Logical New Year Quotes

Succeeding in business is no easy task, but my approach, backed by many years of experience, can help each unique entrepreneur—including you—clear the fog and take the next logical steps forward toward the realization of their dreams.

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.

you’re looking for logic in all the wrong places.

You'll get over it...' It's the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to greive over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? I've thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you're not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you? Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Do the dead find peace beyond the rattle of the world? What peace is there for us whose best love cannot return them even for a day? I raise my head to the door and think I will see you in the frame. I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word was yours. The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.

Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

This story takes place a half a billion years ago-an inconceivably long time ago, when this planet would be all but recognizable to you. Nothing at all stirred on the land except the wind and the dust. Not a single blade of grass waved in the wind, not a single cricket chirped, not a single bird soared in the sky. All these things were tens of millions of years away in the future. But of course there was an anthropologist on hand. What sort of world would it be without an anthropologist? He was, however a very depressed and disillusioned anthropologist, for he'd been everywhere on the planet looking for someone to interview, and every tape in his knapsack was as blank as the sky. But one day as he was moping alongside the ocean he saw what seemed to be a living creature in the shallows off shore. It was nothing to brag about, just sort of a squishy blob, but it was the only prospect he'd seen in all his journeys, so he waded out to where it was bobbing in the waves. He greeted the creature politely and was greeted in kind, and soon the two of them were good friends. The anthropologist explained as well as he could that he was a student of life-styles and customs, and begged his new friend for information of this sort, which was readily forthcoming. ‘And now’, he said at last, ‘I'd like to get on tape in your own words some of the stories you tell among yourselves.’ ‘Stories?’ the other asked. ‘You know, like your creation myth, if you have one.’ ‘What is a creation myth?’ the creature asked. ‘Oh, you know,’ the anthropologist replied, ‘the fanciful tale you tell your children about the origins of the world.’ Well, at this, the creature drew itself up indignantly- at least as well as a squishy blob can do- and replied that his people had no such fanciful tale. ‘You have no account of creation then?’ ‘Certainly we have an account of creation,’ the other snapped. ‘But its definitely not a myth.’ ‘Oh certainly not,’ the anthropologist said, remembering his training at last. ‘Ill be terribly grateful if you share it with me.’ ‘Very well,’ the creature said. ‘But I want you to understand that, like you, we are a strictly rational people, who accept nothing that is not based on observation, logic, and scientific method.’ ‘"Of course, of course,’ the anthropologist agreed. So at last the creature began its story. ‘The universe,’ it said, ‘was born a long, long time ago, perhaps ten or fifteen billion years ago. Our own solar system-this star, this planet, and all the others- seem to have come into being some two or three billion years ago. For a long time, nothing whatever lived here. But then, after a billion years or so, life appeared.’ ‘Excuse me,’ the anthropologist said. ‘You say that life appeared. Where did that happen, according to your myth- I mean, according to your scientific account.’ The creature seemed baffled by the question and turned a pale lavender. ‘Do you mean in what precise spot?’ ‘No. I mean, did this happen on land or in the sea?’ ‘Land?’ the other asked. ‘What is land?’ ‘Oh, you know,’ he said, waving toward the shore, ‘the expanse of dirt and rocks that begins over there.’ The creature turned a deeper shade of lavender and said, ‘I cant imagine what you're gibbering about. The dirt and rocks over there are simply the lip of the vast bowl that holds the sea.’ ‘Oh yes,’ the anthropologist said, ‘I see what you mean. Quite. Go on.’ ‘Very well,’ the other said. ‘For many millions of centuries the life of the world was merely microorganisms floating helplessly in a chemical broth. But little by little, more complex forms appeared: single-celled creatures, slimes, algae, polyps, and so on.’ ‘But finally,’ the creature said, turning quite pink with pride as he came to the climax of his story, ‘but finally jellyfish appeared!

The utter atrocities of Nazism have shown us clearly what the inherent potential of destruction in the parenting rules we have been using for the last 150 years. These rules are non-democratic. They are based on inequality of power and unequal rights. They promote the use and ownership of some people by others and teach the denial and repression of emotional vitality and spontaneity. They glorify obedience, orderliness, logic, rationality, power and male supremacy. They are flagrantly anti-life.

You make the mistake of considering Christianity as something that developed over the course of a few years, from the death of Jesus to the time the gospels were written. But Christianity wasn't new. Only the name was new. Christianity was merely a stage in the meeting, cross-fertilization, metamorphosis of Western logic and Eastern mysticism. Look how the religion itself changed over the centuries, reinterpreting itself to meet changing times. Christianity is just a new name for a conglomeration of old myths and philosophies. All the gospels do is retell the sun myth and garble some of the ideas from the Greeks and Romans.

Well, let's consider the value of the dollar. Ultimately, logically, the dollar has no value at all. It's a piece of paper. It only has value because we say it has value, and because we agree on a system of bartering that maintains that value. Great care is taken to keep the value of the dollar strong. Smart guys in Washington and New York lose sleep over this. And we all watched what happend in Argentina a few years ago. We watched what happened when the value of currency declined rapidly. It's not a good thing. Sex is like that. God is concerned with the value of sex staying high. It's important to a person's health, a family's health, and a society's health. But like anything, sex can be cheapened in our minds, so we don't hold it in high esteem. God doesn't think this is a good thing. Stuff God doesn't think is good is called sin. "What happens when sex is cheaped?" somebody asked. A lot happens. The main thing is there is no sacred physical territory associated with commitment. There can still be emotional territory, but there isn't anything physical, experiential, that a man and a woman have only with each other. Sleeping around does something to the heart, to the mind. It leaves less commodity to spend on a sacred mate. But all of that sounds pretty fluffy. Let me break it down into practical stuff. Women saying no to men, not letting men have sex with them, causes men to step up. If, in order to have sex with them, women demanded you got a job and shaved every day and didn't dress like a dork or sit around playing video games, then all of us would do just that. We all want to have sex, right? ... And this in turn would be good for families, would be good for the communities.

I couldn't help thinking it was wasteful for people with such good logic skills to spend so many years and so much energy learning to reconcile an old book with the way things were now. Couldn't a person just write a new book?

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other. And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them. For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.' Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. 'The danger is that there will be no war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.' He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.

Benjamin chuckled. “Don’t worry none, Arlan don’t like them fancy city women. He likes you.” She blushed, and reached for her fork. “We’d better eat our supper before it gets cold.” “Ben’s right,” Calvin put in. “Arlan ain’t never liked a girl the way he likes you.” “Well of course he likes me,” Samijo said. “He married me didn’t he?” “Ma says you have to like the person you marry, love them, and be in love with them,” Daniel said matter of fact. “That’s a lot,” Samijo giggled. “Why?” The three looked at her as if she’d just laid an egg, then glanced at one another. Daniel set down his fork and explained. “Ma says it’s on account if’n ones missing, you still got two in your pocket.  And if two out of three are missing sometimes, you at least still have one.” Samijo laughed at the logic, then thought about it a moment. What he said made sense, and if so, then where was she in her relationship with Arlan?  She at least had one out of three, as she knew she liked her new husband and was sure he felt the same about her.  But did they love each other yet? That she didn’t know. She’d never been in love, and hadn’t loved anyone in years.

They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.

All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.

Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it. People often adopt short-term goals that they strive to achieve but not necessarily to exceed. They are likely to reduce their efforts when they have reached an immediate goal, with results that sometimes violate economic logic. New York cabdrivers, for example, may have a target income for the month or the year, but the goal that controls their effort is typically a daily target of earnings. Of course, the daily goal is much easier to achieve (and exceed) on some days than on others. On rainy days, a New York cab never remains free for long, and the driver quickly achieves his target; not so in pleasant weather, when cabs often waste time cruising the streets looking for fares. Economic logic implies that cabdrivers should work many hours on rainy days and treat themselves to some leisure on mild days, when they can “buy” leisure at a lower price. The logic of loss aversion suggests the opposite: drivers who have a fixed daily target will work many more hours when the pickings are slim and go home early when rain-drenched customers are begging to be taken somewhere.

Only twenty-seven people in Britain can explain why the day after Christmas Day is called Boxing Day, but that doesn't stop millions from marking it by staying home from work. An intriguing side effect of thus having two consecutive public holidays is that no matter what days of the week they fall on, the British can easily justify taking the whole week off. Suppose Christmas Day falls on a Tuesday, with Boxing Day on the Wednesday. Well, then, what is the point, the contemporary Bob Cratchit cries, of bother to open up the office or factory on Monday, when we all plan to knock off work by lunchtime because it's Christmas Eve? And it's hardly worth cranking up the heat for a working week that's now been whittled down to just two days. By the time we finish complaining about our ingrate in-laws and the cheesy Christmas television programs and the blatant materialism of our kids, it's time to go home for the weekend. Isn't it simpler for Mr. Scrooge to close the countinghouse until the New Year? (He can still pay us, of course.) This creative logic is a little more challenging when Christmas Day is a Thursday, but several Plumley residents had pulled it off...

In a way, it’s odd that the greatest sympathy for evolutionism is found among scholars who study the distant past. For events of this century, and especially of the last few decades, suggest that the arrow of history identified by some social scientists of the nineteenth century is roughly on target. Lewis Morgan’s essential point was right: the endless impetus of cultural evolution has pushed society through several thresholds over the past 20,000 years. And now it is pushing society through another one. A magnificent new social structure—our future home—is being built before our eyes.

