Marks Is Just A Number Quotes

The problem, of course, was that turning into a monster was the brighter of my two choices. Choice Number 1: I turn into a vampyre, which equals a monster in just about any human’s mind. Choice Number 2: My body rejects the Change and I die. Forever. So the good news is that I wouldn’t have to take the geometry test tomorrow.

I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me, but the chemistry is incredibly simple and very destructive. When we first met, you told me that a disguise is always a self portrait, how true of you, the combination to your safe – your measurements. But this is far more intimate. This is your heart, and you should never let it rule your head. You could have chosen any random number and walked out of here today with everything you worked for. But you just couldn’t resist it, could you? I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage. Thank you for the final proof.

Look I have somewhere I have to be and I don’t particularly love that I have to go, but you freaking out and making a scene is not going to do anything other than piss me off. I hope you had a good time last night and you can leave your number but we both know the chances of me calling you are slim to none. If you don’t want to be treated like crap maybe you should stop going home with drunken dudes you don’t know. Trust me we’re really only after one thing and the next morning all we really want is for you to go quietly away. I have a headache and I feel like I’m going to hurl, plus I have to spend the next hour in a car with someone that will be silently loathing me and joyously plotting my death so really can we just save the histrionics and get a move on it?

My, my," he said, looking the note over. "If only students would write this much in their essays. One of you has considerably worse writing than the other, so forgive me if I get anything wrong here." He cleared his throat."'So, I saw J last night,' begins the person with bad handwriting, to which the response is,'What happened,' followed by no fewer than five question marks. Understandable, since sometimes one—let alone four—just won't get the point across, eh?" The class laughed, and I noticed Mia throwing me a particularly mean smile. "The first speaker responds:'What do you think happened? We hooked up in one of the empty lounges.'“ Mr. Nagy glanced up after hearing some more giggles in the room. His British accent only added to the hilarity. "May I assume by this reaction that the use of 'hook up' pertains to the more recent, shall we say,carnal application of the term than the tamer one I grew up with?” More snickers ensued. Straightening up, I said boldly, "Yes, sir, Mr. Nagy. That would be correct, sir." A number of people in the class laughed outright. "Thank you for that confirmation, Miss Hathaway. Now, where was I? Ah yes, the other speaker then asks,'How was it?' The response is,'Good,' punctuated with a smiley face to confirm said adjective. Well. I suppose kudos are in order for the mysterious J, hmmm?'So, like, how far did you guys go?' Uh, ladies," said Mr. Nagy, "I do hope this doesn't surpass a PG rating.'Not very.We got caught.'And again, we are shown the severity of the situation, this time through the use of a not-smiling face.'What happened?' 'Dimitri showed up. He threw Jesse out and then bitched me out.'“ The class lost it, both from hearing Mr. Nagy say "bitched" and from finally getting some participants named. "Why, Mr.Zeklos, are you the aforementioned J? The one who earned a smiley face from the sloppy writer?

and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook. I declare it's marked out just like a large chessboard!' Alice said at last. 'There ought to be some men moving about somewhere--and so there are!' she added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. 'It's a great huge game of chess that's being played--all over the world--if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is!

Age in just a number. It carries no weight. The real weight is in impacts. The truth is that you can do it at any age. Get up and be willing to leave a mark.

This isn't how it should be, God. Thousands of graves marking thousands of lives--so much focus on death. Did the gravediggers spend their lives just serving the dead? How many Numbers ticked away for the sake of carving headstones no one would read? As I stare at this scene, I decide I don't want a headstone when I die. I don't even want to be buried. I want to disappear--save that chunk of earth for people to live on. This land I stand on is worthless now. No one can build a house here. No one can plant gardens or start a new village. Is that what the people buried beneath me would have wanted? Earth wasn't intended to hold only dead bodies. I stand. God, I need to live.

Finally, if you attempt to read this without working through a significant number of exercises (see §0.0.1), I will come to your house and pummel you with [Gr-EGA] until you beg for mercy. It is important to not just have a vague sense of what is true, but to be able to actually get your hands dirty. As Mark Kisin has said, “You can wave your hands all you want, but it still won’t make you fly.

