Liquid Modernity Quotes

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

The updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am…

What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.

The main point about civility is...the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.

A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

Precisar tornar-se o que já se é é a característica da vida moderna.

globalization is the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land where one can escape and find happiness. Or the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land different from yours in terms of being able to oppose the sense of meaninglessness, the loss of criteria and, ultimately, moral blindness and the loss of sensitivity.

En cuanto al poder, se aleja a toda vela de la calle y del mercado, de las asambleas y de los parlamentos, de los gobiernos locales y de los nacionales, más allá del alcance del control de los ciudadanos, hacia la extraterritorialidad de las redes electrónicas. En la actualidad, los principios estratégicos favoritos de los que tienen el poder son el escape, la evasión y la retirada, y su estado ideal es la invisibilidad.

As Peter Berger has noted, the strategy of apologizing for Christian faith by trying to demonstrate its social utility is always eventually self-liquidating. Sooner of later people realize that a great many of the supposedly practical and secular benefits of the Christian religion can be had more easily without religion...The logic of practical atheism may well be more deeply ingrained in the evangelical tradition than conservatives perhaps have realized.

On a side note, is there any place on earth that sounds like it has a more chill vibe than Hawaiian Brian’s? Or for that matter, is there a chiller name than “Hawaiian Brian”? “Damnit! Hawaiian Brian just stole my debit card and liquidated all my bank accounts!” I can’t ever see someone having to utter that sentence.

Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents ' freedom.

Um aspecto muito visível do desaparecimento das velhas garantias é a nova fragilidade dos laços humanos. A fragilidade e transitoriedade dos laços pode ser um preço inevitável do direito de os indivíduos perseguirem seus objetivos individuais, mas não pode deixar de ser, simultaneamente, um obstáculo dos mais formidáveis para perseguir eficazmente esses objetivos -- e para a coragem necessária para persegui-los.

There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, "spirits." Methyl alcohol, they called "wood spirit"; ethyl alcohol, "wine spirit." Even today, alcoholic beverages are frequently referred to as "spirits." (Modern Arabs, from whose language the word "alcohol" was taken, call ethyl alcohol "spirit" from the English. This is a queer exchange.)

Even though Christ Himself would not deliver us from the power of the Totalitarian State, as He did not deliver Himself, we must see His purpose in it all. Maybe his children are being persecuted by the world in order that they might withdraw themselves from the world. Maybe His most violent enemies may be doing His work negatively, for it could be the mission of totalitarianism to preside over the liquidation of a modern world that became indifferent to God and His moral laws.

When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences. The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed - the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to papers of others.

By the Ram with a Thousand Ewes! By the Tail of Dagon and the Horns of Derceto!” said Azédarac, as he fingered the tiny, pot-bellied vial of vermilion liquid on the table before him. “Something will have to be done with this pestilential Brother Ambrose.

The effect of education on political attitudes is complicated, for democratic society. The self-professed aim of modern education is to "liberate" people from prejudices and traditional forms of authority. Educated people are said not to obey authority blindly, but rather learn to think for themselves. Even if this doesn't happen on a mass basis, people can be taught to see their own self-interest more clearly, and over a longer time horizon. Education also makes people demand more of themselves and for themselves; in other words, they acquire a certain sense of dignity which they want to have respected by their fellow citizens and by the state. In a traditional peasant society, it is possible for a local landlord (or, for that matter, a communist commissar) to recruit peasants to kill other peasants and dispossess them of their land. They do so not because it is in their interest, but because they are used to obeying authority. Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nutty causes like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend not to volunteer for private armies or death squads simply because someone in a uniform tells them to do so

The color of her hair spreading across the pillow looked like a liquid flame, licking and curling its way as it spilled across the fabric, and it occurred to him…that was how it felt to love her—like a fire that’s constantly burning, constantly consuming. He would have it no other way.

The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one's outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. Tu put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid - none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.

Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.

The relations individuals enter into with other individuals nowadays have been described as ‘pure’ – meaning ‘no strings attached’, no unconditional obligations assumed and so no predetermination, and therefore no mortgaging, of the future. The sole foundation and only reason for the relationship to continue is, it has been said, the amount of mutual satisfaction drawn from it.

Robbing humans of their faces and individuality is no less a form of evil than diminishing their dignity or looking for threats primarily among those who have immigrated or harbour different religious beliefs.

A preppy girl at the end of the table rolls a quarter off her nose and bounces it toward a glass in front of her. The coin hits the glass and falls back on the table. “Off the rim has to drink,” the guy next to her says too loudly, even with the music. The girl flashes him a defiant stare as she picks up a large cup to her left and chugs the liquid inside. She never breaks eye contact even as she slams the empty cup back down. Modern mating rituals at their finest.

To quote from Le Délabrement de l’Occident of Cornelius Castoriadis, An autonomous society, a truly democratic society, is a society which questions everything that is pre-given and by the same token liberates the creation of new meanings.

Modern man no longer dares to preach that the individual is born as a blank slate. Too many mishaps have taught him that we are the oppressed heirs of our family, our race, our blood. Blood is not an innocent liquid, but the viscous paste of history.

the notion that we know all there is to know about people and their needs and that all these data are pinned down exactly and fully explained by the market, the state, sociological surveys, ratings, and everything else that turns people into the Global Anonymous.

All certainty that comes after the 'original sin' of dismantling the matter-of-fact world full of routine and short of reflection must be a manufactured certainty, a blatantly and unashamedly 'made-up' certainty, burdened with all the inborn vulnerability of human-made decisions.

Even if the self he or she is struggling to display and get recognized is deemed by the actor to precede, pre-empt and predetermine the choice of individual identity (ethnic, race, religious and gender ascriptions claim to belong to that category of self), it is the urge of selection and the effort to make the choice publicly recognizable that constitutes the self-definition of the liquid modern individual. That effort would have hardly been undertaken if the identity in question was indeed endowed with the determining power it claims and/or is believed to possess.

One fact is beyond dispute: Homogenization prevents the consumer from realizing just how little fat is contained in modern processed milk, even "full fat" milk. Before homogenization, milk purchasers looked for milk that had lots of cream - that was the sign that the milk came from healthy cows, cows on pasture. Old-fashioned milk contained from 4 to 8 percent butterfat, which translated into lots of cream on the top. Modern milk is standardize at 3.5 percent, no more. Butterfat brings bigger profits to the dairy industry as butter or as an ingredient in ice cream than as a component of liquid milk. The consumer has been cheated, but with homogenization, he can't tell.