Well, no, Sister Brannigan was the one putting her name on the checks to the cemetery. Someone else was making the deposits into her personal account.” “But now that she’s gone?” “I suppose the Neapolitan benefactor will have to find someone else if he wants to remain anonymous.” Bree snorted, “For a second I thought maybe it might be Bernardo.” “Well, why not? I mean, a little bank fraud isn’t likely to keep my father up at night,” Alessandro said. “But he’s in New York,” Bree reminded him. “Geography, darling?” Alessandro asked amused. “You say that with such pride it scares me,” Bree said rolling her eyes. “I love you too,” Alessandro smiled. “But no. If he was, why let us go off on this whole journey?” “It’s Bernardo. If there’s something I’ve learned about your father it’s that the rules of logic don’t apply to him. Or any other kind of rules,” Bree added, “Maybe this is all some kind of big elaborate plan and we’re gonna go home and find out he’s been keeping Francesca and Adriano frozen in his basement in one of those sci-fi freezers that they say you can buy and use to come back to life in a hundred years.” Alessandro shook his head at her, not impressed with her sense of humour.

the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

What I hadn’t realized was that, above all else, Favs was a prodigy. Speechwriters, even great ones, tend to lead either from the head or heart. I was a head-first writer, connecting logical dots and only later adding emotions. Heart-first people went the other way around. Favs was the only true switch-hitter I ever met. His writing was both lyrical and well organized, arcing between timeless values and everyday concerns with astounding ease and grace. Perhaps because he possessed innate talent, Favs tended to separate people into two categories: those who had it and those who did not. I was lucky enough to be lumped into the haves. From the day I arrived he acted as if, all evidence to the contrary, his team benefited from having me around. “So, is it amazing?” friends would ask. Of course it was amazing. Sometimes Kathy, Valerie’s assistant, would explain that we needed to reschedule a meeting because Valerie had been called into the Oval. She said this casually, as though her boss had been put on hold with the cable company and not summoned by the leader of the free world. Other times I would watch Favs and the POTUS speechwriters spitball lines for a set of remarks. A few days later, I would see those exact same lines on the front page of the New York Times. It was unbelievable. I felt like Cinderella at the ball.

For more than two hundred years, on the topic of human population, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, basing itself on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. When I began researching this book I thought of Malthusian theory, eugenics, Nazi genocide and modern population control as separate and distinct episodes in human history. I am no longer so sure. I think there is some persuasive evidence that a direct, if meandering, intellectual thread links the Poor Laws, the Irish famine, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the one-child policies of Beijing. In all cases, cruelty as policy, based on faulty logic, sprang from a belief that those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak.

Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty. Before the year is over, I think I will be looking back longingly on the Gulf of Lower California — that sea of mirages and timelessness. It is a very magical place. It is cold and clear here now - the leaves all fallen from the trees and only the frogs are very happy. Great cheering sections of frogs singing all the time. The earth is moist and water is seeping out of the ground everywhere. So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded. Maybe you can find some vague theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like. There it is — It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded. And so I'll look to see this German plan collapse because they do not know enough to plan for everything.

Like the fascist/New Age alliance, all of this is playing out on a kind of historical loop. Whenever one group has chosen to allow terrible violence to be inflicted on another group, there have been stories and logics that provided the permission for the beneficiaries of the violence either to actively (even gleefully) participate or to actively look away. Stories that said things like this: The people being sacrificed/enslaved/imprisoned/colonized/left to die so that others can live comfortably are not the same level of human. They are other/substandard/lesser/darker/more animal/diseased/criminal/lazy/uncivilized. These logics have been resurgent on the right for years now, evident in the presence of protofascist and authoritarian leaders in Brazil, India, Hungary, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey, among others.

the case is even stronger, and the parallel with madness is yet more strange. For it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that, right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity. Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind , not to loose . They may well call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say "thank you" for the mustard.

In the Middle Ages, marriage was considered a sacrament ordained by God, and God also authorised the father to marry his children according to his wishes and interests. An extramarital affair was accordingly a brazen rebellion against both divine and parental authority. It was a mortal sin, no matter what the lovers felt and thought about it. Today people marry for love, and it is their inner feelings that give value to this bond. Hence, if the very same feelings that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that? If an extramarital affair provides an outlet for emotional and sexual desires that are not satisfied by your spouse of twenty years, and if your new lover is kind, passionate and sensitive to your needs – why not enjoy it? But wait a minute, you might say. We cannot ignore the feelings of the other concerned parties. The woman and her lover might feel wonderful in each other’s arms, but if their respective spouses find out, everybody will probably feel awful for quite some time. And if it leads to divorce, their children might carry the emotional scars for decades. Even if the affair is never discovered, hiding it involves a lot of tension, and may lead to growing feelings of alienation and resentment. The most interesting discussions in humanist ethics concern situations like extramarital affairs, when human feelings collide. What happens when the same action causes one person to feel good, and another to feel bad? How do we weigh the feelings against each other? Do the good feelings of the two lovers outweigh the bad feelings of their spouses and children? It doesn’t matter what you think about this particular question. It is far more important to understand the kind of arguments both sides deploy. Modern people have differing ideas about extramarital affairs, but no matter what their position is, they tend to justify it in the name of human feelings rather than in the name of holy scriptures and divine commandments. Humanism has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad. Murder is wrong not because some god once said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Rather, murder is wrong because it causes terrible suffering to the victim, to his family members, and to his friends and acquaintances. Theft is wrong not because some ancient text says, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Rather, theft is wrong because when you lose your property, you feel bad about it. And if an action does not cause anyone to feel bad, there can be nothing wrong about it. If the same ancient text says that God commanded us not to make any images of either humans or animals (Exodus 20:4), but I enjoy sculpting such figures, and I don’t harm anyone in the process – then what could possibly be wrong with it? The same logic dominates current debates on homosexuality. If two adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their inner feelings. In the Middle Ages, if two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement – indeed, their happiness would only have worsened the situation. Today, in contrast, if two men love one another, they are told: ‘If it feels good – do it! Don’t let any priest mess with your mind. Just follow your heart. You know best what’s good for you.

No revolution can be successful without organization and money. "The downtrodden masses" usually provide little of the former and none of the latter. But Insiders at the top can arrange for both.   What did these people possibly have to gain in financing the Russian Revolution? What did they have to gain by keeping it alive and afloat, or, during the 1920's by pouring millions of dollars into what Lenin called his New Economic Program, thus saving the Soviets from collapse?   Why would these "capitalists" do all this? If your goal is global conquest, you have to start somewhere. It may or may not have been coincidental, but Russia was the one major European country without a central bank. In Russia, for the first time, the Communist conspiracy gained a geographical homeland from which to launch assaults against the other nations of the world. The West now had an enemy.   In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world's richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth men like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans, and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international Communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it. Can there be any other explanation that makes sense? Remember that for over 150 years it has been standard operating procedure of the Rothschilds and their allies to control both sides of every conflict. You must have an "enemy" if you are going to collect from the King. The East-West balance-of-power politics is used as one of the main excuses for the socialization of America. Although it was not their main purpose, by nationalization of Russia the Insiders bought themselves an enormous piece of real estate, complete with mineral rights, for somewhere between $30 and $40 million.   ----  

I still had moments when my nerves got to me, but whenever I’d start to get anxious, Kyla Ross would remind me, “Simone, just do what you do in practice.” And before I went out for each event, she’d high-five me and say, “Just like practice, Simone!” I’d say the same thing to her when it was her turn to go up. “Just like practice” became our catchphrase. As I walked onto the mat to do my floor exercise, I held on to that phrase like it was a lifeline, because I was about to perform a difficult move I’d come up with in practice—a double flip in the layout position with a half twist out. The way it happened was, I’d landed short on a double layout full out earlier that year during training, and I’d strained my calf muscle on the backward landing. Aimee didn’t want me to risk a more severe injury, so she suggested I do the double layout—body straight with legs together and fully extended as I flipped twice in the air—then add a half twist at the end. That extra half twist meant I’d have to master a very tricky blind forward landing, but it would put less stress on my calves. I thought the new combination sounded incredibly cool, so I started playing around with it until I was landing the skill 95 percent of the time. At the next Nationals Camp, I demonstrated the move for Martha and she thought it looked really good, so we went ahead and added it to the second tumbling pass of my floor routine. I’d already performed the combination at national meets that year, but doing it at Worlds was different. That’s because when a completely new skill is executed successfully at a season-ending championship like Worlds or the Olympics, the move will forever after be known by the name of the gymnast who first performed it. Talk about high stakes! I’ll cut to the chase: I nailed the move, which is how it came to be known as the Biles. How awesome is that! (The only problem is, when I see another gymnast perform the move now, I pray they don’t get hurt. I know it’s not logical, but because the move is named after me, I’d feel as if it was my fault.)

I know he’s had his problems in the past… “He can’t keep his hands off a liquor bottle at the best of times, and he still hasn’t accepted the loss of his wife!” “I sent him to a therapist over in Baltimore,” she continued. “He’s narrowed his habit down to a six-pack of beer on Saturdays.” “What does he get for a reward?” he asked insolently. She sighed irritably. “Nobody suits you! You don’t even like poor old lonely Senator Holden.” “Like him? Holden?” he asked, aghast. “Good God, he’s the one man in Congress I’d like to burn at the stake! I’d furnish the wood and the matches!” “You and Leta,” she said, shaking her head. “Now, listen carefully. The Lakota didn’t burn people at the stake,” she said firmly. She went on to explain who did, and how, and why. He searched her enthusiastic eyes. “You really do love Native American history, don’t you?” She nodded. “The way your ancestors lived for thousands of years was so logical. They honored the man in the tribe who was the poorest, because he gave away more than the others did. They shared everything. They gave gifts, even to the point of bankrupting themselves. They never hit a little child to discipline it. They accepted even the most blatant differences in people without condemning them.” She glanced at Tate and found him watching her. She smiled self-consciously. “I like your way better.” “Most whites never come close to understanding us, no matter how hard they try.” “I had you and Leta to teach me,” she said simply. “They were wonderful lessons that I learned, here on the reservation. I feel…at peace here. At home. I belong, even though I shouldn’t.” He nodded. “You belong,” he said, and there was a note in his deep voice that she hadn’t heard before. Unexpectedly he caught her small chin and turned her face up to his. He searched her eyes until she felt as if her heart might explode from the excitement of the way he was looking at her. His thumb whispered up to the soft bow of her mouth with its light covering of pale pink lipstick. He caressed the lower lip away from her teeth and scowled as if the feel of it made some sort of confusion in him. He looked straight into her eyes. The moment was almost intimate, and she couldn’t break it. Her lips parted and his thumb pressed against them, hard. “Now, isn’t that interesting?” he said to himself in a low, deep whisper. “Wh…what?” she stammered. His eyes were on her bare throat, where her pulse was hammering wildly. His hand moved down, and he pressed his thumb to the visible throb of the artery there. He could feel himself going taut at the unexpected reaction. It was Oklahoma all over again, when he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ever touch her again. Impulses, he told himself firmly, were stupid and sometimes dangerous. And Cecily was off limits. Period. He pulled his hand back and stood up, grateful that the loose fit of his buckskins hid his physical reaction to her. “Mother’s won a prize,” he said. His voice sounded oddly strained. He forced a nonchalant smile and turned to Cecily. She was visibly shaken. He shouldn’t have looked at her. Her reactions kindled new fires in him.