As she began rattling off a number of multi-syllabic Latin-derived medical terms, he had to rearrange himself in his leathers. Something about her getting all professional made him want to get all up in her. Probably had to do with the bonding thing—he wanted to mark this spectacular person as his, so the whole world knew they needed to back the fuck off. Jane was the only female who had ever gotten his attention and held it. And yeah, if he had to wax psychological on the situation, it was probably because her single-minded passion for her job, shit, her relentless commitment to excellence, made him feel a little like he was always chasing her just to keep up. On so many levels he was a typical predator: The chase was more electric than the capture and consumption. And with Jane, there was always something to pursue. “Hello? V?” When their eyes met, he frowned. “Sorry. Distracted.

Deem not the just by Heaven forgot! Though life its common gifts deny,— Though, with a crushed and bleeding heart, And spurned of man, he goes to die! For God hath marked each sorrowing day, And numbered every bitter tear, And heaven's long years of bliss shall pay For all his children suffer here.

New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.

But Nick still had one person left to speak to. Mark. “How did you survive?” he asked as Mark left Simi, who was licking her fingers and joined them by the truck. Mark flashed him a grin. “What? Did you forget the first rule I taught you, boy?” Nick scowled as he tried to remember Mark’s various rules for survival. “Duck urine chases away every living and unliving thing?” “Nah, that’s number six. Rule number one: I don’t have to outrun the zombie. I just have to outrun you. How you think Eric and Tabitha got captured?” Tabitha laughed. “Oh please. Inspector Gadget over there made a blowtorch out of Eric’s art sealant and a lighter. I’m not sure the house is stil standing, but he got us out of there and Simi covered the rest of our retreat. We’d have gotten away completely had Eric not tripped and I made the mistake of going back for him while Mark was hot-wiring a neighbour’s car.” Nick laughed at more proof Mark wasn’t completely insane. Never go back for the fallen unless you want to be captured or killed. Unless the fallen was Bubba, who usually had a larger calibre of weapons. Mark sighed. “By the time I realized they weren’t behind me, they were gone and I was sick over it. I really thought they’d gotten eaten. But luckily I saw your girlfriend under attack and, with Simi’s help, was able to get her to safety.

That's how I read the Bible. There are more than sixty references in Scripture to celebration and all but one or two of them are positive. Most of them are divine commands to go and party. Exodus and Deuteronomy and Numbers read like a string of invitations to a nonstop whirlwind of festival: "Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread...Celebrate the Feast of Harvest...Celebrate the Feast of Weeks...Celebrate the Passover...Celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles...Celebrate." These were not quiet, sedate, well-mannered little tea parties. They were raucous, shout-at-the-top-of-your-lungs and dance-in-the-streets, weeklong shindigs. The heart of the prodigal home, shouting to His servants, "Bring the fatted calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate!" That's our God. You read this stuff enough, you start to get the sense that God is looking for just about any excuse to fire up the barbecue and invite the neighborhood over.

When he can't take anymore, Galen plucks his phone from his pocket and dials, then hangs up. When the call is returned, he says, "Hey, sweet lips." The females at the table hush each other to get a better listen. A few of them whip their heads toward Emma to see if she's on the other end of the conversation. Satisfied she's not, they lean closer. Rachel snorts. "If only you liked sweets." "I can't wait to see you tonight. Wear that pink shirt I like." Rachel laughs. "Sounds like you're in what we humans like to call a pickle. My poor, drop-dead-gorgeous sweet pea. Emma still not talking to you, leaving you alone with all those hormonal girls?" "Eight-thirty? That's so far away. Can't I meet you sooner?" One of the females actually gets up and takes her tray and her attitude to another table. Galen tries not to get too excited. "Do you need to be checked out of school, son? Are you feeling ill?" Galen tosses a glance at Emma, who's picking a pepperoni off her pizza and eyeing it as if it were dolphin dung. "I can't skip school to meet you again, boo. But I'll be thinking about you. No one but you." A few more females get up and stalk their trays to the trash. The cheerleader in front of him rolls her eyes and starts a conversation with the chubby brunette beside her-the same chubby brunette she pushed into a locker to get to him two hours ago. "Be still my heart," Rachel drawls. "But seriously, I can't read your signals. I don't know what you're asking me to do." "Right now, nothing. But I might change my mind about skipping. I really miss you." Rachel clears her throat. "All right, sweet pea. You just let your mama know, and she'll come get her wittle boy from school, okay?" Galen hangs up. Why is Emma laughing again? Mark can't be that funny. The girl beside him clues him in: "Mark Baker. All the girls love him. But not as much as they love you. Except maybe Emma, I guess." "Speaking of all these girls, how did they get my phone number?" She giggles. "It's written on the wall in the girls' bathroom. One hundred hall." She holds her cell phone up to his face. An image of his number scrawled onto a stall door lights up the screen. In Emma's handwriting.