The principal reason for this limited mastery of materials was the energy constraint: for millennia our abilities to extract, process, and transport biomaterials and minerals were limited by the capacities of animate prime movers (human and animal muscles) aided by simple mechanical devices and by only slowly improving capabilities of the three ancient mechanical prime movers: sails, water wheels, and wind mills. Only the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuels to the inexpensive and universally deployable kinetic energy of mechanical prime movers (first by external combustion of coal to power steam engines, later by internal combustion of liquids and gases to energize gasoline and Diesel engines and, later still, gas turbines) brought a fundamental change and ushered in the second, rapidly ascending, phase of material consumption, an era further accelerated by generation of electricity and by the rise of commercial chemical syntheses producing an enormous variety of compounds ranging from fertilizers to plastics and drugs.

What treasures lay inside! Yes, here were the colors that she had asked for: red, pink, yellow, blue, green, black- all in powder form, of course, not like the one or two bottles of liquid food color that were available at the Lebanese supermarket in town; those were not at all modern- some big blocks of marzipan, and, as always, June had included some new things for Angel to try. This time there were three tubes that looked rather like thick pens. She picked one upend examined it: written along its length were the words 'Gateau Graffito,' and underneath, written in uppercase letters, was the word 'red.' Reaching for the other two pens- one marked 'green' and the other 'black'- she saw a small printed sheet lying at the bottom of the bubblewrap nest. It explained that these pens were filled with food color, and offered a picture showing how they could be used to write fine lines or thick lines, depending on how you held them. It also guaranteed that the contents were kosher. Eh, now her cakes were going to be more beautiful than ever!

It is Boden’s third form of creativity that is the more mysterious and elusive, and that is transformational creativity. This describes those rare moments that are complete game changers. Every art form has these gear shifts. Think of Picasso and Cubism, Schoenberg and atonality, Joyce and modernism. They are like phase changes, when water suddenly goes from a liquid to a gas.

الكفاح من أجل الحرية ، الذي هو في أصله علاقة اجتماعية تماما ، لا يمكن أن يكون إلا قوة تحدث الفرقة والشقاق ، وأن أي تطبيق واقعي لها لا بد من أن يحدث الانقسام والاختلاف لا محالة . فالحرية ، مثل كثير من القيم والمثل العليا ، في حالة مخاض دائم ، فلا تتحقق أبدا ، بل ( أو لهذا السبب نفسه ) نصبوا إليها دائما ، ونكافح من أجلها ، فتتولد قوة دافعة كبيرة في تجريب متواصل لا نهاية له. وهو ما يسمى التاريخ

السعادة العامة وتبعاتها من المسؤولية؛ تلك الحرية التي يهيم في مدحها دعاة التحرر ليست على النقيض من تأكيداتهم ضامنة للسعادة ، فأغلب الظن انها ستأتي ببؤس وشقاء يقوق الفرح . ومن هذا المنظور يخطى دعاة التحرر عندما يحزنون ، كما يفعل ديفيد كونواي ، ويؤكدون مبدا هنري سیدجويك الذي يقول إن السعادة العامة تأتي على أكمل وجه وأحسنه إذا ما غرسنا في نفوس الشباب البالغين، التوقع بأن كل واحد منهم سيترك إلى قدرته على تدبير أموره وقضاء حوائجها.

make some rose water. Take the petals of six or seven organic roses, place these in a pot and add enough distilled or spring water to cover them. On a medium-low heat, bring the petals to a simmer and cover with a lid for twenty to thirty minutes, until the petals have lost their color. Strain the mixture and pour the liquid into a glass jar. Decant this mixture into a spray bottle, then shake it and use it on your skin or to cleanse your altar, mirror or ritual tools—or pretty much whatever you like.

W bezlitośnie powikłanym świecie praca, podobnie jak całe ludzkie życie, rozpada się na szereg zamkniętych epizodów, a szanse na wykonanie jej zgodnie z założonym planem są, podobnie jak w przypadku innych ludzkich działań, nikłe lub wręcz nierealne. Praca przemieściła się ze świata ładotwórstwa i kontrolowanej przyszłości na obszar gry. Działania pracujących osób przypominają coraz bardziej strategię graczy, którzy stawiają sobie umiarkowanie odległe cele i wybiegają myślą nie dalej niż jeden lub dwa posunięcia do przodu.

As the scholar of English literature Marty Roth notes, while modern writers from Eugene O’Neill to Hemingway have explicitly denied the role of alcohol in their art, “this disclaimer, when it comes from a heavy drinker, is more likely to be part of an alcoholic alibi system than a statement of fact.”14 In any case, it is impossible to ignore the fact that an inordinate proportion of writers, poets, artists, and musicians are also heavy users of liquid inspiration, willing to put up with the physical and sometimes financial and personal costs in return for an unleashed mind.

The attack was designed as a show of overwhelming strength for which the audience was not the already conquered people of Bukhara, but the still distant army and people of Samarkand, the next city on his march. The Mongol invaders rolled up their newly constructed siege engines—catapults, trebuchets, and mangonels that hurled not only stones and fire, as besieging armies had done for centuries, but also pots of burning liquids, exploding devices, and incendiary materials. They maneuvered immense crossbows mounted on wheels, and great teams of men pushed in portable towers with retractable ladders from which they could shoot down at the defenders of the walls. At the same time that they attacked through the air, miners went to work digging into the earth to undermine the walls by sapping. During this awesome display of technological prowess in the air, on the land, and beneath the earth, Genghis Khan heightened the psychological tension by forcing prisoners, in some cases the captured comrades of the men still in the citadel, to rush forward until their bodies filled the moat and made live ramparts over which other prisoners pushed the engines of war.

Seventy-five percent of the time when I'm ordering my "almond milk matcha latte with no sugar added, lukewarm, please," I'll be recognized by an employee. And yes, my order is a pin in the ass, but I'm determined to enjoy the liquid indulgences of modern life. Might as well take advantage of it all before the zombie apocalypse. I have no practical skills; I'm fully aware that I'll be one of the first ones "turned." Instead of learning motorcycle repair or something else disaster-scenario useful, I'll order the drink I want until I become a shambling corpse. AND I WON'T BE DEFENSIVE ABOUT IT, OKAY?

In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.

