of 2020, US doctors were widely prescribing HCQ to patients and family members, reporting outstanding results, and taking it themselves prophylactically. In May 2020, Dr. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. published the most comprehensive study, to date, on HCQ’s efficacy against COVID. Risch is Yale University’s super-eminent Professor of Epidemiology, an illustrious world authority on the analysis of aggregate clinical data. Dr. Risch concluded that evidence is unequivocal for early and safe use of the HCQ cocktail. Dr. Risch published his work—a meta-analysis reviewing five outpatient studies—in affiliation with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the American Journal of Epidemiology, under the urgent title, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to Pandemic Crisis.”30 He further demonstrated, with specificity, how HCQ’s critics—largely funded by Bill Gates and Dr. Tony Fauci31—had misinterpreted, misstated, and misreported negative results by employing faulty protocols, most of which showed HCQ efficacy administered without zinc and Zithromax which were known to be helpful. But their main trick for ensuring the protocols failed was to wait until late in the disease process before administering HCQ—when it is known to be ineffective. Dr. Risch noted that evidence against HCQ used late in the course of the disease is irrelevant. While acknowledging that Dr. Didier Raoult’s powerful French studies favoring HCQ efficacy were not randomized, Risch argued that the results were, nevertheless, so stunning as to far outweigh that deficit: “The first study of HCQ + AZ [ . . . ] showed a 50-fold benefit of HCQ + AZ vs. standard of care . . . This is such an enormous difference that it cannot be ignored despite lack of randomization.”32 Risch has pointed out that the supposed need for randomized placebo-controlled trials is a shibboleth. In 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration proved in a landmark meta-analysis of 10,000 studies, that observational studies of the kind produced by Didier Raoult are equal

In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.

I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange—no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity—of local colour, texture, custom, life in general—from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only!—that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked. 2.8 When I arrived at Madison’s, we had sex. Afterwards,

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system—and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found—if there's anyone out there to do the finding. We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us. But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things? Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

It will be seen how there can be the idea of a special science, the *critique of pure reason* as it may be called. For reason is the faculty which supplies the *principles* of *a priori* knowledge. Pure reason therefore is that which contains the principles of knowing something entirely *a priori*. An *organon* of pure reason would be the sum total of the principles by which all pure *a priori* knowledge can be acquired and actually established. Exhaustive application of such an organon would give us a system of pure reason. But as this would be a difficult task, and as at present it is still doubtful whether indeed an expansion of our knowledge is possible here at all, we may regard a science that merely judges pure reason, its sources and limits, as the *propaedeutic* to the system of pure reason. In general, it would have to be called only a *critique*, not a *doctrine* of pure reason. Its utility, in regard to speculation, would only be negative, for it would serve only to purge rather than to expand our reason, and, which after all is a considerable gain, would guard reason against errors. I call all knowledge *transcendental* which deals not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects insofar as this manner is to be possible *a priori*. A system of such concepts would be called *transcendental philosophy*. But this is still, as a beginning, too great an undertaking. For since such a science must contain completely both analytic and synthetic *a priori* knowledge, it is, as far as our present purpose is concerned, much too comprehensive. We will be satisfied to carry the analysis only so far as is indispensably necessary in order to understand in their whole range the principles of *a priori* synthesis, with which alone we are concerned. This investigation, which properly speaking should be called only a transcendental critique but not a doctrine, is all we are dealing with at present. It is not meant to expand our knowledge but only to correct it, and to become the touchstone of the value, or lack of value, of all *a priori* knowledge. Such a critique is therefore the preparation, as far as possible, for a new organon, or, if this should turn out not to be possible, for a canon at least, according to which, thereafter, the complete system of a philosophy of pure reason, whether it serve as an expansion or merely as a limitation of its knowledge, may be carried out both analytically and synthetically. That such a system is possible, indeed that it need not be so comprehensive as to cut us off from the hope of completing it, may already be gathered from the fact that it would have to deal not with the nature of things, which is inexhaustible, but with the understanding which makes judgments about the nature of things, and with this understanding again only as far as its *a priori* knowledge is concerned. The supply of this *a priori* knowledge cannot be hidden from us, as we need not look for it outside the understanding, and we may suppose this supply to prove sufficiently small for us to record completely, judge as to its value or lack of value and appraise correctly. Still less ought we to expect here a critique of books and systems of pure reason, but only the critique of the faculty of pure reason itself. Only once we are in possession of this critique do we have a reliable touchstone for estimating the philosophical value of old and new works on this subject. Otherwise, an unqualified historian and judge does nothing but pass judgments upon the groundless assertions of others by means of his own, which are equally groundless.