As any numbers of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.

[Egyptian] advances in medicine, however, as well as in other areas of science, were limited to their attempts to solve the problems confronting them. They did not attempt to probe into the realm of theory. "History for the Egyptians was the cyclic recurrence of the elements of the divine eternal order. Just as the land was reborn each year, so the pharaoh who died and became Osiris was reborn in Horus, his son and successor. The passage of time was marked by the succession of pharaohs, who were grouped into dynasties and numbered.

Apparently, I’m known as a “reader.” I read two or three books a week, which normally comes in at around one hundred and twenty-five books a year. And I feel pretty good about that. At least I did. Until I read Charles Chu’s calculations. The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours. TV … 2,737.5 hours.

And those who have read the trilogy tend to number it among the unapproachables—just some of those books that are simply too strange and fantastical and, well, weird to really like. I love this series deeply, but I still relate to those people. On the surface, the Ransom Trilogy bears the marks of a sci-fi adventure. But then there are all those philosophical passages, and there’s an awful lot of time spent just talking on Perelandra, and then Merlin (of all people!) shows up and don’t even get started on Mr. Bultitude… It is for these people—indeed, for my former self—that I have written this book.

Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

I’m not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: “Can I get you anything?” I’ll say, getting up from a dinner table, “Coffee, tea, a pony?” People rarely laugh at this, especially if they’ve heard it before. “This party’s ‘sposed to be fun,” a friend will say. “Really? Will there be pony rides?” It’s a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it’s hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. There are little elements in a person’s life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it’s a patent phrase, sometimes it’s a perfume, sometimes it’s a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies. I don’t even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn’t? It’s like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that’s precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into my regular speech: abstractly. “I have something for you,” a guy will say on our first date. “Is it a pony?” No. It’s usually a movie ticket or his cell phone number. But on our second date, if I ask again, I’m pretty sure I’m getting a pony. And thus the Pony drawer came to be. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but almost every guy I have ever dated has unwittingly made a contribution to the stable. The retro pony from the ‘50s was from the most thoughtful guy I have ever known. The one with the glitter horseshoes was from a boy who would later turn out to be straight somehow, not gay. The one with the rainbow haunches was from a librarian, whom I broke up with because I felt the chemistry just wasn’t right, and the one with the price tag stuck on the back was given to me by a narcissist who was so impressed with his gift he forgot to remover the sticker. Each one of them marks the beginning of a new relationship. I don’t mean to hint. It’s not a hint, actually, it’s a flat out demand: I. Want. A. Pony. I think what happens is that young relationships are eager to build up a romantic repertoire of private jokes, especially in the city where there’s not always a great “how we met” story behind every great love affair. People meet at bars, through mutual friends, on dating sites, or because they work in the same industry. Just once a coworker of mine, asked me out between two stops on the N train. We were holding the same pole and he said, “I know this sounds completely insane, bean sprout, but would you like to go to a very public place with me and have a drink or something...?” I looked into his seemingly non-psycho-killing, rent-paying, Sunday Times-subscribing eyes and said, “Sure, why the hell not?” He never bought me a pony. But he didn’t have to, if you know what I mean.

Mr. Jeavons said that I was a very clever boy. I said that I wasn’t clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn’t clever. That was just being observant. Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new. Like the universe expanding, or who committed a murder. Or if you see someone’s name and you give each letter a value from 1 to 26 (a = 1, b = 2, etc.) and you add the numbers up in your head and you find that it makes a prime number, like Jesus Christ (151), or Scooby-Doo (113), or Sherlock Holmes (163), or Doctor Watson (167). Mr. Jeavons asked me whether this made me feel safe, having things always in a nice order, and I said it did.