There are considerable complexities attached to other measures. It is not so much that they vary as that they may be differently interpreted, according to what it is you are trying to measure. A foot in length is the same as your modern foot of 12 inches but if you are measuring cloth then you use the ell, normally 45 inches—but 27 inches if the cloth is Flemish. Probably the most complicated measures are those involving liquids. A gallon of wine is not the same volume as a gallon of ale. A standard hogshead contains 63 wine-gallons or 52.5 ale-gallons. Except that there is no such thing as a standard hogshead; there is a standard for wine, another for ale, and a third for beer (which is imported). If you are buying beer in London, a hogshead amounts to 54 ale-gallons; if you are buying ale, it amounts to 48.

The first, and more traditional, involved the ingestion of mercury as well as the topical application of this liquid metal to chancres and lesions. The second, more modern theory favored other metals and chemicals—gold, silver, copper, bromine, iodine, and nitric acid—to be taken internally or applied in ointments. Both approaches were hazardous to patients’ health. Of these two methods, Gothenburg’s Kurhuset appears to have favored non-mercurial cures. Elisabeth, during her stay, was treated internally with hydroiodic acid, the main components of which are iodine and hydrogen; her genital warts would have been dehydrated with a cream or cut off. After receiving this cure for seventeen days, Elisabeth went into premature labor. On April 21, while under lock and key at the Kurhuset, she gave birth to a stillborn seven-month-old girl.* She did not cite the father’s name on the birth certificate.

The crisis in the concept of community gives rise to unbridled individualism: people are no longer fellow citizens, but rivals to beware of. This “subjectivism” has threatened the foundations of modernity, has made it fragile, producing a situation with no points of reference, where everything dissolves into a sort of liquidity. The certainty of the law is lost, the judiciary is regarded as an enemy, and the only solutions for individuals who have no points of reference are to make themselves conspicuous at all costs, to treat conspicuousness as a value, and to follow consumerism. Yet this is not a consumerism aimed at the possession of desirable objects that produce satisfaction, but one that immediately makes such objects obsolete. People move from one act of consumption to another in a sort of purposeless bulimia: the new cell phone is no better than the old one, but the old one has to be discarded in order to indulge in this orgy of desire.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

MT: But you are. You are justifying it. RG: I'm trying to show that there's meaning at precisely the point where the nihilistic temptation is strongest today. I'm saying: there's a Revelation, and people are free to do with it what they will. But it too will keep reemerging. It's stronger than them. And, as we have seen, it's even capable of putting mimetic phenomena to work on its behalf, since today everyone is competing to see who is the most “victimized.” Revelation is dangerous. It's the spiritual equivalent of nuclear power. What's most pathetic is the insipidly modernized brand of Christianity that bows down before everything that's most ephemeral in contemporary thought. Christians don't see that they have at their disposal an instrument that is incomparably superior to the whole mishmash of psychoanalysis and sociology that they conscientiously feed themselves. It's the old story of Esau sacrificing his inheritance for a plate of lentils. All the modes of thought that once served to demolish Christianity are being discredited in turn by more “radical” versions of the same critique. There's no need to refute modern thought because, as each new trend one-ups its predecessors, it's liquidating itself at high speed. The students are becoming more and more skeptical, but, and above all in America, the people in power, the department chairs, the “chairpersons,” as they say, are fervent believers. They're often former sixties' radicals who've made the transition to administrative jobs in academia, the media, and the church. For a long time, Christians were protected from this insane downward spiral, and, when they finally dive in, you can recognize them by their naïve modernist faith. They're always one lap behind. They always choose the ships that the rats are in the midst of abandoning. They're hoping to tap into the hordes of people who have deserted their churches. They don't understand that the last thing that can attract the masses is a Christian version of the demagogic laxity in which they're already immersed. Today, it's thought that playing the social game, whether on the individual or the group level, is more indispensable than thinking…it's thought that there are truths that shouldn't be spoken. In America, it's become impossible to be unapologetically Christian, white, or European without running the risk of being accused of “ethnocentrism.” To which I reply that the eulogists of “multiculturalism” place themselves, to the contrary, in the purest of Western traditions. The West is the only civilization ever to have directed such criticisms against itself. The capital of the Incas had a name that I believe meant “the navel of the world.

For the modern phase of the “Christian West” it is characteristic that the eschatological element is increasingly pushed into the background. The idea of history as a time between creation and redemption, or between death and Parousia of the Messiah, loses its plausibility in the demarcated horizon of “modern troubled history.” “Christian woe” – which no longer even senses its contradiction in terms – begins to arrange itself in a forwardly open continuum. The burdensome thought of a final end is obscured by the philosophy of infinitely perfectible progress. Thus, from the 18th century onwards, Christian ideas against traditional Christianity become paradoxically effective by creating decidedly post-Christian or anti-Christian philosophies of history. It is precisely in the decidedly worldly and atheistic wings of the Enlightenment that the messianic impulse, chastened for a millennium, reawakens to radical offensiveness. It becomes world-political violence in Marxism above all and gives a messianic perspective to modern progressive thought – a perspective back onto a beginning from the point of view of an end; the end of the path through the desert of an alienated interim and to the beginning of an era of post-historical fulfillment. It seems that the Christian impulse in modernity reaches a worldly maximum of influence under an atheist, socialist, and humanist incognito. At the same time, it witnesses its irreligious liquidation as well.

The watcher’s eyes are likely to swivel forward in a sequence of stately turns as the screen’s pixel glows: each quarter-ounce mass of eyeball tugged by six flat muscles, in a glissando slide within the slippery fat lining the orbital cavity. The eye blinks, the widened pupils are in position, and the incoming electromagnetic waves roar in. Ripping through the thin layer of the cornea, they decelerate slightly, with their outermost edges forming a nearly flat plane as they travel inward, carrying the as-yet-undetected signal from the screen deep into the waiting human. The waves continue through the liquid of the aqueous humor and on to the gaping hole of the pupil. The human may have squinted to avoid the glare, but human reflexes work at the rate of slow thousandths of a second and are no match for these racing intruders. The pupil is crossed without obstruction. The stiff lens just below focuses the incoming waves even more, sending them into the inland sea of the jellylike vitreous humor deeper down in the eye. A very few of the incoming electric waves explode against the organic molecules in their way, but most simply whirl through those soft biological barriers and continue straight down, piercing the innermost wrapping of the eyeball, till they reach the end-point of their journey: the fragile, stalklike projection from the living brain known as the retina. And deep inside there, in the dark, barely slowed from their original 670 million mph, the waves splatter into the ancient, moist blood vessels and cell membranes, and something unexpected happens. An electric current switches on.