5 provided you with a comprehensive view of the overall discovery process. It’s fair to say that every client of ours possesses a solid technical discovery process, and their SEs are trained to gather the “speeds and feeds” and the technical infrastructure issues. The skill that many SE organizations seem to lack is staying focused on the business issues and not reverting back to technology at the first chance they get.

What we possess is the iheologia viatorum, the theology of travelers, who are not yet at their heavenly home and lack the comprehensive knowledge given to the blessed after the resurrection.

As concerns the question of the psychological engine that drove Hitler, the conventional interpretation of lusting after power is, in final analysis, the refuge of lack of comprehension." -- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 27

Images cannot be ideas but they can play the part of signs or, to be more precise, co-exist with ideas in signs and, if ideas are not yet present, they can keep their future place open for them and make its contours apparent negatively Images are fixed, linked in a single way to the mental act which accompanies them. Signs, and images which have acquired significance, may still lack comprehension; unlike concepts, they do not yet possess simultaneous and theoretically unlimited relations with other entities of the same kind. They are however already permutaMe, that is, capable of standing in successive relations with other entities - although with only a limited number and, as we have seen, only on the condition that they always form a system in which an alteration which affects one element automatically affects all the others.

When the system of mass incarceration collapses (and if history is any guide, it will), historians will undoubtedly look back and marvel that such an extraordinarily comprehensive system of racialized social control existed in the United States. How fascinating, they will likely say, that a drug war was waged almost exclusively against poor people of color—people already trapped in ghettos that lacked jobs and decent schools.

Simplicity and concision are tough. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted that he’d written a long letter, having lacked the time required to write a shorter one.2 As I believe, if you can’t convey a thought clearly and in a few words, then your comprehension of it is probably lacking.

Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work—of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence “unnatural,” but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian

The leading cause of death - heart disease -, and the most common mental illness - depression -, have one thing in common - lack of consciousness. This consciousness is not a metaphysical or philosophical construct but an understanding that becomes very organic when found. Those who express too much anger, resentment and ignorance are part of this spiritual darkness that comes from a complete detachment from consciousness. The progress of consciousness then begins with a comprehension of our senses. At the most fundamental level, we must understand the Muladhara chakra - our connection to mother Earth. You then come to the second chakra, which is balanced through what you eat - it is empowered with that which comes from the soil or that which is rooted to the soil. And then you can begin to understand the third chakra - what you feel. You heal these 3 chakras, and you begin to understand consciousness while healing your body and mind.

Hispanic" and "Latino" are terms whose descriptive legitimacy is premised on a startling lack of specificity. The categories encompass any and all individuals living in the United States who trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean; Latinos hail from Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and beyond-more than twenty countries in all. Such inclusivity is part of the problem: "Hispanic" and "Latino" tell us nothing about country of origin, gender, citizenship status, economic class, or length of residence in the United States. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala is Hispanic; so is a third-generation Mexican American lawyer. Moreover, both categories are racially indeterminate: Latinos can be white, black, indigenous, and every combination thereof. In other words, characterizing a subject as either "Hispanic" or "Latino" is an exercise in opacity-the terms are so comprehensive that their explanatory power is limited. When referring to "Latinos in the United States," it is far from immediately clear whether the subjects under discussion are farmworkers living below the poverty line or middle-class homeowners, urban hipsters or rural evangelicals, white or black, gay or straight, Catholic or Jewish, undocumented Spanish monolinguals or fourth-generation speakers of English-only.

The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality

What was the new research he was referencing? A research document that claimed to show benefit to masking based on reviewing a collection of studies, which somehow ignored all of the randomized controlled trials showing no effect from masking. These kinds of glaring omissions have been a continuous problem among scientists desperate to justify the implementation of masks despite the gold standard of evidence indicating they would be effectively useless. One randomized controlled trial did occur during 2020, conducted by researchers in Denmark. Those researchers’ objective was clearly stated: “To assess whether recommending surgical mask use outside the home reduces wearers’ risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in a setting where masks were uncommon and not among recommended public health measures.”25 Given all of the pre-COVID scientific research, it should come as no surprise that the results showed no benefit to mask wearing to protect against infection with COVID-19. The Denmark researchers’ summary clearly identifies the lack of any significant impact: “The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers.” Thousands of Danes were enrolled in this trial, the most comprehensive effort by any scientific researchers to study the potential effect of mask wearing by the general public. Participants were provided high-quality surgical masks, not the cloth face coverings recommended by many public health agencies. In the best approximation of a gold-standard clinical trial that researchers could design, the results showed absolutely no statistically significant benefit. The findings, surprisingly, received no major media attention, nor did they generate questions for the expert community that now universally embrace masking.