This isn't out of keeping with Edwin's experience of Canada - if anything, he reflects, it would come as the shock of his life if after a half a year in the New World he were to find himself suddenly able to charm the locals - but the flat uninterest of the women's gaze is unnerving. This is a moment, he realizes, when he could express his views on colonization to people on the other side of the equation, so to speak, but he can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound absurd under the circumstances - if he tells them he believes colonization to be abhorrent, surely the logical next question will be Then what are you doing here? - so he says nothing further, and then they're behind him and the moment has passed... He never goes into the forest, because he's afraid of bears and cougars, but now it holds a strange appeal...Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, that's unfair - this place isn't death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn't care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn't even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged.

Psychologically, the United States is a bizarre mixture of overconfidence and insecurity. Interestingly, this is the precise description of the adolescent mind, and that is exactly the American condition in the twenty-first century. The world’s leading power is having an extended adolescent identity crisis, complete with incredible new strength and irrational mood swings. Historically, the United States is an extraordinarily young and therefore immature society. So at this time we should expect nothing less from America than bravado and despair. How else should an adolescent feel about itself and its place in the world? But if we think of the United States as an adolescent, early in its overall history, then we also know that, regardless of its self-image, adulthood lies ahead. Adults tend to be more stable and more powerful than adolescents. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that America is in the earliest phase of its power. It is not fully civilized. America, like Europe in the sixteenth century, is still barbaric (a description, not a moral judgment). Its culture is unformed. Its will is powerful. Its emotions drive it in different and contradictory directions. Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn’t live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for. Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and that their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism undermines self-certainty Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle.

I thought he preferred Ronan,” Declan said. It was the most ridiculous thing to say. It was the most meaningless of takeaways. But out it came. Declan and the new Fenian were situated just as they had been when they’d begun this: the new Fenian on the wooden chair he’d pulled up, Declan on the couch, memories tied up and down his fingers. The new Fenian had sorted through the bright strings with supernatural skill, finding just the ones he’d wanted. Then he’d carefully tied them onto Declan in chronological order, from the day his mother had arrived at the Barns with Declan until the day she’d left the Barns without him. Niall had stayed, always choosing Declan, a life with Declan beside him as much as possible. A life with Ronan, because Declan had cared for him when no one else yet did. It had only taken minutes to experience the memories, but it had felt like years. Dream logic. Dream time. Declan wasn’t the same person he’d been on the other side of it. His father had loved him, adored him, favored him. Given up everything for him. “You had to know you were the favorite,” the new Fenian said. “Didn’t I—he take you everywhere with him that he could?

As we lifted off, China growing ever more distant from the window-seat, the endless ocean opening up before us, I was torn between the excitement of something new and leaving that which I'd grown to love. In that moment, I understood we may never come back; that we were floating there suspended between two worlds, above the world. There was no logic in where we would go from here, nor any limitation. We had each other, and we knew now of what adaptation we were capable. Their faces flashed through my mind, and I wondered if we'd ever find a country like that again, or if we'd ever be as open with new friends, knowing now what it was like to leave them. Like a first love lost. I hoped we'd have the courage to love Germany so that the day we'd leave our hearts would also break. For what is life except that kind of attachment? And isn't it true that one can live in a place all their life, surrounded by comfort and familiarity, and never feel this longing? As the last view of China slipped off the horizon, I promised myself that I would always dare to love, squeezing Patrick's hand, and seeing that in our love for each other, we'd always have the strength to let go.

Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided—already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order—by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by what Poincaré called the (experimental) group of displacement. But it goes without saying that, at this elementary level, which precedes all thought, we cannot regard this grouping as an operational system, since it is a system of responses actually effected; the fact is therefore that it is undifferentiated, the displacements in question being at the same time and in every case responses directed towards a goal serving some practical purpose. We might therefore say that at this level spatio-temporal, logico-arithmetical and practical (means and ends) groupings form a global whole and that, in the absence of differentiation, this complex system is incapable of constituting an operational mechanism. At the end of this period and at the beginning of representative thought, on the other hand, the appearance of the symbol makes possible the first form of differentiation: practical groupings (means and ends) on the one hand, and representation on the other. But this latter is still undifferentiated, logico-arithmetical operations not being distinguished from spatio-temporal operations. In fact, at the intuitive level there are no genuine classes or relations because both are still spatial collections as well as spatio-temporal relationships: hence their intuitive and pre-operational character. At 7–8 years, however, the appearance of operational groupings is characterized precisely by a clear differentiation between logico-arithmetical operations that have become independent (classes, relations and despatialized numbers) and spatio-temporal or infra-logical operations. Lastly, the level of formal operations marks a final differentiation between operations tied to real action and hypothetico-deductive operations concerning pure implications from propositions stated as postulates.

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history—and history was thrusting them aside. Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.

There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations. McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.

So in a different version of my life, I had a bicycle. My father gave it to me when I was a little girl. And I could use this bicycle to find lost things. I would ride it across an imaginary covered bridge, and the bridge would always take me wherever I needed to go. Like once my mother lost a bracelet and I rode my bike across this bridge and came out in New Hampshire, forty miles away from home. And the bracelet was there, in a restaurant called Terry’s Primo Subs. With me so far?” “Imaginary bridge, superpowered bike. Got it.” “Over the years I used my bicycle and the bridge to find all kinds of things. Missing stuffed animals or lost photos. Things like that. I didn’t go ‘finding’ often. Just once or twice a year. And as I got older, even less. It started to scare me, because I knew it was impossible, that the world isn’t supposed to work that way. When I was little, it was just pretend. But as I got older, it began to seem crazy. It began to frighten me.” “I’m surprised you didn’t use your special power to find someone who could tell you there was nothing wrong with you,” Lou said. Her eyes widened and lit with surprise, and Lou understood that in fact she had done just that. “How did you—” she began. “I read a lot of comics. It’s the logical next step,” Lou said. “Discover magic ring, seek out the Guardians of the Universe. Standard operating procedure. Who was it?” “The bridge took me to a librarian in Iowa.” “It would be a librarian.

There is an excellent short book (126 pages) by Faustino Ballvè, Essentials of Economics (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education), which briefly summarizes principles and policies. A book that does that at somewhat greater length (327 pages) is Understanding the Dollar Crisis by Percy L. Greaves (Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1973). Bettina Bien Greaves has assembled two volumes of readings on Free Market Economics (Foundation for Economic Education). The reader who aims at a thorough understanding, and feels prepared for it, should next read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1949, 1966, 907 pages). This book extended the logical unity and precision of economics beyond that of any previous work. A two-volume work written thirteen years after Human Action by a student of Mises is Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (Mission, Kan.: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1962, 987 pages). This contains much original and penetrating material; its exposition is admirably lucid; and its arrangement makes it in some respects more suitable for textbook use than Mises’ great work. Short books that discuss special economic subjects in a simple way are Planning for Freedom by Ludwig von Mises (South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press, 1952), and Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). There is an excellent pamphlet by Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Santa Ana, Calif.: Rampart College, 1964, 1974, 62 pages). On the urgent subject of inflation, a book by the present author has recently been published, The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978). Among recent works which discuss current ideologies and developments from a point of view similar to that of this volume are the present author’s The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies (Arlington House, 1959); F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945) and the same author’s monumental Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, 1969) is the most thorough and devastating critique of collectivistic doctrines ever written. The reader should not overlook, of course, Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms (ca. 1844), and particularly his essay on “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Those who are interested in working through the economic classics might find it most profitable to do this in the reverse of their historical order. Presented in this order, the chief works to be consulted, with the dates of their first editions, are: Philip Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy, 1911; John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth, 1899; Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, 1888; Karl Menger, Principles of Economics, 1871; W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 1871; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848; David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817; and Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

Usually adolescent rebels are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. As Mark Twain famously put it, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one’s self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. One opposes it to discover its logic and validity for one’s self. And by failing to defeat it, one comes to it, and to greater maturity, through experience rather than mere received wisdom. Of course, every new generation alters the adult authority it ultimately joins. But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past. The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. Baby boomers, already rather inflated from growing up in the unparalleled prosperity of postwar America, were inflated further by an adult authority that often backed down in the face of their rebellion. It doesn’t matter, for example, that there was honor in America’s acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgement of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and, thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved.

That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” … The word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error. But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? … Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you. Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame. So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming … But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.

The New Man is the most important things that is happening in the world today. The new man will have to find new forms of communication, working together and sharing, because the old man and the old society will not disappear immediately. The old man will also put up a fight. The new man is a new humanity. Up to now, man has lived a pathological life, a neurotic life, a destructive life. During modern times, during the last 3000 years, there have been 6000 wars. You can not call this humanity healthy. Once in a while a Buddha, a Jesus, a Socrates, appeared, but each person is born to be a Buddha. How can I become the new man? The new man means a new consciousness, a new being. Humanity can not be saved if the new man does not arrive. Before it was not a necessity, but now it is absolutely necessary because now the war technology can destroy the whole earth. if not the new man arrives, if not people become more aware, awake and conscious, then this earth will not survive. The New Man means to develop all the three dimensions of being, all the three doors to God: the head, the dimension of thinking, logic and reason, the heart, the dimension of joy, trust, intuition, relationships, beauty, creativity and a sense of unity in love and the being, the dimension of meditation, silence, emptiness and oneness with life. The first level of the head is the dimension of ideas, intellect, hypothesis, theories, logic, analysis, rationality and dualistic thinking. The first level is the level of the mind, which means a continuous oscillation like a pendulum between the mind's memories of the past and the ideas, dreams and expectations of the future. The second level of the heart is the dimension of joy, acceptance, trust, understanding, trust, friendship, relationships, intuition, empathy, creativity, compassion, humor, playfulness and a sense of unity in love. The third level of being is the dimension of presence, awareness, meditation, silence, emptiness and wholeness. The third level is our connection with our inner life source. The new man means awareness, consciousness, love and creativity. The new man means meditation, to be in contact with our own inner source of silence. And if more people become meditative, the earth becomes filled with the fragrance of the new man.