[T]he ancients, knowing nothing about vaporisation, drew an absolute line between solids and liquids on the one hand and what we call gases on the other. The name they gave to what we call gas was spiritus (Latin), pneuma (Greek) or ruach and neshama (Hebrew). In each case the word could mean air, breath or wind. The ancients thought of the wind as the breath of God. So when the Hebrews offered their account of the world’s origin, they said the powerful wind (ruach) of God fluttered over the waters. And when they told of the origin of humankind, they said that God made humans out of the dust of the earth, breathed his gentle breath (neshama) into them and they became living persons. Further, it was as obvious to ancients as it is to us that the best way of distinguishing between a living person and a corpse is to look for breath— for a living person breathes. Breath was believed to be the very essence of what constitutes a living human being, and thus the very principle of life. But for the ancients breath, air and wind were all the same. When a man dies, said Ecclesiastes, “the dust returns to the earth and the breath returns to God”. When Jesus died on the cross, according to Luke, he said, “Father into your hands I commit my spirit (pneuma)” and, “having said this he breathed his last”. Of course we are used to hearing the word ‘spirit’ in one place and ‘breath’ in the other, but in the Greek original the same word, pneuma, is used. Similarly in the King James Version (still nearer to the medieval world-view than we are) Matthew reports that “Jesus cried with a loud voice and gave up the ghost (pneuma)”. During the transition to the modern world people continued to speak about spirit without realising that they were no longer talking about something originally conceived to be as tangible as the air we breathe. Christians continued to speak of God as spirit and referred to what they called the power of the Holy Spirit. Preachers continued to expound the story of Jesus and Nicodemus in John’s Gospel (where being born again of the spirit is described in terms of the blowing of the wind), but failed to draw attention to the fact that in this story the same word is sometimes translated ‘wind’ and sometimes ‘spirit’. Only slowly has it dawned upon us that in talking about spirit we are talking about something far less substantial than wind or the air that we breathe. Indeed, spirit has no substance at all. It has become a purely abstract term that has no external referent. It continues in usage as a frozen metaphor from a now obsolete worldview, and its only possible meaning is a metaphorical or symbolic one. Conservative Christians continue to speak about the Holy Spirit, the power of the spirit and so on, as if it were an oozy something that operates like the wind. Without being wholly aware of the fact, they live in the medieval world for religious purposes and return to the modern world for the mundane business of daily living.

During these uninterrupted peregrinations of mine from place to place, and almost continuous and intense reflection about this, I at last formed a preliminary plan in my mind.   Liquidating all my affairs and mobilizing all my material and other possibilities, I began to collect all kinds of written literature and oral information, still surviving among certain Asiatic peoples, about that branch of science, which was highly developed in ancient times and called " Mehkeness ", a name signifying the " taking away-of-responsibility ", and of which contemporary civilisation knows but an insignificant portion under the name of " hypnotism ", while all the literature extant upon the subject was already as familiar to me as my own five fingers.   Collecting all I could, I went to a certain Dervish monastery, situated likewise in Central Asia and where I had already stayed before, and, settling down there, I devoted myself wholly to the study of the material in my possession.   After two years of thorough theoretical study of this branch of science, when it became necessary to verify practically certain indispensable details, not as yet sufficiently elucidated by me in theory, of the mechanism of the functioning of man's subconscious sphere, I began to give myself out to be a " healer " of all kinds of vices and to apply the results of my theoretical studies to them, affording them at the same time, of course, real relief.   This continued to be my exclusive preoccupation and manifestation for four or five years in accordance with the essential oath imposed by my task, which consisted in rendering conscientious aid to sufferers, in never using my knowledge and practical power in that domain of science except for the sake of my investigations, and never for personal or egotistical ends, I not only arrived at unprecedented practical results without equal in our day, but also elucidated almost everything necessary for me.   In a short time, I discovered many details which might contribute to the solution of the same cardinal question, as well as many secondary facts, the existence of which I had scarcely suspected.   At the same time, I also became convinced that the greater number of minor details necessary for the final elucidation of this question must be sought not only in the sphere of man's subconscious mentation, but in various aspects of the manifestations in his state of waking consciousness.   After establishing this definitely, thoughts again began from time to time to " swarm " in my mind, as they had done years ago, sometimes automatically, sometimes directed by my consciousness,—thoughts as to the means of adapting myself now to the conditions of ordinary life about me with a view to elucidating finally and infallibly this question, which obviously had become a lasting and inseparable part of my Being.   This time my reflections, which recurred periodically during the two years of my wanderings on the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, resulted in a decision to make use of my exceptional, for the modern man, knowledge of the so-called " supernatural sciences ", as well as of my skill in producing different " tricks " in the domain of these so-called " sciences ", and to give myself out to be, in these pseudo-scientific domains, a so-called " professor-instructor ".

Z.B: Hannah Arendt observó que el verdadero genio entre los seductores nazis era Himmler, que organizó a las masas en un sistema de dominación total, gracias a su (correcta!) suposición de que en su gran mayoría los hombres no son vampiros o sádicos, sino empleados y miembros de una familia.

Z.B.: por adiaforización entiendo estratagemas para situar, a propósito o por defecto, ciertos actos y/o actos omitidos respecto a ciertas categorías de seres humanos fuera el eje moral-inmoral, es decir, fuera del <> y a margen del ámbito de los fenómenos sujetos sujetos a evaluación moral; estratagemas para declarar esos actos o esa inacción, de una forma implícita o explícita, como <> y evitar que las opciones entre ellos se sometan a un juicio ético, lo que significa eludir el oprobio moral.

L.D: los políticos intentan mantener a la academia en una posición de incertidumbre y precariedad transformándola, o <>, en una rama del mundo empresarial. Por lo general, la idea de la necesidad de racionalizar, cambiar, reformular, restaurar y renovar el mundo académico es un simulacro. Oculta el hecho de que precisamente es la clase política y la mala gestión, también política, lo que hay que cambiar y reconducir con urgencia. Sin embargo, habla el poder: si no te cambio, tú me cambiarás a mí.

(...) na era da instantaneidade (...) A duração deixa de ser um recurso para tornar-se um risco; o mesmo pode ser dito de tudo o que é volumoso, sólido e pesado - tudo o que impede ou restringe o movimento. (...) corpos volumosos tiveram seu dia: outrora testemunhavam o poder e a força de seus donos; hoje anunciam a derrota na próxima rodada de aceleração e assim sinalizam a impotência. Corpo esguio e adequação ao movimento, roupa leve e tênis, telefones celulares (inventados para o uso dos nômades que têm que estar "constantemente em contato"), pertences portáteis ou descartáveis - são os principais objetos culturais da era da instantaneidade. Peso e tamanho, e acima de tudo a gordura (literal ou metafórica) acusada da expansão de ambos, compartilham o destino da durabilidade. São os perigos que devemos temer e contra os quais devemos lutar; melhor ainda, manter distância.