In the midst of World War II, Quincy Wright, a leader in the quantitative study of war, noted that people view war from contrasting perspectives: “To some it is a plague to be eliminated; to others, a crime which ought to be punished; to still others, it is an anachronism which no longer serves any purpose. On the other hand, there are some who take a more receptive attitude toward war, and regard it as an adventure which may be interesting, an instrument which may be legitimate and appropriate, or a condition of existence for which one must be prepared” Despite the millions of people who died in that most deadly war, and despite widespread avowals for peace, war remains as a mechanism of conflict resolution. Given the prevalence of war, the importance of war, and the enormous costs it entails, one would assume that substantial efforts would have been made to comprehensively study war. However, the systematic study of war is a relatively recent phenomenon. Generally, wars have been studied as historically unique events, which are generally utilized only as analogies or examples of failed or successful policies. There has been resistance to conceptualizing wars as events that can be studied in the aggregate in ways that might reveal patterns in war or its causes. For instance, in the United States there is no governmental department of peace with funding to scientifically study ways to prevent war, unlike the millions of dollars that the government allocates to the scientific study of disease prevention. This reluctance has even been common within the peace community, where it is more common to deplore war than to systematically figure out what to do to prevent it. Consequently, many government officials and citizens have supported decisions to go to war without having done their due diligence in studying war, without fully understanding its causes and consequences. The COW Project has produced a number of interesting observations about wars. For instance, an important early finding concerned the process of starting wars. A country’s goal in going to war is usually to win. Conventional wisdom was that the probability of success could be increased by striking first. However, a study found that the rate of victory for initiators of inter-state wars (or wars between two countries) was declining: “Until 1910 about 80 percent of all interstate wars were won by the states that had initiated them. . . . In the wars from 1911 through 1965, however, only about 40 percent of the war initiators won.” A recent update of this analysis found that “pre-1900, war initiators won 73% of wars. Since 1945 the win rate is 33%.”. In civil war the probability of success for the initiators is even lower. Most rebel groups, which are generally the initiators in these wars, lose. The government wins 57 percent of the civil wars that last less than a year and 78 percent of the civil wars lasting one to five years. So, it would seem that those initiating civil and inter-state wars were not able to consistently anticipate victory. Instead, the decision to go to war frequently appears less than rational. Leaders have brought on great carnage with no guarantee of success, frequently with no clear goals, and often with no real appreciation of the war’s ultimate costs. This conclusion is not new. Studying the outbreak of the first carefully documented war, which occurred some 2,500 years ago in Greece, historian Donald Kagan concluded: “The Peloponnesian War was not caused by impersonal forces, unless anger, fear, undue optimism, stubbornness, jealousy, bad judgment and lack of foresight are impersonal forces. It was caused by men who made bad decisions in difficult circumstances.” Of course, wars may also serve leaders’ individual goals, such as gaining or retaining power. Nonetheless, the very government officials who start a war are sometimes not even sure how or why a war started.

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. Guidance means your source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment by moment decision making and doing. Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, an integrated wholeness. Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible.

The salient feature of Paradise is that, as a reader, I experience events long before I can make sense of them.35 Events initially seem to exist outside of any frame of meaning, and it is only afterward that the frame through which the event is comprehensible becomes visible. The event itself initially appears as a violent irruption of the Real, occurring outside of any symbolic context. What Morrison is tapping into here is one of the key aspects of contemporary experience. Rather than experiencing the events in our lives as a part of a whole, within the context of the universal, we tend to experience events in isolation, as if each event exists in its own sphere, untouched by any other. The lack of an evident universal is what makes interpretation so difficult today. This appearance, however, is misleading, and it is through the act of interpretation that we can see the connection between events, the way in which they are all situated within a universality. On the level of its form, the novel illustrates both the illusion of nonuniversality and the hidden universality that makes interpretation possible.

Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress, much the same way LGBTQ activists had gone after us on DADT. And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.