At that time Eugene had quite reached the conclusion that there was no hereafter—there was nothing save blind, dark force moving aimlessly—where formerly he had believed vaguely in a heaven and had speculated as to a possible hell. His reading had led him through some main roads and some odd by-paths of logic and philosophy. He was an omnivorous reader now and a fairly logical thinker. He had already tackler Spencer's 'First Principles,' which had literally torn him up by the roots and set him adrift and from that had gone back to Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Spinoza and Schopenhauer—men who ripped out all his private theories and wonder what life really was. He had walked the streets for a long time after reading some of these things, speculating on the play of forces, the decay of matter, the fact that thought-forms had no more stability than cloud-forms. Philosophies came and went, governments came and went, races arose and disappeared. He walked into the great natural history museum of New York once to discover enormous skeletons of prehistoric animals—things said to have lived two, three, five millions of years before his day and he marvelled at the forces which produced them, the indifference, apparently, with which they had been allowed to die. Nature seemed lavish of its types and utterly indifferent to the persistence of anything. He came to the conclusion that he was nothing, a mere shell, a sound, a leaf which had no great significance, and for the time being it almost broke his heart. It tended to smash his egotism, to tear away his intellectual pride. He wandered about dazed, hurt, moody, like a lost child. But he was thinking persistently. ¶ Then came Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lubbock—a whole string of British thinkers who fortified the original conclusions of the others, but showed him a beauty, a formality, a lavishness of form and idea in nature's methods which fairly transfixed him. He was still reading—poets, naturalists, essayists, but he was still gloomy. Life was nothing save dark forces moving aimlessly. ¶ The manner in which he applied this thinking to his life was characteristic and individual. To think that beauty should blossom for a little while and disappear for ever seemed sad. To think that his life should endure but for seventy years and then be no more was terrible. He and Angela were chance acquaintances—chemical affinities—never to meet again in all time. He and Christina, he and Ruby—he and anyone—a few bright hours were all they could have together, and then would come the great silence, dissolution, and he would never be anymore. It hurt him to think of this, but it made him all the more eager to live, to be loved while he was here. If he could only have a lovely girl's arms to shut him in safely always!

A similar theological—and particularly ecclesiological—logic shapes the Durham Declaration, a manifesto against abortion addressed specifically to the United Methodist Church by a group of United Methodist pastors and theologians. The declaration is addressed not to legislators or the public media but to the community of the faithful. It concludes with a series of pledges, including the following: We pledge, with Cod’s help, to become a church that hospitably provides safe refuge for the so-called “unwanted child” and mother. We will joyfully welcome and generously support—with prayer, friendship, and material resources—both child and mother. This support includes strong encouragement for the biological father to be a father, in deed, to his child.27 No one can make such a pledge lightly. A church that seriously attempted to live out such a commitment would quickly find itself extended to the limits of its resources, and its members would be called upon to make serious personal sacrifices. In other words, it would find itself living as the church envisioned by the New Testament. William H. Willimon tells the story of a group of ministers debating the morality of abortion. One of the ministers argues that abortion is justified in some cases because young teenage girls cannot possibly be expected to raise children by themselves. But a black minister, the pastor of a large African American congregation, takes the other side of the question. “We have young girls who have this happen to them. I have a fourteen year old in my congregation who had a baby last month. We’re going to baptize the child next Sunday,” he added. “Do you really think that she is capable of raising a little baby?” another minister asked. “Of course not,” he replied. No fourteen year old is capable of raising a baby. For that matter, not many thirty year olds are qualified. A baby’s too difficult for any one person to raise by herself.” “So what do you do with babies?” they asked. “Well, we baptize them so that we all raise them together. In the case of that fourteen year old, we have given her baby to a retired couple who have enough time and enough wisdom to raise children. They can then raise the mama along with her baby. That’s the way we do it.”28 Only a church living such a life of disciplined service has the possibility of witnessing credibly to the state against abortion. Here we see the gospel fully embodied in a community that has been so formed by Scripture that the three focal images employed throughout this study can be brought to bear also on our “reading” of the church’s action. Community: the congregation’s assumption of responsibility for a pregnant teenager. Cross: the young girl’s endurance of shame and the physical difficulty of pregnancy, along with the retired couple’s sacrifice of their peace and freedom for the sake of a helpless child. New creation: the promise of baptism, a sign that the destructive power of the world is broken and that this child receives the grace of God and hope for the future.29 There, in microcosm, is the ethic of the New Testament. When the community of God’s people is living in responsive obedience to God’s Word, we will find, again and again, such grace-filled homologies between the story of Scripture and its performance in our midst.

‌* When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. ‌* Mistakes, mistakes, it’s all I seem capable of at times ‌*No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment. ‌*It’s much easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it ‌*When death captures me,” the boy vowed, “he will feel my fist on his face.”. ‌*he’d turned for one last look at his family as he left the apartment. Perhaps then the guilt would not have been so heavy. No final goodbye. No final grip of the eyes. Nothing but goneness. ‌ *Wrecked, but somehow not torn into pieces. ‌*Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. ‌*“If we gamble on a Jew,” said Papa soon after, “I would prefer to gamble on a live one,” and from that moment, a new routine was born. *‌you should know it yourself—a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.” ‌*The fire was nothing now but a funeral of smoke, dead and dying, simultaneously. ‌*Even death has a heart.. ‌* In truth, I think he was afraid. Rudy Steiner was scared of the book thief’s kiss. He must have longed for it so much. He must have loved her so incredibly hard. So hard that he would never ask for her lips again and would go to his grave without them. ‌*There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone. *‌That damn snowman,” she whispered. “I bet it started with the snowman—fooling around with ice and snow in the cold down there.” Papa was more philosophical. “Rosa, it started with Adolf.” *‌There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas ‌*They were French, they were Jews, and they were you. ‌*Sometimes she sat against the wall, longing for the warm finger of paint to wander just once more down the side of her nose, or to watch the sandpaper texture of her papa’s hands. If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread out on top of it. *‌Himmel Street was a trail of people, and again, Papa left his accordion. Rosa reminded him to take it, but he refused. “I didn’t take it last time,” he explained, “and we lived.” War clearly blurred the distinction between logic and superstition. ‌*Silence was not quiet or calm, and it was not peace. ‌*“I should have known not to give the man some bread. I just didn’t think.” “Papa, you did nothing wrong.” “I don’t believe you. ‌ * I’m an idiot.” No, Papa. You’re just a man.. ‌*What someone says and what happened are usually two different things ‌* despised by his homeland, even though he was born in it ‌ *“Of course I told him about you,” Liesel said. She was saying goodbye and she didn’t even know it. ‌*Say something enough times and you never forget it ‌*robbery of his life? ‌*Those kinds of souls always do—the best ones. The ones who rise up and say, “I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.” Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places ‌*One could not exist without the other, because for Liesel, both were home. Yes, that’s what Hans Hubermann was for Liesel Meminger ‌*DEATH AND LIESEL It has been many years since all of that, but there is still plenty of work to do. I can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule it. And I remain. I carry them away.

It is the political change in international relations as well as a change in superpower fortunes which indicate that the days of successful unilateral intervention are past and that multilateral military intervention might only succeed in exceptional circumstances. Even before the changes in these relationships had occurred, both the old USSR and the USA discovered in the most dramatic way the true impotence of their power in the intra-state conflicts of Afghanistan and Vietnam respectively. Not least, the cost of unilaterally inspired intervention was horrendous. The total bill for Vietnam was $190 billion while the Soviets spent $3-4 billion for each of the years their forces were fulfilling no useful purpose in Afghanistan. The fact is that most military interventions undertaken this century should never have been embarked upon, for they were doomed for failure. The reason for this has tended to be due to misplaced faith in national capabilities as well as misappreciation of the size of the problem. By way of illustration it is appropriate first to relate international theory to the concept of military intervention, followed by a current overview essentially of the two states most traditionally involved in military intervention, the former USSR and USA.

From what I've heard, others can recall the exact time in their lives when they lost their virginity. Not so with Catholics. Ours was wrapped beneath layers of guilt. Cautiously, slowly, and hoping that God was too busy with other things to notice, our logic and lust would unravel quilts of Sunday morning sermons, catechism lessons, confessional admonitions, and parental warnings. Such apprehensive behavior would often overflow into other activities. A devout Catholic would never completely open his Christmas gifts until August. Catholics also did very well on bomb squads. By the time we got through all the wrappings, we would often discover that our virginity had simply melted away. Ask a non-Catholic when they lost their virginity and they recall a specific moment. Ask a Catholic the same question and they begin counting the years on their fingers. Sitting in the library trying to figure out mathematical equations for a statistics course. I looked up from my pad of scribblings to see Denise Meyers, a girl I vaguely knew from around school, straining to reach a book that was on one of the higher shelves. She was wearing a short skirt. Discovering a new mathematical equation: Arousal equals the distance of the short skirt above the knees times the shapeliness of the legs. Denise Meyers was a reasonably attractive girl but, under the gaze of someone being affected by "library lunacy," she looked incredibly provocative. "Library lunacy" was a state of mind reached by sitting in the library and concentrating on material so boring that, after a few minutes, even the seventy-year-old librarian begins looking good. One sure indication that your mind was slipping

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of the twentieth century, when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds, and transit systems were meant to knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens, and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good, improving the entire community and ultimately the nation. This logic was expanded upon in subsequent decades—through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The “greatest generation” was bound together by mutual needs and common threats. It invested in strong public institutions as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism, and communism. Yet increasingly over the past three decades, “we’re all in it together” has been replaced by “you’re on your own.” Global capital has outsourced American jobs abroad. As I’ve noted, the very rich have taken home almost unprecedented portions of total earnings while paying lower and lower tax rates. A new wave of immigrants has hit our shores, only to be condemned by demagogues who forget we are mostly a nation of immigrants. Not even Democrats any longer use the phrase “the public good.” Public goods are now, at best, “public investments.” Public institutions have morphed into “public-private partnerships,” or, for Republicans, “vouchers.

Francis Schaeffer warned years ago that the first generation of Christians who lead the church astray doctrinally change only one key point in their doctrinal position and change nothing else, so it can seem for a time that the change is not too harmful. But their followers and disciples in the next generation will take the logic of their arguments much further and will advocate much more extensive kinds of error. I think that is happening in a regular, predictable way in evangelical feminism, and I have sought to document that in this book.