Upon the uninviting mattresses were carefully folded together those blankets which a great modern humorist has aptly compared to cold buckwheat cakes. The question of towels was left entirely to the imagination. The glass decanters were filled with a transparent liquid faintly tinged with brown, but from which an odor less faint, but not more pleasing, ascended to the nostrils, like a far-off sea-sick reminiscence of oily machinery. Sad-coloured curtains half-closed the upper berth. The hazy June daylight shed a faint illumination upon the desolate little scene. Ugh! how I hate that state-room!

Fast. It’s for anyone who is hungry for a deeper connection with the Lord and who is also willing to make a three-week commitment to the spiritual discipline of fasting as a means of pursuing that connection. Because it is a partial fast, as opposed to an absolute or liquid fast, participants are able to eat a wide variety of foods. For this reason, the Daniel Fast is a good entry-level fast. However, if you have a medical condition or any health concerns, you should consult with your physician before beginning any type of fast, including the Daniel Fast. The guidelines of the modern-day Daniel Fast are based on the fasting experiences of the prophet Daniel. We follow his example not so much because his diet is worth emulating as because his heart is worth emulating. In the book of Daniel, chapters 1 and 10, we discover how Daniel’s passion for God caused him to long for spiritual food more than physical food, which is the ultimate desire of anyone choosing to participate in a fast. As we take a closer look at what he did, it’s important to remember that we’re not trying to duplicate Daniel’s menu, but

The nature of capital was a major debate issue at the turn of the twentieth century because economist wanted to know how quickly the economy could adjust and recover from a depression. If capital were homogeneous and highly liquid, then the adjustment process should not take long and the economy could soon be back on its feet. But if capital were heterogeneous and not easily transferable to other uses, then the adjustment process could take much longer and it might take years for a nation to recover from a depression

En otras palabras, la individualización consiste en transformar la identidad humana de algo 'dado' en una 'tarea', y en hacer responsables a los actores de la realización de esta tarea y de las consecuencias (así como de los efectos colaterales) de su desempeño.

El apócrifo aviso de la columna de 'busco trabajo'-'tengo auto, puedo viajar'- puede servir como epítome de la nueva problemática de vida, junto con la duda que acosa actualmente a los directores de los laboratorios tecnológicos y científicos: 'Hemos encontrado la solución, ahora encontremos un problema'. La pregunta 'Qué puedo hacer?' ha llegado a dominar la acción, minimizando y desplazando a pregunta 'como puedo hacer mejor lo que tengo que hacer de todos modos?

ففي تحوّل عظيم، صار المجتمع يعظّم أيّما تعظيم المرونة في قلب الأشياء رأسًا على عقب، والتخلص منها، والتخلي عنها، فضلًا عن الروابط الإنسانية التي يسهل حلّها والفكاك منها، والواجبات التي يسهل الرجوع عنها، وقواعد اللعب التي لا تدوم أطول من زمن اللعبة، فقد ألقي بنا جميعًا في سباق نلهث فيه وراء كل جديد.

It is precisely the artists with the vital spark whom they set out to attack most viciously. It is the creative individual (sic) whom they accuse of undermining the social structure. A persecutory mania manifests itself the moment an honest word is spoken. The atmosphere of the whole modern world, from Communist Russia to capitalist America, is heavy with guilt. We are in the Time of the Assassins. The order of the day is: liquidate! The enemy, the archenemy, is the man who speaks the truth. Every realm of society is permeated with falsity and falsification. What survives, what is upheld, what is defended to the last ditch, is the lie.

For modern western economies, a rapid expansion of consumer options is the normal experience. What used to be remarkable or a sign of middle-class status is very rapidly trivialized. Standards are never settled. Everything is always in flux, a condition that philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”32 Rather than a solid sense of what the good life looks like, we are left with ever-shifting values as our choices multiply. The basic principle that Durkheim discovered was that at a certain point, increasing choice actually decreases satisfaction, sometimes precipitously: “Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity. Being unlimited, they constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command; they cannot be quenched. Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture.

Hasta los azotes han pasado al rubro "hágalo usted mismo" y han sido reemplazados por la autoflagelación

La completud siempre es futura, y los logros pierden su atractivo y su poder gratificador en el mismo instante de su obtención

The modern use of Repo financing, though not yet called a Repo, began shortly after the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. Part of the Fed’s official mandate was to "provide an elastic currency," which, as we know, includes providing liquidity to the banking system. During its first few years, injecting cash into the financial system exclusively involved the rediscounting of commercial paper. The Fed loaned money to banks and received commercial paper as collateral. Then, with the growing issuance of Liberty Bonds by the U.S. government, banks began presenting these new government securities to the Fed for rediscounting. When the Fed rediscounted the first Liberty Bond, the Repo market was born.