The baby boomers have been responsible for the most dramatic sundering of Western civilization since the Protestant Reformation. If that is hard to accept, it is only because the boomer revolution has been so comprehensive that it has become almost impossible to imagine what life was like before it. The rise of television, for example, has so altered the human mind as much as the printing press did, and one of the ways it has altered it has been to make sustained concentration virtually impossible for those raised in its atmosphere, the way a third dimension is unthinkable for the inhabitants of Flatland. The result has been generations of young people who lack a grounding in the basic facts of history, which can’t possibly be absorbed by video. To cover their tracks even further, the boomers have stuffed their heirs with sufficient pseudo-knowledge to make them feel as if they know enough about the past to judge themselves superior to it.

More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence. Technical solidity is not attained without at least some persistence. The chief cause of false writing is economic. Many writers need or want money. These writers could be cured by an application of banknotes. The next cause is the desire men have to tell what they don't know, or to pass off an emptiness for a fullness. They are discontented with what they have to say and want to make a pint of comprehension fill up a gallon of verbiage. An author having a very small amount of true contents can make it the basis of formal and durable mastery, provided he neither inflates nor falsifies [...] The plenum of letters is not bounded by primaeval exclusivity functioning against any kind of human being or talent, but only against false coiners, men who will not dip their metal in the acid of known or accessible fact.

Existential dread to philosophy’s end in an objectively indignant and unknowable universe is principally all we shall ever expect to bear and intuit but more importantly were intended to observe in dull harmonious respite, the congenital lack of a resolving creation myth or prime reason to exist, for anything to survive and billions of years lay dormant for the incidental arrival of our brains unwillingly limited to these strictures that were already set for us by the dawning of contumacious evolution without cause but local expedience, no matter the latest surge of scientific ingenuity or imagined promise in our comprehension of the universe’s layered and aimless design by scoping the hanging stars gripped by a listless Milky Way within speculative aeons of unshored blackness, only a dubious reasoning to our being ever spun and plied from the remaining equally unknowable shunted gaze of the cosmos.

It’s so obvious to me what a horribly destructive direction we are headed in; I scratch my head about why it’s not as obvious to everyone else. I guess it’s because our entire economy and society incentivizes all of us, including me, not to take the thirty-thousand-foot-view. We expect to have infinite energy from fossil fuels, and AC on demand, and full tanks of gas in our cars, and cheap food, and a million different jobs that in one way or another depend on extracting from nature’s reserves, but we lack comprehension of what it took to put them there or how fragile the cucles that made them can be.

As I wrote a while back, the greatest obstacle to the higher education of the intellect lies not in economic, social, racial or family factors, but in the moral order. It lies in what the Greeks called apeirokalia: the lack of experience of the finest things. A soul which, from an early age, is not exposed to the sight of concrete examples of natural, artistic, intellectual, spiritual and moral beauty, becomes incapable of conceiving any reality higher than the top of its ordinary perceptions. Like the frog at the bottom of the well, if we ask him "What is heaven?", he replies: "It's a small hole in the top of my house." This is the chronic affliction of national culture, always devoted to the irrelevant and full of contempt for anything above its precarious comprehension capacity.

Governments lacking AI projects, research and development endeavors, and a comprehensive national AI strategy, but engaging in discussions and collaborations focused on the risks and safety of AI, present a paradox.

One song to the tune of another - a concept that is almost too simple for words. Without a trace of ostentation and offering no more than plain uncomplicated straightforwardness, the difficulty of the round lies only in finding the mode juste to describe its lack of pretention and complication or the ease and clarity, which embraces its artless elementalism. Indeed Its this very lack of convoluted ramification that makes excessive detail description not only unnecessary, but also superfluous to a point bordering on the tautological. It's impossible to describe its lack of advanced over contrived complex compound structure or its total avoidance of extravagantly woven sophistry in mere words. These conventional catalysts so expeditious to verbal facility that elucidate conceptual comprehension succinctly and without recourse to extraneous elaboration. If only everything in life was so simple!