Learning Logic Brings More Peace of Mind Than Meditation

The most positive outcome I know to such a friendship is the recognition that we do not have to figure out which one of us is wrong; indeed, that concept may not even apply. By ordinary logic, if two people or groups disagree, then one is wrong — or it is all relative and does not much matter anyway. But the basis for both disagreement and friendship is something that is neither strictly logical nor entirely relative. Rather, the basis for theological friendship between Christians and Jews is a mystery — the word Paul rightly uses (Rom 11:25; cf. 11:33) as he struggles with this most painful new fact of salvation history, the separation of Jews and Gentiles within the household of Israel’s faith. The mystery has only deepened over time, as the two communities have over a period of two thousand years sustained an allegiance to the God to whom Israel’s Scriptures bear witness, and likewise have experienced the faithfulness of that God to them. This prolonged duality is something neither Paul nor anyone else in the first century anticipated. At the very least, it should caution us all to modesty in our theological assertions.

His posturing for independence came to its logical climax when in 1966 he ordered all foreign troops out of France, arguing that in the event of war, he would not let French soldiers bow to American command as they had been forced to do in World War Two. The way de Gaulle announced his new policy has gone down in history. Apparently the Général phoned the American President, Lyndon Johnson, to tell him that France was opting out of NATO, and that consequently all American military personnel had to be removed from French soil. Taking part in the conference call was Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State, and Johnson told Rusk to reply: ‘Does that include those buried in it?

In order to “situate” the doctrine of a Scholastic, for example, or even of a Prophet, a “psychoanalysis” is prepared — it is needless to emphasize the monstrous pride implicit in such an attitude — and with an entirely mechanical and perfectly unreal logic, the “influences” to which this doctrine has been subject are laid bare; in the course of this process there is no hesitation in attributing to saints all kinds of artificial and even fraudulent conduct, but it is obviously forgotten, with satanic inconsequentiality, to apply the same principle to oneself and to explain one’s own — supposedly “objective” — position by psychoanalytical considerations; in short, sages are treated as sick men, and one takes oneself for a god. In the same line of thinking, it is shamelessly asserted that there are no primary ideas: that they are due only to prejudices of a grammatical order — hence to the stupidity of the sages who were duped by them — and that their only effect has been to sterilize “thought” for thousands of years, and so forth; it is a case of expressing a maximum of absurdity with a maximum of subdety. For procuring a feeling of self-satisfaction, there is nothing like the conviction of having invented gunpowder or of having stood Christopher Columbus’ egg on its point!

I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.

The Catholic Church’s policy of blaming women and sex for the ills of the world came to full fruition in the late Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance. At minimum, hundreds of thousands of innocent women and men were hunted down, tortured horribly, reduced to physical, social, and economic wreckage, or burnt at the stake for being “witches”. The Catholic Church, so obsessed with it’s paranoid, irrational, illogical, and superstitious fantasies, deliberately tortured and executed human beings for a period of three hundred years. All this carnage, due to the Church's fear of learning, kept Europe in the throws of abysmal ignorance for a thousand years. What has been lacking in the world since the fall of the ancient world is a logical view of the godhead. To the Greek and Roman mind the gods were utilitarian; that is they offered convenient place to appreciate human archetypes. Sin and redemption from sin had nothing to do with the gods. The classic Greek and Roman gods did not offer recompense in life nor a heavenly afterlife as reward. Rather morality was determined by your service to humanity whether it was in the form of philosophy, science, art, architecture, engineering, leadership, or conquest. In this way humanity could live up to great potential instead of wasting their energy on worship, and false promises For almost a thousand years after the fall of Rome the Catholic Church’s control of society and law guaranteed that woman’s position was degraded to that of a second class citizen, far below the ancient Roman standard. Every literary reference depicts women as inferior, unworthy of inheritance, foolish, lustful and sinful. The Church ordained wife beating and encouraged total obedience to fathers and husbands. Women generally could not own land, join a guild, nor earn money like a man. Despite all this, a series of events unfolded; the crusades, rebirth of classical ideas, the printing press, the Reformation, and the Renaissance, all of which began to move womankind forward. VALENTINES DAY CARDS The Lupercalia festival of the New Year became an orgiastic carnival. A lottery ceremony ensued where men chose their sexual partners by choosing small bits of paper naming each woman present. Later the Christians, trying to incorporate and tame this sexual festival substituted the mythical saint Valentine; and ‘the cards of lust’ evolved into the valentine cards we exchange today.

The major change is not the development of new organs per se but the repurposing of old features for new uses and functions. It has been common knowledge that feathers arose to help birds fly and lungs to enable animals to live on land. These notions are logical, obvious—and false. What’s more, we’ve known this for over a century.

Route 206 has only two lanes, which makes no sense in this over populated state, but presumably someone in power believes that restricting the road to only two lanes forestalls the advent of a further population explosion. Presumably these same people have not realized that a two-lane system clogs cars, frustrates drivers, and imperils a family of three (Mom, Dad, Ben) driving to a dinner deep in Southern New Jersey. These same people have not seen any logic to expanding a roadway so that a bleary, sweaty, fleshy man, vodka steaming from his pores, angry at the Range Rover sputtering in front of him, angry that the man with the ponytail driving the Range Rover has a Range Rover, angry at himself for not picking up Willy, his eleven-year-old son, from his mother's today because he went to the bar Fredo's instead, angry angry angry - so fuck it, fuck it all, he thought, I'm going to fucking pass this fucking asswipe Range Rover asshole, I don't care who's coming down the other side, I don't care if the President and his fucking Secret Service guys are barreling down this shitty road, fuck it all, I have the bigger car, I don't need a Range Rover, I have this, my TRUCK, my beautiful big motherfucking TRUCK, and goddamn it, what was up with the blond at the bar?

It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.” In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.” [...] Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.” When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.” [...] In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.” When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!” Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.” It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.

In his review of Hacker's and Maxwell Bennett's 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Churchland argues that Hacker's and Bennett's criticisms of recent neurological theory: do no more than highlight the independently obvious fact that the new theory violates some of the default conceptions of the average ten-year-old. But where is the crime in this? Why should we make those baseline expectations permanently critical for the meaningful use of the terms at issue? Were we permanently to cleave the standards of 'conceptual hygiene' thus imposed by [Bennett and Hacker], we would be doomed to only the most trivial of scientific advances. For our conceptual innovations would then be confined to what is currently taken, by the average ten-year-old, to define 'the bounds of sense.' Churchland's charge is that Hacker and Bennett are simply imposing standards of conceptual hygiene that, if actually implemented, would hinder a sort of spontaneous linguistic imagination that is essential to scientific progress - and, I would add, to our everyday life with language as well.

As an archaeologist who deals with material evidence along with ancient Near Eastern cultures and texts, and who is also an evangelical Christian, I often find the debate about biblical inerrancy puzzling, if not irritating. For me, the concept of inerrancy is tied to divine intent. It is clear to me that Scripture has come to us as God’s unique representation of reality, an aggregate of authentic ancient records and eyewitness accounts driven by divine selectivity toward the ultimate goal of bringing forth the final record of the New Covenant through Messiah, Jesus. Because it is self-evident that God does not superintend error, ‘doctrinal’ inerrancy is axiomatic. Further, on the pragmatic side of the issue, my 45+ years of examining biblical texts in the light of archaeology and history (and vice versa!) have given me unequivocal confidence in the Bible’s ‘inductive’ inerrancy; i.e., I have yet to identify anything in it that I would consider to be in error. In my mind, an errant Scripture is an affront to logic, science, and faith.

Musil actually read the Logical Syntax and considered proposing it (somewhat ironically) as the ‘best new book of the year’ of 1934 in response to a query from a literary magazine.

About a year or so ago, Johnny made a truly remarkable set of observations and was responsible for a completely new method of programming, "Herman Goldstine elaborated in 1949. "Johnny's scheme was to wire up what corresponds to the ENIAC's plug-boards with a fixed set of instructions that is universal to all problems." Individual instructions were assigned unique numbers - order codes - that were intelligible to "a switching center so built that upon receipt of a given number, characterizing one of the orders wired into the plug-boards, it energizes the proper board and thereby causes the order to be executed." A sequence of orders, constituting a program, could either be entered via the ENIAC's function tables, or read from punched cards. "It is no longer necessary to stand on one's head to fit a given routine," Goldstine continued. "To prepare an individual problem the coder now merely writes out the sequence of operations, arithmetic and logical, which characterize his problem and then transliterates these into the numbers the machine will understand.

The twentieth century was almost a hundred straight years of wars among empires of hungry ghosts, viciously addicted to the fleeting economic fix of creating new enemies. Each war carried a surprisingly similar rhetoric of xenophobia. And each time, violence was presented as the necessary precursor for a true and lasting peace. We were always fighting in the present so, somehow, we wouldn’t have to fight in the future; fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here, and on and on. Each time the rhetorical future became the actual present and then the textbook past, the cycle proved to be both endless and fruitless. The twenty-first century is picking up right where the twentieth left off, with better weapons. There’s only one little problem with the logic of violence: war doesn’t end war—any more than a heroin fix ends a heroin addiction.

Patrick Kirch concludes: “By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logical extension of which was that their rulers, their kings, were now held to be divine. This was not simply a quantitative extension of the Ancestral Polynesian ranking system; it was truly a qualitative change by which Hawaiian society had entered a new realm.”138 It appears that nearly all other archaic states experienced the same qualitative change to the extreme forms of inequality that Kirch describes for the Hawaiian kingdoms. Based on his survey of seven early civilizations,

Writing and repairing software generally takes far more time and is far more expensive than initially anticipated. “Every feature that is added and every bug that is fixed,” Edward Tenner points out, “adds the possibility of some new and unexpected interaction between parts of the program.”19 De Jager concurs: “If people have learned anything about large software projects, it is that many of them miss their deadlines, and those that are on time seldom work perfectly. … Indeed, on-time error-free installations of complex computer systems are rare.”20 Even small changes to code can require wholesale retesting of entire software systems. While at MIT in the 1980s, I helped develop some moderately complex software. I learned then that the biggest problems arise from bugs that creep into programs during early stages of design. They become deeply embedded in the software’s interdependent network of logic, and if left unfixed can have cascading repercussions throughout the software. But fixing them often requires tracing out consequences that have metastasized in every direction from the original error. As the amount of computer code in our world soars (doubling every two years in consumer products alone), we need practical ways to minimize the number of bugs. But software development is still at a preindustrial stage—it remains more craft than engineering. Programmers resemble artisans: they handcraft computer code out of basic programming languages using logic, intuition, and pattern-recognition skills honed over years of experience.