Gold Buyer in Chennai: Santhi Jewellery Chennai is a city where gold holds a special place because of its extensive cultural heritage. Gold has been used as a symbol of wealth and prestige in South Indian culture for centuries. Santhi Jewellery is the most popular place to sell gold in Chennai because of its dedication to trust, openness, and excellent service among the many gold buyers there. Why Exchange Gold? The decision to sell gold can be made for a variety of reasons, including the need to upgrade outdated designs, unlock financial liquidity in the event of an emergency, or simply to make a strategic financial decision. In any case, if you want to get the most money for your precious metal, you need to find a reputable gold buyer. Santhi Gems - A Confided in Gold Buyer in Chennai Santhi Gems has procured a standing as quite possibly of the most confided in gold purchaser in Chennai. Santhi Jewellery, which is located in the center of the city, takes pride in providing transparent and sincere evaluations for your gold assets, ensuring that you receive the best price based on market rates at the present time. Why Santhi Jewelers? Fair Market Value: Santhi Jewellery is known for providing honest and accurate gold appraisals. They use cutting-edge technology to evaluate the purity and weight of your gold, ensuring that you are compensated fairly based on current market prices. The process is open and transparent. Experience and knowledge: Santhi Jewellery has a deep understanding of gold's value and market trends thanks to years of experience in the gold industry. Whether your gold is in the form of old jewelry, coins, or bullion, their team of experts will make sure you get the best price for it. A focus on the customer: Customer satisfaction is a top priority at Santhi Jewellery. They make selling easy and comfortable for you, and they make sure that all of your questions are answered. Whether you are selling a little piece of gems or a lot of gold, each exchange is dealt with absolute attention to detail and impressive skill. Payment in a flash: The guarantee of immediate payments is one of the biggest advantages of selling gold at Santhi Jewellery. Payment is processed immediately after your gold has been evaluated and you agree to the price. Because of this, it is a convenient choice for people who require quick access to funds. No extra costs: At Santhi Jewellery, openness is important. Santhi Jewellery guarantees a transparent transaction, in contrast to some gold buyers who may deduct concealed fees or charges. The whole thing is easy, so there won't be any surprises. You'll know exactly how much you'll get. Convenient Location Santhi Jewellery is conveniently located in the center of Chennai, making it convenient for people looking to sell gold in the city. Their courteous staff is always available to assist you with any inquiries, and their modern and secure premises guarantee a safe environment for your transaction. Conclusion Santhi Jewellery is a name that stands out when looking for a dependable Gold Buyer in Chennai because of its professionalism, open process, and dedication to customer satisfaction. Santhi Jewellery guarantees that you will receive the highest possible value for your gold, without any hassle, whether you are selling old gold jewelry or looking for a quick financial solution. Visit them right now for a hassle-free and dependable gold buying experience.

A few years ago a corrective report announced that people had misinterpreted the first report. Humans needed a total of sixty-four ounces of liquid a day, but they did not have to drink that amount from a glass. It actually all could come from food. And coffee and tea counted. Studies showed that these caffeinated beverages didn’t deplete the body’s liquids after all. Why, in the midst of this epidemic of grown-ups toting and constantly nursing from water bottles decorated with various company logos, has no one asked how our mothers and fathers and our grandparents, and the entire human race for tens of thousands of years before, escaped mass annihilation by dehydration because high-impact polycarbonate plastic bottles filled with “spring water” hadn’t been invented yet? Our modern minds believed what putative “science” and old wives’ tales in magazines told us and overrode the wisdom of our bodies. WHEN

The liquid modern variety of adiaphorization is cut after the pattern of the consumer–commodity relation, and its effectiveness relies on the transplantation of that pattern to interhuman relations.

The republican ideal, harking back to the ‘good’ elements of the Revolution, assumes that France is a nation of progress on the side of the secular angels. But the various narratives of the last two centuries have shown that the country invariably opts for right over left with occasional eruptions to prove that its revolutionary legacy is not dead. Thus, 1830 was followed by the bourgeois monarchy when those unhappy with the system were told that the answer to their complaints of exclusion was to enrich themselves as conservatism was entrenched under Guizot’s golden mean. Within four months of the revolution that created the Second Republic, troops were liquidating the worker barricades of the June Days and, in 1851, Louis-Napoleon staged his coup. Two decades later, the Commune was suppressed with equal bloodshed. The Third Republic was slow to introduce social reforms, shied away from an income tax for decades and denied the vote to half the population. While introducing historic and lasting changes, the Popular Front collapsed after two years and Paul Reynaud set to work to chip away at its legacy.

same threat-level warning issued ad nauseam. The security mandates—empty your pockets, remove your shoes, laptops out, gels and liquids in separate bags—repeated so many times that eventually everyone stopped hearing them. All of this so reflexive and automatic and habituated and slow that the travelers were a little zoned out and playing with their phones and just simply enduring this uniquely modern, first world ordeal that is not per se “difficult” but is definitely exhausting. Spiritually debilitating. Everyone feeling a small ache of regret, suspecting that, as a people, we could do better. But we don’t. The line for a McRib was quiet and solemn and twenty people deep.

The Plane of Matter (A) comprises the forms of Matter in its form of solids, liquids, and gases, as generally recognized by the text-books on physics. The Plane of Matter (B) comprises certain higher and more subtle forms of Matter of the existence of which modern science is but now recognizing, the phenomena of Radiant Matter, in its phases of radium, etc., belonging to the lower sub-division of this Minor Plane. The Plane of Matter (C) comprises forms of the most subtle and tenuous Matter, the existence of which is not suspected by ordinary scientists. The Plane of Ethereal Substance comprises that which science speaks of as "The Ether," a substance of extreme tenuity and elasticity, pervading all Universal Space, and acting as a medium for the transmission of waves of energy, such as light, heat, electricity, etc. This Ethereal Substance forms a connecting link between Matter (so-called) and Energy, and partakes of the nature of each. The Hermetic Teachings, however, instruct that this plane has seven sub-divisions (as have all of the Minor Planes), and that in fact there are seven ethers, instead of but one.

The washing up liquid smells of sweeties. It tells me that it is ginger and peach. It smells of something we should still be eating. This seems wrong: it should smell of something after, whatever it is that comes after.

Cuanto mejor protegidos de la contaminación están los valores preservados en el pensamiento, menos relevancia tienen para la vida de aquellos a quienes deberían ser de utilizada.

Cuando las autoridades son muchas, tienden a cancelarse entre sí, y la única autoridad efectiva es la de quien debe elegir entre ellas (...) las autoridades ya no mandan, sino que intentan congraciarse con los electores por medio de la tentación y la seducción.

In other words, the atheist bloodbath is the product of a hubristic modern ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. In rejecting God, man becomes scornful of the doctrine of human sinfulness and convinced of the perfectibility of his nature. Man now seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. In order to achieve this, the atheist rulers establish total control of society. They invent a form of totalitarianism far more comprehensive than anything that previous rulers attempted: every aspect of life comes under political supervision. Of course if some people—the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, the handicapped, the religious dissidents, and so on—have to be relocated, incarcerated, or liquidated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants have shown themselves quite willing to pay. The old moral codes do not apply, and ordinary atheist functionaries carry out behavior that would make a church inquisitor quake. The atheist regimes, by their actions, confirm the truth of Dostoevsky’s dictum: if God is not, everything is permitted. Whatever the cause for why atheist regimes do what they do, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in three thousand years not managed to kill anywhere near the number of people killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the main source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the worst mass murders of history.