That logic of American partisanship came under a more sustained and ultimately more effective assault in the Progressive Era, however, precisely because of its relation to the logic of the Constitution. As we have seen, the early progressives critiqued the American system for lacking coherence and sacrificing responsiveness, energy, and effectiveness in government for the sake of stability, safety, and cohesion in society. They argued that this trade-off was neither successful nor necessary, and that unity could be achieved by unified leadership, especially presidential leadership, not by aimless negotiation. So they sought a politics in which different parties offered thoroughly distinct and comprehensive policy programs, the public selected among them on Election Day, and then the winning party would have essentially unlimited power to pursue its program until the public voted for someone else. The competition among factions in society would not be resolved by their bargaining within the institutions of government but by voters choosing among them at the ballot box and letting whichever won a majority deploy all the powers of government in the service of its vision.

If you do not read or listen to process and understand context, your response will always be shallow, spiteful and wrong.

After this quarrel, Harilal composed the long letter that he then had printed. The letter rehearsed their decade of disagreement, the son saying that the father had ‘oppressed’ him, and paid him ‘no attention at all’. ‘Whenever we tried to put across our views on any subject to you,’ said Harilal, ‘you have lost your temper quickly and told us, “You are stupid, you are in a fallen state, you lack comprehension.” Harilal also accused Gandhi of bullying Kasturba, writing: ‘It is beyond my capacity to describe the hardships that my mother had to undergo.’ Gandhi had disapproved of Harilal’s marriage, since he fell in love and chose his bride, rather than, as was the custom, have his parents choose a wife for him. Harilal’s relationship with his wife, Chanchi, was intensely romantic; this wasn’t to Gandhi’s liking either, since he believed sex was strictly for procreation and a true satyagrahi should be celibate. Harilal emphatically disagreed. ‘No one can be made an ascetic,’ he told his father. ‘A person becomes an ascetic on his own volition... I cannot believe a salt-free diet, or abstinence from ghee or milk [all of which Gandhi preached and practised] indicates strength of character and morality.’ Harilal claimed he spoke on behalf of his younger brothers as well. Gandhi had imposed his will on his four sons, without ever giving them a hearing. ‘My entire letter stresses one point,’ remarked Harilal. ‘You have never considered our rights and capabilities, you have never seen the person in us'.

Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo. Only the CEO has comprehensive knowledge of the criteria, the rationale for the criteria, all of the feedback from interviewers and references, and the relative importance of the various stakeholders. Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.

I am troubled by a crushing physical sense of other people’s lack of comprehension.

To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

One cannot examine the actions of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963, without concluding that the Service stood down on protecting President Kennedy. Indeed, the 120-degree turn into Dealey Plaza violates Secret Service procedures, because it required the presidential limousine to come to a virtual stop. The reduction of the president’s motorcycle escort from six police motorcycles to two and the order for those two officers to ride behind the presidential limousine also violates standard Secret Service procedure. The failure to empty and secure the tall buildings on either side of the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza likewise violates formal procedure, as does the lack of any agents dispersed through the crowd gathered in Dealey Plaza. Readers who are interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Secret Service’s multiple failures and the conspicuous violation of longstanding Secret Service policies regarding the movement and protection of the president on November 22, 1963, should read Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect. The difference in JFK Secret Service protection and its adherence to the services standard required procedures in Chicago and Miami would be starkly different from the arrangements for Dallas. Palamara established that Agent Emory Roberts worked overtime to help both orchestrate the assassination and cover up the unusual actions of the Secret Service in the aftermath. Roberts was commander of the follow-up car trailing the presidential limousine. Roberts covered up the escapades of his fellow secret servicemen at The Cellar, a club in downtown Ft. Worth, where agents, some directly responsible for the safety of President Kennedy during the motorcade, drank until dawn on November 22. He also ordered a perplexed agent Donald Lawton off the back of the presidential limousine while at Love Field, thus giving the assassins clearer, more direct shots and more time to get them off. Also, although Roberts recognized rifle fire being discharged in Dealey Plaza, he neglected to mobilize any of the agents under his watch to act. To mask the inactivity of his agents, Roberts, in sworn testimony, falsely increased the speed of the cars (from 9–11 mph to 20–25 mph) and the distance between them (from five feet to 20–25 feet).85 No analysis of the Secret Service’s actions on the day of the assassination can be complete without mentioning that Secret Service director James Rowley was a former FBI agent and close ally of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as a crony of Lyndon Johnson. Hoover was one of Johnson’s closest associates. The FBI Director would take the unusual step of flying to Dallas for a victory celebration in 1948 when Johnson illegally stole his Senate seat through election fraud. Johnson and Hoover were neighbors in the Foxhall Road area of the District of Columbia. Hoover’s budget would virtually triple during the years LBJ dominated the appropriations process as Senate Majority Leader. Rowley was a protégé of the director and one of the few men who left the FBI on good terms with Hoover. Rowley’s first public service job in the Roosevelt administration was arranged for him by LBJ. The neglect of assigning even one Secret Service agent to secure Dealey Plaza, as well as cleaning blood and other relatable pieces of evidence from the presidential limousine immediately following the assassination, seizing Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital to prevent a proper, well-documented autopsy, failing to record Oswald’s interrogation—all were important pieces of the assassination deftly executed by Rowley.