And what about the most merciful Christian God, slowly roasting in the fires of hell all those who would not submit? Was He not an executioner? And was the number of those burned by the Christians on bonfires less than the number of burned Christians? Yet - you understand - this God was glorified for ages as the God of love. Absurd? No, on the contrary: it is testimony to the ineradicable wisdom of man, inscribed in blood. Even at that time - wild, shaggy - he understood: true, algebraic love of humanity is inevitably inhuman; and the inevitable mark of truth is - its cruelty. Just as the inevitable mark of fire is that it burns. Show me fire that does not burn. Well - argue with me, prove the contrary!

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. "Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

The write, "reconciliation is revolutionary, that is orient to structural change." Which means, reconciliation can never be apolitical... This is why white American churches remain so far from experiencing anything resembling reconciliation. The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don't challenge the status quo... But without people of color in key positions, influencing topics of conversation, content, direction, and vision, whatever diversity is included is still essentially white - it just adds people of color like sprinkles on top. The cake is still vanilla... When our voices are truly desired, numbers will cease to be the sole mark of achievement.

As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub- divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and vive la guerre éternelle—till the New Jerusalem, of course!

As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once ‘impossible’: the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been imagined in 1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now deemed unrealistic. ‘Modernization’, Badiou bitterly observes, ‘is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so’. At

The bourbon goes into the recipe, Miss Connor, not into you,” he’d said from directly behind me. He had a way of doing that, catching me in the act. I suppose the number of times I screwed up made me an easy mark. My spine straightened at the scolding, but my mouth did what it knew best. “Well, that’s just a waste of perfectly good bourbon if you ask me.

Dr. Ben-Judah gave what Rayford considered a brilliant example of how to easily identify someone with just a few marks. “Despite the billions of people who still populate this planet, you can put a postcard in the mail with just a few distinctions on it, and I will be the only person to receive it. You eliminate much of the world when you send it to Israel. You narrow it more when it comes to Jerusalem. You cut the potential recipients to a tiny fraction when it goes to a certain street, a certain number, a certain apartment. And then, with my first and last name on it, you have singled me out of billions. That, I believe, is what these prophecies of Messiah do. They eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, until only one person could ever fulfill them.” Dr.

How can you spend your days just damning people? Man, where do you think we are right now? Not just right here, but here, alive on this planet? This is hell, Brother, look around. It doesn’t have to be, but we make it so. I can even prove it. All life on this planet is carbon-based, right? Do you know what the atomic number of carbon is? Six. That means six electrons, six neutrons, and six protons, 666, the mark of the beast is the illusion of matter! Who was cast out of paradise? Lucifer, right? Well, guess who else was kicked out? We were, Adam and Eve, eating the forbidden fruit, the Tree of Knowledge, driven from the garden like varmints. We’re the beast. DNA is the coil of the serpent. Duh. Hell is separation from the Source, man. Dig?” “Right on,” Manny spoke up. “I can dig that.

from her purse. “We have to follow that car!” “But not too close,” Nancy replied. “We’d make them suspicious.” The girls waited three minutes before backing out into the main highway and then turning into the adjacent road. Though the automobile ahead had disappeared, tire prints were plainly visible. The road twisted through a stretch of wood-land. When finally the tire prints turned off into a heavily wooded narrow lane, Nancy was sure they were not far from the cabin. She parked among some trees and they went forward on foot. “There it is!” whispered Nancy, recognizing the chimney. “Bess, I want you to take my car, drive to River Heights, and look up the name of the owner of the car we just saw. Here’s the license number. “After you’ve been to the Motor Vehicle Bureau, please phone Mrs. Putney’s house. If she answers, we’ll know it wasn’t she we saw in the car. Then get hold of Dad or Ned, and bring one of them here as fast as you can. We may need help. Got it straight?” “I—I—g-guess so,” Bess answered. “Hurry back! No telling what may happen while you’re away.” The two watched as Nancy’s car rounded a bend and was lost to view. Then Nancy and George walked swiftly through the woods toward the cabin. Approaching the building, Nancy and George were amazed to find that no car was parked on the road in front. “How do you figure it?” George whispered as the girls crouched behind bushes. “We certainly saw tire marks leading into this road!” “Yes, but the car that passed may have gone on without stopping. Possibly the driver saw us and changed her plans. Wait here, and watch the cabin while I check the tire marks out at the