Whenever liquid water makes the transition to ice, energy is given off to the surroundings. In the process, the water itself assumes a state that is both more ordered and lower in energy. It is a general rule that any system that can give off heat and thereby assume a state of lower energy will do so. For the purpose of illustration, let's assume that the energy set free by the freezing of water is extremely high-so high that it surpasses the energy that is by virtue of Albert Einstein's E = mc^2 connected with the very existence of the water molecules. What would happen? In this fictitious case, it would pay energetically if water in the form of ice were spontaneously created from a space that beforehand contained no water at all. Thus there would be a certain probability for this to occur-never mind that anti-ice would have to be produced too. Let's imagine that it occurs: a crystal of ice is created spontaneously out of the void. Like every crystal, it would have some preferred direction in space and a certain location. Consequently, the perfect symmetry of space would be broken. These imagined circumstances do not exist in reality as far as ice is concerned, but they apply roughly for one of the most imaginative constructs of physics-the so-called Higgs field. This field appears spontaneously in a void as its walls are cooled down-starting from the absurdly high temperature of 10^15 degrees. The field will appear in an ordered state; for a poetic simile, think of ice flowers growing on a window. The energy needed for its existence is smaller than the energy liberated by its falling into that ordered pattern. This pattern is not to be understood in terms of spatial geometry; rather, it refers to the abstract space made up of the properties of elementary particles. In geometrical space, it is merely a field resembling a particularly simple distribution; to every point in space, we assign one and the same complex number. This implies that the Higgs field does not break geometrical symmetry-it breaks an abstract symmetry of elementary particles. In fact, it was introduced into modern theoretical physics by the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs for that very reason-to break an abstract symmetry that would not permit elementary particles to have masses.

What prompts so many commentators to speak of the ‘end of history’, of post-modernity, ‘second modernity’ and ‘surmodernity’, or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its ‘natural limit’. Power can move with the speed of the electronic signal – and so the time required for the movement of its essential ingredients has been reduced to instantaneity.

No one knows for sure who first invented glass. The earliest and most famous origin story comes from Pliny the Elder, the Roman soldier-intellectual who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. The tale goes that many centuries earlier, Phoenician sailors had landed on a beach in what is now Israel. The Phoenicians, the great traders of the ancient era, were importing blocks of natron, an early form of soap rich in sodium (natron is why sodium’s chemical symbol is Na). Before turning in for the night, the Phoenicians lit a fire on the beach, and in the absence of anywhere else to rest their pots, they perched them on some of the natron blocks. As they lit their fire and heated the blocks of natron, something extraordinary happened. Pliny writes: “Upon its being subjected to the action of the fire, in combination with the sand of the seashore, they beheld transparent streams flowing forth of a liquid hitherto unknown: this, it is said, was the origin of glass.”[5

On Hope God forbid I talk about hope, it's so cliché. Not that it doesn't exist, but it has become just that. In a world of ready-made things, any effort is banal. It must be delivered in liquid form, Bauman and his diabolical lack of concreteness, Liquid hope? No, a lack of concrete hope. Does it sound too romantic? Maybe it does, and also, resonates. Isn't resonating in souls the desire of every poet, every writer, every thinker? Is it only possible to resonate with that which is empty, empty of itself? Could it be that poets are nothing more than empty completions, resonating with one another? In fact, perhaps that’s what it is.

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined.

Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be.

The task confronting free individuals was to use their new freedom to find the appropriate niche and to settle there through conformity: by faithfully following the rules and modes of conduct identified as right and proper for the location.

We should stop trying to meet the world on its own terms and focus on building up fidelity in distinct community. Instead of being seeker-friendly, we should be finder-friendly, offering those who come to us a new and different way of life. It must be a way of life shaped by the biblical story and practices that keep us firmly focused on the truths of that story in a world that wants to obscure them and make us forget. It must be a way of life marked by stability and order and achieved through the steady work, both communal and individual, of prayer, asceticism, and service to others—exactly what liquid modernity cannot provide. A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist. A church that does not emphasize asceticism and discipleship is as pointless as a football coaching staff that doesn’t care if its players show up for practice. And though liturgy by itself is not enough, a church that neglects to involve the body in worship is going to find it increasingly difficult to get bodies into services on Sunday morning as America moves further into post-Christianity. Benedict Option churches will find

يصعب تصوّر وجود ثقافة لا تبالي بالأبدية، وتجتنب الدوام، ويصعب أيضاً تصوّر أخلاقيات لا تبالي بتبعات أفعال البشر، وتجتنب المسؤولية عن الآثار التي ربما تحدثها في الآخرين. إن قدوم عصر الآنية يُدخل الثقافة البشرية والأخلاق في أرض غير مستكشفة ولا خريطة لها، حيث تفقد العادات التي تواكب الحياة كل نفع ومعنى، وقد وصف غي دوبور هذا الوضع في مقولته الشهيرة: 'الرجال يشبهون أزمانهم أكثر من آبائهم' ، ونساء هذا العصر ورجاله يختلفون عن آبائهم وأمهاتهم لأنهم يعيشون حاضراً 'يريد أن ينسى الماضي، ويبدو أنه لا يؤمن بالمستقبل'.

Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the ‘transition’ between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshipping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease – a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the ‘Orthodox’ oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism – and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.

The desire to demonize others is based on the ontological uncertainties.

a young American with a moderate level of education expects to change jobs at least eleven times during his or her working life – and the pace and frequency of change are almost certain to go on growing before the working life of the present generation is over.

Flexibility’ is the slogan of the day, and when applied to the labour market it augurs an end to the ‘job as we know it’, announcing instead the advent of work on short-term contracts, rolling contracts or no contracts, positions with no in-built security but with the ‘until further notice’ clause.

Goethe had actually performed an extraordinary set of experiments in his investigation of colors. Goethe began as Newton had, with a prism. Newton had held a prism before a light, casting the divided beam onto a white surface. Goethe held the prism to his eye and looked through it. He perceived no color at all, neither a rainbow nor individual hues. Looking at a clear white surface or a clear blue sky through the prism produced the same effect: uniformity. But if a slight spot interrupted the white surface or a cloud appeared in the sky, then he would see a burst of color. It is “the interchange of light and shadow,” Goethe concluded, that causes color. He went on to explore the way people perceive shadows cast by different sources of colored light. He used candles and pencils, mirrors and colored glass, moonlight and sunlight, crystals, liquids, and color wheels in a thorough range of experiments. For example, he lit a candle before a piece of white paper at twilight and held up a pencil. The shadow in the candlelight was a brilliant blue. Why? The white paper alone is perceived as white, either in the declining daylight or in the added light of the warmer candle. How does a shadow divide the white into a region of blue and a region of reddish-yellow? Color is “a degree of darkness,” Goethe argued, “allied to shadow.” Above all, in a more modern language, color comes from boundary conditions and singularities.