Get Out Of Legal Trouble By Finding A Great Medical Malpractice Lawyer In Baltimore You will save on legal costs when you're taking the time to effectively ensure that your medical malpractice lawyer knows what you need. Your lawyer ought to be well versed on how to get the best outcome for your case. Take these factors into consideration the next time you are searching for the right attorney. Dependable attorneys are famous for having comprehensive, detailed interviews with their clients. The questions, though they might seem excessive, can help the medical malpractice lawyer in learning more about you before going into the courtroom, which will ultimately allow him to offer you the very best representation that they could. Whether it is from a book, online, or through questioning, any attorney worth his salt is usually out to learn more info. You have to find a new attorney immediately if the one you have is uninterested in your case and only asks a few pointless questions. Law firms and independent attorneys are like all other business - they can acquire clients through deception. Look for proof when an attorney claims his work is exceptional in order to validate it. Perform a comprehensive background check to understand their case history, their performance in college and the type of reputation that they've. Online reviews can also help you determine if the legal consultant delivered on his or her promises. There's nothing more important in the attorney-client relationship than good communication. A good, dependable medical malpractice lawyer can make sure that you have a clear understanding of any details they provide. The percentage of winning grows higher when your legal consultant understands and has all the info they need to win your case. Excellent interactions between you and your lawyer are vital to winning your case. When working with a legal consultant, be very specific about what type of attorney you want to hire. You'll need to find a legal consultant that specializes in the kind of law that governs your legal case. Find attorneys who have had success in similar cases. Call for a consultation in order to understand more about the attorney and what other skills or experience they possess in the field your legal case falls under. A medical malpractice lawyer who lacks moral character won't be up front about their ability to represent you. That attorney must be willing to inform you in the event that one is not able to handle your legal case in some way. Be really careful never to fall for attorneys who make false reports about past accomplishments. There are a few attorneys who'll need to work your legal case just to receive that new experience.

Listen to the discussion between any two philosophers one of whom upholds determinism, and the other liberty: it is always the determinist who seems to be in the right. He may be a beginner and his adversary a seasoned philosopher. He can plead his cause nonchalantly, while the other sweats blood for his. It will always be said of him that he is simple, clear and right. He is easily and naturally so, having only to collect thought ready to hand and phrases ready-made: science, language, common sense, the whole of intelligence is at his disposal. Criticism of an intuitive philosophy is so easy and so certain to be well received that it will always tempt the beginner. Regret may come later,—unless, of course, there is a native lack of comprehension and, out of spite, personal resentment toward everything that is not reducible to the letter, toward all that is properly spirit. That can happen, for philosophy too has its Scribes and its Pharisees.

There are stories about technology. There are stories about stories. Most of all, though, there are stories that tackle our understanding, or lack thereof, of the many machines that have freed us to love, work, birth, build, change, destroy, and reconfigure reality, often beyond our will or comprehension—even as they greatly augment our will and comprehension.

One of the things that drive the various reductionist programs about mind, value, and meaning, in spite of their inherent implausibility, is the lack of any comprehensive alternative.

No, art is not retard. You lack the intellectual ability for art comprehension, logical reasoning and verbal sophistication.