At every step of the way, to give her the contrast she needed, Thatcher marked out an opponent: the socialists, the wets, the Argentineans. These enemies helped to define her image as determined, powerful, self-sacrificing. Thatcher was not seduced by popularity, which is ephemeral and superficial. Pundits might obsess over popularity numbers, but in the mind of the voter—which, for a politician, is the field of battle—a dominating presence has more pull than does likability. Let some of the public hate you; you cannot please everyone. Your enemies, those you stand sharply against, will help you to forge a support base that will not desert you. Do not crowd into the center, where everyone else is; there is no room to fight in a crowd. Polarize people, drive some of them away, and create a space for battle. Everything in life conspires to push you into the center, and not just politically. The center is the realm of compromise. Getting along with other people is an important skill to have, but it comes with a danger: by always seeking the path of least resistance, the path of conciliation, you forget who you are, and you sink into the center with everyone else. Instead see yourself as a fighter, an outsider surrounded by enemies. Constant battle will keep you strong and alert. It will help to define what you believe in, both for yourself and for others. Do not worry about antagonizing people; without antagonism there is no battle, and without battle, there is no chance of victory. Do not be lured by the need to be liked: better to be respected, even feared. Victory over your enemies will bring you a more lasting popularity.

Spider?” I’d said, with a question mark in my voice. “Yeah.” “You know at school . . . what did you do that for? Wade in like that?” Spider frowned. “He was disrespectful, Jem. What you said—I could tell it was real. It was what you were really feeling. He had no right to make a joke of it.” “Yeah, I know, he’s a tosser, but it’s nothing to do with you. You made a right show of yourself. You made a show of me.” “I didn’t want him to get away with it.” “Yeah, but I don’t need a knight in shining armor. I can look after myself.” He was smiling a bit now. I paused. “It’s not funny, man. It’s made everything worse,” I said quietly. “I’ve got comments all the time now, ‘bout you and me. Sly comments.” He looked away, studied his hands. The knuckles on the right one were nearly healed up now. My mouth had gone dry, but I had to get this clear with him. “You do know there’s no ‘you and me,’ don’t you, Spider?” He looked up. “What?” “We’re not like . . . together. Just mates.” There was something about his sullenness when he said, “Yeah, ‘course. Just mates. Mates is good,” that made me think he felt the exact opposite. I was churning inside, cursing that day under the bridge. People were so bloody difficult. Why had I ever got involved? He stood up, came toward me, putting an arm out. I thought, Shit, he’s going to hug me. Hasn’t he listened to anything? But his hand formed a fist, and he lightly punched my arm. “Listen, man, I know what you’re like. I’ve told you I’ll never say nothing nice to you. And now you’ve put my straight, I’ll never do nothing nice for you, either. OK? If someone disrespects you, I’ll let them. If you’re being mugged on the street, I’ll walk on by. If I see you on fire, I won’t even piss on you. OK?

Most foolishly, liberals grew increasingly reliant on the courts to circumvent the legislative process when it failed to deliver what they wanted (and I wanted too). Decisions rained down on everything from protecting rare fish to more explosive matters, such as abortion and school busing. Liberals lost the habit of taking the temperature of public opinion, building consensus, and taking small steps. This made the public more and more susceptible to the right’s claim that the judiciary was just an imperial preserve of educated elites. The charge stuck and the approval of judicial nominations has ever since been a highly partisan process, which the right now dominates. All these factors combined to convince a growing number of Americans that even if they wanted to work together, government action would be ineffective, too costly, counterproductive, or uncontrolled.

Please rate your level of annoyance on a scale of one to ten." "Are you serious?" "We can't proceed with intake until you answer the question." "Uh ... five," he said, "No—six; the question made it worse." "Have you experienced any unfair treatment since being marked unsavory? Anyone refusing you service, or in any way infringing upon your rights as a citizen?" The rote way in which she asked the question made him want to smack that tablet out of her hand. At least she could have pretended to sare about his answer the way she had pretended to smile. "People looked at me like I've just killed their cat." She looked at him as if he's just told her he actually had killed a few cats. "Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the way people look at you. But if your rights are ever infringed upon, it's important that you let your probation officer know." "Wait—you're not my probation officer?" She sighed. “I’m your intake officer. You’ll meet your probation officer after we’re done with intake.” “Will I have to take a number again?” “Yes.” “Then please change my annoyance level to nine.