The way I see it,” she went on, “our friendship, and our working relationship, were solid foundations we built over time. Now you’re here wanting more, and the way we started that next step was with a kiss. So I feel like we’ve done just about everything two people can do in getting to know each other except…finish that kiss. It seemed to me that the logical next step, the next piece of information we needed to know, was what comes next when we let that kiss go to its natural conclusion.” She did smile then, and her emerald green eyes blazed as she let down a guard he didn’t know she’d still had erected, letting him see for the first time the rest of what she was feeling. “Or at least that was my rationale for finally letting myself have what I fantasized about having, all those months I worked next to you.” He opened his mouth, then shut it again when her words sank in. “I--what did you just say?” Her smile remained, but there was a new light flickering in the depths of her eyes now, one that somehow managed to look bold, excited, and endearingly nervous all at the same time. “You weren’t alone, Cooper, in wanting…what you wanted. At least the physical attraction part anyway. I should have been more forthright about that when you showed up at the pub, or afterward. But at least try to see this from my perspective. Suddenly, out of the blue, the man I lusted after all those months was standing, quite improbably, right in front of me, in his full, Technicolor gorgeousness, looking even better than the guy I was sure I’d exaggerated and romanticized. Right there, in the flesh. And before I could even begin to get a grip on that, you went all going down on bended knee on me, and--it was all so much, too much, to even begin to process.” She let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “Maybe if you’d just dragged me into your arms and not given me a chance to think, I might have surrendered right there on the spot, and the rest of the Cove be damned. But instead you’re all sincere, with your big, beautiful heart hanging on your sleeve, all earnest and lovely, and I so didn’t deserve anything like that, not after the way I left things between me and your entire family. I didn’t have the first clue what to do with that. With you.” Her smile turned decidedly rueful. “So, naturally, I resorted to form. I shut you down, told you to go away. If I couldn’t run away, I was going to make damn sure you did. I mean, it was one thing to leave Cameroo, then insult you and your family by not keeping in touch. It was another thing entirely to do it again, right to your face.” “I hate to interrupt,” he said, trying like hell not to grin, then drag her into his lap to do what he apparently should have done the moment he’d laid eyes on her again. “But I haven’t heard a word you’ve said since that part where you’ve been lusting after me for two years.

Only twenty-seven people in Britain can explain why the day after Christmas Day is called Boxing Day, but that doesn't stop millions from marking it by staying home from work. An intriguing side effect of thus having two consecutive public holidays is that no matter what days of the week they fall on, the British can easily justify taking the whole week off. Suppose Christmas Day falls on a Tuesday, with Boxing Day on the Wednesday. Well, then, what is the point, the contemporary Bob Cratchit cries, of bother to open up the office or factory on Monday, when we all plan to knock off work by lunchtime because it's Christmas Eve? And it's hardly worth cranking up the heat for a working week that's now been whittled down to just two days. By the time we finish complaining about our ingrate in-laws and the cheesy Christmas television programs and the blatant materialism of our kids, it's time to go home for the weekend. Isn't it simpler for Mr. Scrooge to close the countinghouse until the New Year? (He can still pay us, of course.) This creative logic is a little more challenging when Christmas Day is a Thursday, but several Plumley residents had pulled it off...

think the only way to avoid talking about your own loss is to do the project: focus on other people’s situations instead.’ Rachel sighed again. She couldn’t deny there was a certain logic to this. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, asking to switch assignments won’t do you any favours in terms of your position here. This is a huge account and we both know you can bring it in – it would cement your celebrity status for good.’ Jack ignored her sarcasm. ‘I’m good at what I do. There’ll be plenty more chances for me to get this agency coveted, lucrative clients.’ Rachel pulled her hand out of his and crossed her arms. He was infuriatingly confident. ‘On the other hand …’ Jack said, ‘if we go ahead with Lighthouse, I’ll be with you, supporting you – and I’ll know the truth. And at least it sounds as if the content side of things won’t require too much soul-searching. It seems pretty clear Olivia Mason already knows what’s best when it comes to writing material for her new website.’ ‘True.’ Rachel stood up straighter and pulled her shoulders back a little. Jack was right: refusing to work on this account was guaranteed to raise questions about her past, not to mention her emotional stability. What kind of person was still this churned up about a bereavement – even a close one – after almost sixteen years? A loss they never breathed a word about, even to good friends? She decided to put those questions away for examination at some future, unspecified time. Then there was the risk that she’d mark herself out as difficult or unprofessional by refusing to do the work she’d been given. All things considered, it might be better to put her head down and get on with this. It would be a difficult few weeks, but ploughing on was probably preferable to publicly dredging up past pain. ‘Okay,’ Rachel said, subdued but certain. ‘Okay?’ ‘Yeah. I don’t think I have much choice here, do I? Sticking with the account seems like the lesser of two evils.’ ‘It’s going to be fine,’ Jack said bracingly. ‘And it’ll be over within a few weeks, just like the BHGH pitch. Once we get this done, we’ll be on to the next big thing – other people will be manning the account – and we never have to talk about any of this again if you don’t want to.’ Rachel nodded. Jack reached for her hand again, squeezing it and then letting go as they turned to walk back into the building. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked as she headed towards the ladies. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘And … I’m sorry I had a go at

It is possible that some people have been so mauled by life in this society that such a semi-suicide is the best alternative to real suicide for them. Curiously, a hell of a lot of M.D.s are using the same logic in relentlessly over-prescribing tranquilizers, many of which are quite habit forming (e.g., Librium) and some of which (e.g. Tofranil), are definitely linked with impotence according to psycho-pharmacologists. As Dr. Lawrence Kolb told a Congressional committee way back in 1925, “There is . . . a certain type of shrinking neurotic individual who can’t meet the demands of life, is afraid to meet people, has anxieties and fears, who if they took small amounts of narcotics – and I have examined quite a few of them – would be better and more efficient people than they would be without it.” Dr. Kolb also described two physicians who were opiate addicts and practiced successfully until they managed to “kick the habit,” after which they became hopeless problems to themselves and their families. “These two physicians that I am talking about didn’t get cured," Dr. Kolb said scornfully, “they should have had it (the drug) forever, because it (the cure) would not mean anything but an insane asylum for them, and they were doing a pretty good job of work as physicians when they were on the drug and regularly taking it.” American society has ignored Dr. Kolb’s pragmatic approach for decades and has struggled heroically to get all these lost souls off their depressant drugs. Or has it? The “war against heroin” continues; but in New York, the state has abandoned the hope of real “cure” and is satisfied just to get the junkies off an addicting drug it has made illegal – heroin – and onto an equally addicting drug it has made legal – methadone; and in the nation at large, prescriptions for central nervous system depressants are said to run into the tens of millions every year. The official attitude, by default, now appears to be, “If you can’t bear our society without being half-asleep, let us at least control which drug you choose to be half-asleep on.” This is not a formula for a non-addicted nation. It is a face-saving game to allow those bureaucrats whom William S. Burroughs calls “control addicts” to continue to believe that they are, by God, controlling everybody they want to control.

According to Cosmides and Tooby (1992, 2005), the answer is that humans have not evolved to respond to abstract logical problems; they have evolved, however, to respond to problems structured as social exchanges when they are presented in terms of costs and benefits. Consider this problem: You are a bouncer at a local bar, and your job is to make sure that no one who is underage drinks alcohol. You have to test this rule: “If a person is drinking alcohol, then he or she must be 21 years old or older.” Which of the following four people do you have to check out to do your job: someone drinking beer, someone drinking soda, a 25-year-old, or a 16-year-old? In contrast to the abstract logic problem above, the vast majority of people correctly select the beer drinker and the 16-year-old. The logic of the problem is identical to the above abstract problem involving vowels and even numbers. So why are people good at solving this problem but not the abstract problem? People reason correctly when the problem is structured as a social contract. If you drink beer but are not over 21 years old, then you have taken a benefit without meeting the requirement (cost) of being of legal drinking age. People do well when they are “looking for cheaters,” those who have taken a benefit without paying the cost.

Human Resources Says, “Only Apply to Jobs If You Have 80% of the Requirements” HR says this because it reduces the number of applications they have to review. The 80% requirement sounds logical, until: • You read a job description, which is one continuous sentence and 15 lines long. • The hiring manager says he's so busy that he didn’t have time to create a job description. In fact, the description online is only a template, so it doesn't describe the actual job. • The hiring manager tells you that they haven’t fleshed out the responsibilities for the new role. • The job requirements appear as if they’re looking for a Nobel Prize winner. I’ve encountered all four situations. I've applied for positions where I didn't have 80% of the requirements. Because of the exposure I received during the interview, I was asked to interview for another role. That is where I work now, four years later. I know others who’ve done the same thing.

Other notable contributions, to non-Aristotelianism came from mathematician John von Neumann, who proposed in 1933 that we could best discuss the new paradoxes of quantum mechanics in a three-valued logic of true, false and maybe (the excluded middle); and semanticist Alfred Korzybski who, the same year, proposed that most human conflict, including war, results from the either/or, and that we could communicate with less hostility in a n-valued logic bounded by yes and no but including a middle with as many degrees of probability as each situation demands. E.g.: 1=no 2= 20 percent probable 2.5 = 25 percent probable . . . etc . . . 9.0 = 90 percent probable 10 = yes.

It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed the act—even by the logic of the psychopath—is not likely to prove very therapeutic for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act it is not altogether cowardly.

HIC | JACET | FISCI LIBERATOR’, ‘here lies the Treasury’s Liberator’. However, in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s fully documented account of the Bank war, in his Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the Working of the American Government (1854), the hero is unquestionably President Jackson, and Van Buren is not seen to play a leading role, in part because while Vice-President he chaired the Senate Debates and could have no voice in them. (That difference raises the question of historical accuracy to which I will return.) The first third of canto 37 weaves together thirty or more items, most of them things said by Van Buren or taken up by him over the many years from 1813 when he was a New York state senator to 1840 when he was President. The passage is a prime instance of Pound’s method of adding one detail to another without providing the conventional syntactical and logical connections, in order to allow a more complex web of relations to develop. Banks fraudulently failing, wealthy landowners and factory owners, high judges and the Chief Justice himself, senators, financial speculators, all are implicated in defrauding immigrants of the value of their banknotes, in driving settlers off the land they would cultivate, in denying workers the vote, in preventing local government of local affairs, and in ‘“decrying government credit. |…in order to feed on the spoils”’.

took in the unfinished paintings. Strong and colorful, filled with promise and an inner logic that helps lift them above ordinary abstractions, so said the New York Times four years ago, the time of my last exhibition. So what had happened to all that promise?