Now in this sense also, I take it, Peter affirms that believers have been begotten again unto a living hope. In all probability the representation, while applicable to all believers, was influenced to some extent by the apostle’s memory of his own experience. There had been a moment in his previous life when all at once, in the twinkling of an eye as it were, he had been translated from a world of despair into a world of hope. It was when the fact of the resurrection of Christ flashed upon him. Under the two-fold bitterness of his denial of the Lord and of the tragedy of the cross, utter darkness had settled down upon his soul. Everything he expected from the future in connection with Jesus had been completely blotted out. Perhaps he had even been in danger of losing the old hope which as a pious Israelite he cherished before he knew the Lord. And then suddenly, the whole aspect of things had been changed. The risen Christ appeared to him and by his appearance wrought the resurrection of everything that had gone down with him into the grave. No, there was far more here for Peter than a mere resurrection of what he had hoped in before. It was the birth of something new that now, for the first time, disclosed itself to his perception. His hope was not given back to him in its old form. It was regenerated in the act of restoration. Previously it had been dim, undefined, subject to fluctuations; sometimes eager and enthusiastic, sometimes cast down and languishing; in many respects earthly, carnal and incompletely spiritualized. Apart from all of these defects, his previous hope had been a bare one, which could only sustain itself by projection into the future, but which lacked that vital support and nourishment in a present substantial reality without which no religious hope can permanently subsist. Through the resurrection of Christ, all these faults were corrected; all these deficiencies supplied. For Peter looked upon the risen Christ as the beginning, the firstfruits of that new world of God in which the believer’s hope is anchored. Jesus did not rise as he had been before, but transformed, glorified, eternalized, the possessor and author of a transcendent heavenly life at one and the same time, the revealer, the sample and the pledge of the future realization of the true kingdom of God. No prolonged course of training could have been more effective for purifying and spiritualizing the apostle’s hope than this single, instantaneous experience; this bursting upon him of a new form of eternal life, concrete and yet all-comprehensive in its prophetic significance. Well might the apostle say that he himself had been begotten again unto a new hope through the resurrection of Christ from the dead. And, of course, what was true of him was even more emphatically true of the readers of his epistle, who, if they were believers from the Gentiles, before their conversion had lived entirely without hope and without God in the world.

People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishment on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naïve. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time had insisted that we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private matter dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.

I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this aspiration.3 As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries. If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of high-modernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.4 They envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition. As a conviction, high modernism was not the exclusive property of any political tendency; it had both right- and left-wing variants, as we shall see. The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.

it is typically progressives who have come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it. These progressives have wanted to use that power to bring about enormous changes in people’s habits, work, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview.7 They have deployed what Václav Havel has called “the armory of holistic social engineering.”8 Utopian aspirations per se are not dangerous. As Oscar Wilde remarked, “A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”9 Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.

Today, Americans spend billions of dollars every year to maintain a strong national defence as a deterrent against external attack by foreign powers, but they fail entirely to apply the same principle of preventive defence to their own health. They eat, drink, and live indiscriminately and treat their bodies as engines of pleasure, without the slightest regard for the damage their habits inflict on their health. When they get sick, they run to the doctor or hospital for a quick fix and never imagine that their ailments are self-inflicted. Those ailments are then further compounded at the clinic, because more often than not they are not correctly diagnosed owing to the lack of a comprehensive and systematic view of the human body and human health. Western medical practice has become increasingly fragmented into narrow fields of specialty, and patients are referred to 'specialists' based entirely on what parts of the body exhibit their symptoms. It does not occur to Western medical specialists that symptoms may appear in parts of the body far removed from the root cause of the disease, although this remains a fundamental tenet of traditional Chinese medicine.

In a life threatening situation, whether terrorism or a rockslide, what kills most people is slowness to react. Regular lives are so safe, so event-less that there is a lack of comprehension when faced with death. It's not necessarily shock. IT's disbelief. It's dismissal. Civilians say to themselves, I've got this wrong, this isn't what I think. But it is, and by the time they've realized, it's too late. And of course sometimes they do in fact have it wrong. They've misread the situation, and they're left embarassed and maybe ashamed. But....." "But they're alive," Mayes finished.

In the series of great offensive pressures which Joffre delivered during the whole of the spring and autumn of 1915, the French suffered nearly 1,300,000 casualties. They inflicted upon the Germans in the same period and the same operations 506,000 casualties. They gained no territory worth mentioning, and no strategic advantages of any kind. This was the worst year of the Joffre régime. Gross as were the mistakes of the Battle of the Frontiers, glaring as had been the errors of the First Shock, they were eclipsed by the insensate obstinacy and lack of comprehension which, without any large numerical superiority, without adequate artillery or munitions, without any novel mechanical method, without any pretence of surprise or manœuvre, without any reasonable hope of victory, continued to hurl the heroic but limited manhood of France at the strongest entrenchments, at uncut wire and innumerable machine guns served with cold skill. The responsibilities of this lamentable phase must be shared in a subordinate degree by Foch, who under Joffre’s orders, but as an ardent believer, conducted the prolonged Spring offensive in Artois, the most sterile and prodigal of all.