In the world of structural unemployment no one can feel truly secure. Secure jobs in secure companies seem to be the yarn of grandfathers’ nostalgia;

Seja como for, a questão agora considerada mais importante é como não causar pânico nos mercados e enviar os sinais corretos aos investidores. Algumas vezes, morre-se a rir. Outras vezes, o riso afugenta a dor. Vivemos num período em que as nossas palavras enviam uma mensagem ao Santo Mercado. É possível que ele aprecie o nosso humor. Talvez ele veja nele sinais de recuperação e energia.

I do believe that this age, while bearing so many analogies to those that have passed represents a uniquely challenging time because of the coincidence of plastic people and a liquid world.

hibiscus mimosa The hibiscus mimosa is lovely in its simplicity, a beautiful mix of prosecco and hibiscus that begs for a toast (or to be served alongside toast, at brunch). Sub in a nonalcoholic sparkling wine for kids and teetotalers. TIME: 3 MINUTES SERVES: 1 ⅓ cup dried hibiscus flowers ⅓ cup sugar 1 lemon wedge Prosecco ½ ounce hibiscus syrup (from one 8.8-ounce jar of hibiscus flowers in syrup) ½ ounce fresh lemon juice Hibiscus flower (from one 8.8-ounce jar of hibiscus flowers in syrup), for garnish Combine the hibiscus flowers and sugar in a food processor. Pulse until the flowers are pulverized. (Be certain to use the pulse method to ensure the sugar doesn’t melt or heat up.) Pour the hibiscus sugar onto a small plate. Rub the rim of a champagne flute with the lemon wedge. Dip the rim in the hibiscus sugar and twist it to coat. Fill the rimmed champagne flute halfway with prosecco, making certain to tilt the glass when pouring the prosecco to ensure the liquid does not overflow. Add the hibiscus syrup and lemon juice; stir with a barspoon. Use a barspoon to add a hibiscus flower to the bottom of the glass. Top off with additional prosecco. Serve and enjoy.

In a liquid modern life, there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up… must be tied loosely so that they can be untied… when circumstances change." Zygmunt Bauman

I’ve seen patients work themselves into NAFLD by drinking too many “healthy” fruit smoothies, for the same reason: they are taking in too much fructose, too quickly. Thus, the almost infinite availability of liquid fructose in our already high-calorie modern diet sets us up for metabolic failure if we’re not careful (and especially if we are not physically active).

The approximately $20 million in liquid assets in the estate simply did not match the scale of Pierpont’s generosity.

Die positive Seite des modernen Heidentums hat man dort, wo es einen Realismus gibt, der Überwindung des Romantizismus bedeutet; dort, wo sich in den neuen Generationen eine nicht theoretische, sondern praktisch erlebte Liquidation der verschiedenen Schreckbilder des Denkens, des Fühlens, der Kunst und der Moral vollzogen hat; dort, wo etwas Ursprüngliches und Barbarisches ersteht, aber gepaart mit den vereinfachten, klaren und beherrschten Formen einer äußersten Modernität; dort, wo tatsächlich eine neue Sachlichkeit, ein neuer Ernst eingetreten ist, eine neue Absonderung, die gleichwohl die Möglichkeit eines Zusammengehens in der Tat und für die Tat nicht ausschließt; dort, wo die Objekte wieder mehr interessieren als die Menschen, und die Werke mehr als die privaten Persönlichkeiten und die „Tragödien“ ihrer Autoren - seien diese nur Individuen, Rassen oder Kollektivitäten; dort, wo sich der Drang geltend macht, herauszugehen aus seiner „Seele“ in die weite, in ihrem Ewigkeitscharakter und ihrer Gleichgültigkeit gegenüber dem Menschlichen wiederhergestellte Welt: aber nicht wie in einer Flucht, sondern wie in einer Rückkehr zur Normalität, zur Natürlichkeit, zur Zentralität. Das alles kann Prinzipien für eine für eine vorläufige Katharsis enthalten. Die Bemühung muß dahin wirken, dass der Weg solcher „Überwindungen“ nicht - wie es meistens der Fall ist - in die Ebene der Materie und des bloßen „Lebens“ einmündet - des bloßen Diesseits -, um dort mit der niederträchtigsten Verelendung der menschlichen Möglichkeiten zu enden. Nötig wäre somit, daß es den Themen eines neuen Realismus, eines neuen nordisch-heidnischen Klassizismus, einer neuen Freiheit im Wesentlichen, im Antisentimentalen, im „Dorischen“ und im Objektiven - die hier und dort in verschiedenen Strömungen der jüngsten Generation, nicht selten von den männlichen Themen eines neuen Nietzschetums begleitet, sich zeigen -, dass es diesen Themen gelänge, sich zu verwandeln, auf eine wahre ebene der Geistigkeit zu gelangen (folglich Wege zu finden, die zu etwas führen, das sowohl jenseits der Materie als auch des „Geistes“, wie ihn die moderne Kultur begriffen hat, steht) und - durch vorauseilende Eliten - ins Außermenschliche zu münden, durch einen Stil der klaren Schau, der Herrschaft und der überindividuellen Vollendung. Wenn man auf dieser Grundlage eine Ethik, die wir auch nordisch-heidnisch nennen können, unsere noch gesunden Rassen reinigt und integral mit einem neuen Lebensstil durchdringt, wird der Boden bereitet sein für das Verständnis und die stufenweise Verwirklichung dessen, was noch höher steht und von dem wir gesprochen haben, damit man erkenne, daß nicht davor und dahinter die Leere ist, sondern daß die Leere nur jetzt ist.

Identifying the bourgeois class with the bourgeois mentality tricks the enemies of the bourgeoisie. The liquidation of a bourgeois class in the modern world is, in effect, nothing more than a slaughter that does not imply the abolition of a bourgeois mentality that already dominates all of society.

... history has shown that the removal of all restraints of reason and morality leads not to liberation but to fascism.

It is true that large numbers of Americans continue to hold transcendental ethics and approach these issues very differently (there is an absolute right to life). Nevertheless, in public policy debates and in popular culture, the Judeo-Christian approach to ethical issues seems anachronistic and is not taken seriously. Once ethics become immanent and provisional, rather than transcendent and absolute, it will be more difficult to object to fascist policies.

without liquidity, nothing else mattered, so the company was willing to play dirty to get its platform started