Although a few enzymes (e.g. carbonic anhydrase) catalyse a single isolated reaction, most are part of a team that catalyses a series of reactions in which each enzyme picks up its predecessor’s product, taking it a step further to create a metabolic pathway. This pathway may be to build up, say, an amino acid from simpler starting molecules, or conversely to break down food molecules to yield new chemical building blocks and sometimes also to trap useable energy. Life is the combined outcome of this seemingly logical enzyme teamwork. Like most things in the living world, this gives the appearance of purposeful planning down to the last detail. Such meticulous perfection would in past eras have been confidently attributed to the attentive skill of an all-powerful Creator. Since Charles Darwin, however, we have an alternative way of explaining how things in the living world come to be the way they are. Darwin led us to understand that natural selection could bring about stepwise beneficial adaptation over thousands or even millions of years, and, in the 150 years since the Origin of Species, we have learnt far more about the genetic mechanisms that can bring about such change. Does this kind of thinking work at the molecular level when we come to look at metabolic pathways and individual enzymes? In fact the study of enzymes and other proteins allows us to be a great deal more certain than Victorian biologists could be. Many of the distinctive biological characteristics studied in comparing animals and plants, like eye colour or wing shape, have turned out to be controlled by multiple genes, whereas, in looking at individual proteins, we are looking at the products of individual genes, and latterly we can even examine those genes directly. The possibility of determining protein amino acid sequences, and, more recently, the corresponding DNA sequences, allows comparison of the same enzyme from many species and also of enzymes catalysing different but similar reactions from a single species.

...science is not only about building carefully-constructed theories that explain general phenomena. It is also, and primarily, about distinguishing good explanations from bad ones. This is where traditional history has been deficient. Historians have created, and continue to create, new explanations, but they are not in the business of testing them with data.

In recent years, a robust body of new research has demonstrated that when we experience distress, engaging in introspection often does significantly more harm than good. It undermines our performance at work, interferes with our ability to make good decisions, and negatively influences our relationships. It can also promote violence and aggression, contribute to a range of mental disorders, and enhance our risk of becoming physically ill. Using the mind to engage with our thoughts and feelings in the wrong ways can lead professional athletes to lose the skills they’ve spent their careers perfecting. It can cause otherwise rational, caring people to make less logical and even less moral decisions. It can lead friends to flee from you in both the real world and the social media world. It can turn romantic relationships from safe havens into battlegrounds. It can even contribute to us aging faster, both in how we look on the outside and in how our DNA is configured internally. In short, our thoughts too often don’t save us from our thoughts. Instead, they give rise to something insidious. Chatter.

The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing. Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, to the area that influences creative thought and plays a role in the formation of mental abstractions and the production of negative emotions. In 2015, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recorded the breathing patterns of a schizophrenic woman over the course of three consecutive years and found that she had a “significantly greater” left-nostril dominance. This breathing habit, they hypothesized, was likely overstimulating the right-side “creative part” of her brain, and as a result prodding her imagination to run amok. Over several sessions, the researchers taught her to breathe through her opposite, “logical” nostril, and she experienced far fewer hallucinations.

Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White-collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same logic that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers—clerks—who replace the professionals.

Every savage can dance,' declared Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. His antagonist's riposte now seems odd—'I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy.' 'Science' is among the most slippery words in the English language, because although it has been in use for hundreds of years, its meanings constantly shift and are impossible to pin down. That plural (meanings) was deliberate. In the early nineteenth century, when Austen casually mentioned the science of dancing, other writers were still using 'science' for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Long afterwards, 'science' could still mean any scholarly discipline, because the modern distinction between the Arts and Sciences had not yet solidified. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin listed five subjects he thought worthwhile studying at university—the Sciences of Morals, History, Grammar, Music, and Painting—none of which feature on modern scientific syllabuses. All of them, Ruskin declared, were more intellectually demanding than chemistry, electricity, or geology. However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected 'philosopher', and William Whewell—one of Babbage's allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer—suggested 'scientist' instead. The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as 'man of science', or 'naturalist', or 'experimental philosopher'. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century's most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused 'scientist' of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die 'than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms'. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that 'scientist' was fully accepted.

Ten Things I Need to Know" The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. Superstition Reviews issue 2 fall 2008

To his peers he outlined his simple logic that “when you touch a man’s pocket, you touch him where he lives. That principle is true of the newspaper editor.” This new clause had its intended effect. Newspaper editors and publishers, understanding that a large portion of their contracted revenues could be canceled at a moment’s notice, made sure to apply the lightest touch with all editorial and legislative matters concerning patent medicines. The concerted action of major advertisers, exercised through one simple clause, compromised much of the newspaper industry’s editorial integrity.

A person seeking inner development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one's mind. They must be so incorporated into one's being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never conclude anything inwardly about these truths.

That was when The New York Times announced the appointment of a 30-year-old writer on tech issues to join the paper’s editorial board. Like all such appointments, Jeong’s promotion to such a position at a young age attracted a considerable amount of attention. And attention in the age of the internet obviously includes online rakings of everything the person has said. In Jeong’s case the raking turned up tweets with a particular focus – which was a sustained and pretty crude abuse of white people. Jeong’s tweets included ‘Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins?’; ‘I dare you to go on Wikipedia and play “Things white people can definitely take credit for”, it’s really hard’; ‘White men are bullshit’; ‘CancelWhitePeople’ and in one stream of tweets ‘Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing. Like skiing, maybe, and also golf . . . It must be so boring to be white.’43 It is fair to say that her Twitter feed showed an obsession with this theme. She even committed the basic error of comparing those people she didn’t like with animals. ‘Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.’44 Another tweet said, ‘Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.’45 Jeong

There’s no commonsense way to understand how stimulated emission could be possible, or why the new photon should be a carbon copy of the old one. The phenomenon is a consequence of the odd logic of quantum mechanics, the physics of the atomic and subatomic world, where our intuition from everyday life breaks down. Einstein discovered the theoretical necessity of stimulated emission in 1917, but it took another 43 years before anyone figured out how to use it to create the first working laser.

The fact of zero He added nonstop: Did you know that zero was not used throughout human history! Until 781 A.D, when it was first embodied and used in arithmetic equations by the Arab scholar Al-Khwarizmi, the founder of algebra. Algorithms took their name from him, and they are algorithmic arithmetic equations that you have to follow as they are and you will inevitably get the result, the inevitable result. And before that, across tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, humans refused to deal with zero. While the first reference to it was in the Sumerian civilization, where inscriptions were found three thousand years ago in Iraq, in which the Sumerians indicated the existence of something before the one, they refused to deal with it, define it and give it any value or effect, they refused to consider it a number. All these civilizations, some of which we are still unable to decipher many of their codes, such as the Pharaonic civilization that refused to deal with zero! We see them as smart enough to build the pyramids with their miraculous geometry and to calculate the orbits of stars and planets with extreme accuracy, but they are very stupid for not defining zero in a way that they can deal with, and use it in arithmetic operations, how strange this really is! But in fact, they did not ignore it, but gave it its true value, and refused to build their civilizations on an unknown and unknown illusion, and on a wrong arithmetical frame of reference. Throughout their history, humans have looked at zero as the unknown, they refused to define it and include it in their calculations and equations, not because it has no effect, but because its true effect is unknown, and remaining unknown is better than giving it a false effect. Like the wrong frame of reference, if you rely on it, you will inevitably get a wrong result, and you will fall into the inevitability of error, and if you ignore it, your chance of getting it right remains. Throughout their history, humans have preferred to ignore zero, not knowing its true impact, while we simply decided to deal with it, and even rely on it. Today we build all our ideas, our civilization, our software, mathematics, physics, everything, on the basis that 1 + 0 equals one, because we need to find the effect of zero so that our equations succeed, and our lives succeed with, but what if 1 + 0 equals infinity?! Why did we ignore the zero in summation, and did not ignore it in multiplication?! 1×0 equals zero, why not one? What is the reason? He answered himself: There is no inevitable reason, we are not forced. Humans have lived throughout their ages without zero, and it did not mean anything to them. Even when we were unable to devise any result that fits our theorems for the quotient of one by zero, then we admitted and said unknown, and ignored it, but we ignored the logic that a thousand pieces of evidence may not prove me right, and one proof that proves me wrong. Not doing our math tables in the case of division, blowing them up completely, and with that, we decided to go ahead and built everything on that foundation. We have separated the arithmetic tables in detail at our will, to fit our calculations, and somehow separate the whole universe around us to fit these tables, despite their obvious flaws. And if we decide that the result of one multiplied by zero is one instead of zero, and we reconstruct the whole world on this basis, what will happen? He answered himself: Nothing, we will also succeed, the world, our software, our thoughts, our dealings, and everything around us will be reset according to the new arithmetic tables. After a few hundred years, humans will no longer be able to understand that one multiplied by zero equals zero, but that it must be one because everything is built on this basis.

John Myers, who spent thirty-seven years at GE, ran its pension fund for years, and sat on the GE Capital board, explained to me the keys to the success of GE Capital: GE’s AAA credit rating, allowing it to borrow money very cheaply. “Banks weren’t even rated AAA at that time,” he said. “We borrowed money cheaper than anyone could.” GE could also use GE Capital to reduce the taxes GE would otherwise pay on earnings from its very profitable industrial businesses. Here’s how that worked: If, say, an airline bought a new jet, it would have an asset that would depreciate over time, and the airline could use the depreciation to reduce its taxable income. But, at that time anyway, most airlines didn’t make much money, if any, so the value of the depreciation deductions was of little use to them. But to GE, the depreciation—the tax deductions—would be very valuable as a way to reduce GE’s pretax income and therefore to pay less in taxes. With that logic, GE Capital would buy the jets, lease them to the airlines at commercially attractive rates, and then use the depreciation on the jets to reduce the pretax income at GE.

It was difficult to tell, for example, which countries were now on Japan’s side and which were not. Putting together what we read in the newspapers and the bits and pieces of information (or misinformation) we had gleaned from leaflets and the like, we formed a total picture of Japan and the war situation in 1959. We knew that the Great Japanese Empire had become a democratic Japan. We did not know when or how, but clearly there was now a democratic government, and the military organization had been reformed. It also appeared as though Japan was now engaged in cultural and economic relations with a large number of foreign countries. The Japanese government was still working for the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the new army was still engaged in military conflict with America. The new army seemed to be a modernized version of the old army, and we supposed that it must have assumed responsibility for the defense of East Asia as a whole, China included. China was now a communist country under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung: there seemed little doubt but that Mao had come to power with the support of Japan. No doubt he was now cooperating with Japan to implement the co-prosperity sphere. Although there was nothing in the newpapers about this, it was only logical that the American secret service would have eliminated any mention of it in preparing the newspapers for us.

For me, this was the first hint that the liturgy might be the cure for spiritual loneliness. Though I felt inadequate and alone during my prayer crisis, I was not alone. Much of American spiritual life trudges through the muck of solitary spirituality. Twenty years ago, Robert Bellah described this phenomenon in Habits of the Heart, with his now famous description of one woman: Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” This suggests the logical possibility of more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. “I believe in God,” Sheila says. “I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” “My little voice” guides many lonely people to and through New Age, wicca, Buddhism, labyrinths, Scientology, yoga, meditation, and various fads in Christianity—and then creates a new Sheilaism from the fragments that have not been discarded along the way. I love Sheila Larson precisely because she articulates nearly perfectly my lifelong struggle: “I believe in God. I am not a religious fanatic…. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilism. Just my own little voice.” The difference between Sheila and me is that she has the courage of her convictions: she knows her faith is very personal and so hasn’t bothered with the church. I like to pretend that my faith is grounded in community, but I struggle to believe in anything but Markism. Fortunately God loves us so much he has made it a “spiritual law” that Sheilism or Markism become boring after awhile. The gift of the liturgy—and it is precisely why I need the liturgy—is that it helps me hear not so much “my little voice” but instead the still, small voice (Psalm 46). It leads away from the self and points me toward the community of God.

regression lines that describe the relationship of the independent variables for each group (called classification functions). The emphasis in discriminant analysis is the ability of the independent variables to correctly predict values of the nominal variable (for example, group membership). Discriminant analysis is one strategy for dealing with dependent variables that are nominal with three or more categories. Multinomial logistic regression and ordinal regression have been developed in recent years to address nominal and ordinal dependent variables in logic regression. Multinomial logistic regression calculates functions that compare the probability of a nominal value occurring relative to a base reference group. The calculation of such probabilities makes this technique an interesting alternative to discriminant analysis. When the nominal dependent variable has three values (say, 1, 2, and 3), one logistic regression predicts the likelihood of 2 versus 1 occurring, and the other logistic regression predicts the likelihood of 3 versus 1 occurring, assuming that “1” is the base reference group.7 When the dependent variable is ordinal, ordinal regression can be used. Like multinomial logistic regression, ordinal regression often is used to predict event probability or group membership. Ordinal regression assumes that the slope coefficients are identical for each value of the dependent variable; when this assumption is not met, multinomial logistic regression should be considered. Both multinomial logistic regression and ordinal regression are relatively recent developments and are not yet widely used. Statistics, like other fields of science, continues to push its frontiers forward and thereby develop new techniques for managers and analysts. Key Point Advanced statistical tools are available. Understanding the proper circumstances under which these tools apply is a prerequisite for using them.

I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accepted as a wrong, but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large--seemingly unavoidable--social and anthropological shifts, rather than the specific decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society: Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgement of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population out-numbered in persons and resources.

FACTORS THAT WILL DEFINE THE EXTREME FUTURE 1. Speed. The rate of change will be blinding, comprehensive in scope, and will touch every aspect of your life. 2. Complexity. A quantum leap in the number of seemingly unrelated forces that will have a direct bearing on everything from lifestyles to work to personal and national security. 3. Risk. New risks, higher risks, and more threats from terror to crime to global economic upheaval will alter every aspect of your life. 4. Change. Drastic adjustments in your work, community, and relationships will force you to adapt quickly to radical changes. 5. Surprise. Sometimes good, sometimes difficult to imagine, surprise will become a daily feature of your life, often challenging sensibility and logic. Although the changes wrought by 9/11 and the subsequent focus on global security and terrorism are central to understanding what comes next, they are not the only trends driving the Extreme Future.

The American experiment was based on the emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century of a fresh new possibility in human affairs: that the rule of reason could be sovereign. You could say that the age of print begat the Age of Reason which begat the age of democracy. The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege. The democratic logic inherent in these new trends was blunted and forestalled by the legacy structures of power in Europe. But the intrepid migrants who ventured across the Atlantic -- many of them motivated by a desire to escape the constraints of class and creed -- carried the potent seeds of the Enlightenment and planted them in the fertile soil of the New World. Our Founders understood this better than any others; they realized that a "well-informed citizenry" could govern itself and secure liberty for individuals by substituting reason for brute force. They decisively rejected the three-thousand-year-old superstitious belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely and arbitrarily. They reawakened the ancient Greek and Roman traditions of debating the wisest courses of action by exchanging information and opinions in new ways. Whether it is called a public forum or a public sphere or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades. Our first self-expression as a nation -- "We the People" -- made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important the marketplace for ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government. The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were the following: 1. It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all. 2. The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent meritocracy of ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them. 3. The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "conversation of democracy" is all about.

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

Circumcision is well-known in the ancient Near East from as early as the fourth millennium BC, though the details of its practice and its significance vary from culture to culture. Circumcision was practiced in the ancient Near East by many peoples. The Egyptians practiced circumcision as early as the third millennium BC. West Semitic peoples, Israelites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites performed circumcision. Eastern Semitic peoples did not (e.g., Assyrians, Babylonians, Akkadians)—nor did the Philistines, an Aegean or Greek people. Anthropological studies have suggested that the rite always has to do with at least one of four basic themes: fertility, virility, maturity and genealogy. Study of Egyptian mummies demonstrates that the surgical technique in Egypt differed from that used by the Israelites; while the Hebrews amputated the prepuce of the penis, the Egyptians merely incised the foreskin and so exposed the glans penis. Egyptians were not circumcised as children, but in either prenuptial or puberty rites. The common denominator, however, is that it appears to be a rite of passage, giving new identity to the one circumcised and incorporating him into a particular group. Evidence from the Levant comes as early as bronze figurines from the Amuq Valley (Tell el-Judeideh) from the early third millennium BC. An ivory figurine from Megiddo from the mid-second millennium BC shows Canaanite prisoners who are circumcised. Southern Mesopotamia shows no evidence of the practice, nor is any Akkadian term known for the practice. The absence of such evidence is significant since Assyrian and Babylonian medical texts are available in abundance. Abraham is therefore aware of the practice from living in Canaan and visiting Egypt rather than from his roots in Mesopotamia. Since Ishmael is 13 years old at this time, Abraham may even have been wondering whether it was a practice that would characterize this new family of his. In Ge 17 circumcision is retained as a rite of passage, but one associated with identity in the covenant. In light of today’s concerns with gender issues, some have wondered why the sign of the covenant should be something that marks only males. Two cultural issues may offer an explanation: patrilineal descent and identity in the community. (1) The concept of patrilineal descent resulted in males being considered the representatives of the clan and the ones through whom clan identity was preserved (as, e.g., the wife took on the tribal and clan identity of her husband). (2) Individuals found their identity more in the clan and the community than in a concept of self. Decisions and commitments were made by the family and clan more than by the individual. The rite of passage represented in circumcision marked each male as entering a clan committed to the covenant, a commitment that he would then have the responsibility to maintain. If this logic holds, circumcision would not focus on individual participation in the covenant as much as on continuing communal participation. The community is structured around patrilineal descent, so the sign on the males marks the corporate commitment of the clan from generation to generation. ◆

This is not easy. It goes against all the conditioning, all the impulses, all the logic which tells us: ‘Get me away from this feeling, this thought, this unpleasant experience.’ It can bring up all our resistance, doubt and anxiety, and we may be tempted to try and fight or deny these too. When we feel the cold, dark night upon us, the last thing we want is to rest in the open. But ultimately we’ve nothing to lose – we’re exposing ourselves only to what’s here anyway. With the light and warmth of awareness, we offer our attitude as fuel for transformation. When we practise this wholeheartedly, courageously, repeatedly, compassionately, over time we may find that even when our frogs don’t turn into princes, we might nevertheless learn to love the frog. Is such a radical shift possible? Yes, according to practitioner reports over thousands of years, and the new data from brain-measuring technology. However, it requires practice, method and courage.

In my experience, historical analogy is the analytic method of choice for senior foreign policy makers trying to get a handle on world events unfolding in real time. When trying to understand a new problem, they rarely use or even read analyses informed by social science methods such as game theory, statistical data, or randomized control trials. And logically, these analogies are made to historical cases with which the individuals are most familiar. I watched this play out dozens of times during my five years in government, and it was particularly striking during our struggles to understand the Arab Spring, and especially events in Egypt in the winter of 2011.

IKEA’s adroit coordination of policies is a more integrated design than anyone else’s in the furniture business. Traditional furniture retailers do not carry large inventory, traditional manufacturers do not have their own stores, normal retailers do not specify their own designs or use catalogs rather than salespeople, and so on. Because IKEA’s many policies are different from the norm and because they fit together in a coherent design, IKEA’s system has a chain-link logic. That means that adopting only one of these policies does no good—it adds expense to the competitor’s business without providing any real competition to IKEA. Minor adjustments just won’t do—to compete effectively with IKEA, an existing rival would have to virtually start fresh and, in effect, compete with its own existing business. No one did. Today, more than fifty years after IKEA pioneered its new strategy in the furniture industry, no one has really replicated it.

The English, American, and French revolutionaries changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty--declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity that they called "the people." This created an immediate logical problem, because "the people" are by definition a group of individuals united by the fact that they are, in fact, bound by a certain set of laws. So in what sense can they have created those laws? When this questions was first posed in the wake of the British, American, and French revolutions, the answer seemed obvious: through those revolutions themselves. But this created a further problem. Revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order. In fact, nothing could possibly be more illegal. Cromwell, Jefferson, or Danton were all clearly guilty of treason, according to the laws under which they grew up, just as much as they would have been had they tried to do the same thing again under the new regimes they created, say, twenty years later. So laws emerge from illegal activity. (p. 214)