Such threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass-cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity. ‘If you sacrifice ten bulls to the sky god, the rain will come; if you honour your parents, you will go to heaven; and if you don’t believe what I am telling you – you’ll go to hell.’ As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organise mass-cooperation networks. Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal ‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’. Our chimpanzee cousins cannot invent and spread such stories, which is why they cannot cooperate in large numbers.

...Subordination of the state to Christian values is precisely what the early Puritans, even those in the tradition of the Mayflower Pilgrims, aimed to do. The First Amendment notwithstanding, large numbers of the American public (especially churchgoing Protestant Christians) have embodied this Puritan way of thinking, viewing America as a "Christan nation." Relatively recent poll data bear out the enduring character of these Puritan convictions. According to a Pew Forum poll held just prior to the 2004 election, over one-half of the public would have reservations voting for a candidate with no religious affiliation (31 percent refusing to vote for a Muslim and 15 percent for a Catholic).

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

From 1960 to 1970, as the New Deal expanded into the Great Society, the number of Americans in poverty declined from 40 million to under 25 million. During the 1970s, after the rise of dog whistle politics but before its full hijacking by rightwing oligarchs, the numbers in poverty remained steady. During the 1980s, as Reagan and then George H.W. Bush reigned, those in poverty soared to 35 million. At the end of Clinton’s second term in 2000, those mired in poverty had fallen to just above 30 million. But following the Great Recession that marked the end George W. Bush’s presidency, over 46 million Americans were in poverty.63 That’s an additional 16 million good folks pushed into the material and emotional hardship of destitution in just one decade.

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, respectively the Chair of the Board and Executive Director of Just Detention International (JDI), one of the most intrepid organizers against prison rape and for implementation of PREA, cites analyses in 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports, showing that there are over 216,600 cases of sexual abuse in prisons in a single year. They continue, “that’s almost 600 people a day—25 an hour.”[113] The most vulnerable among all groups are trans persons, the increasing number of mentally ill that have been taken in by the prisons, and also women. Nearly half of these violations, according to still more recent BJS studies, are committed by prison staff, the very ones, observes JDI pointedly, whose job it is to ensure their safety from such violation.

Children, now we shall try to write a capital letter L,” I say and go to the blackboard. “Ten lines of L’s, then five lines of Lina, and five lines of Larch.” I write out the words slowly with chalk. A shuffling and rustling begins behind me. I expect to find that they are laughing at me and turn around. But it is only the notebooks being opened and the slates put in readiness. The forty heads are bent obediently over their task. —I am almost surprised. The slate pencils are squeaking, the pens scratching. I pass to and fro between the forms. On the wall hangs a crucifix, a stuffed barn owl and a map of Europe. Outside the windows the clouds drive steadily by, swift and low. The map of Germany is coloured in brown and green. I stop before it. The frontiers are hatched in red, and make a curious zigzag from top to bottom. Cologne—Aachen, there are the thin black lines marking the railways; Herbesthal, Liège, Brussels, Lille—I stand on tiptoe—Roubaix, Arras, Ostend—Where is Mount Kemmel then? It isn’t marked at all; but there is Langemarck, Ypres, Bixschoote, Staden. How small they are on the map—tiny points only, secluded, tiny points—and yet how the heavens thundered and the earth raged there on the 31st of July when the Big Offensive began and before nightfall we had lost every officer. I turn away and survey the fair and dark heads bending zealously over the words, Lina and Larch. Strange—for them those tiny points on the map will be no more than just so much stuff to be learned—a few new place names and a number of dates to be memorized by note in the history lesson—like the Seven Years’ War or some battle against the Romans. A

heroin erased the myriad collection of endless worries that had kept me awake all night most of my life. It had freed me from feeling anything: loss, heartbreak, regret, grief, resentment, as well as the burning hatred and disgust I felt not only for myself but also for other people I thought had wronged me, real or imagined. When dope enveloped me in its golden glow, all that melted away like springtime snow. The world became black and white, boiled down to just getting enough drugs each day to keep the dogs of withdrawals off my heels. I felt as though heroin had saved me from a life of misery, and I was prepared to go to any lengths to make sure I would always have it. Heroin was my number one, and anything else—everything else—was such a far-distant second place as to be virtually unseen on the radar screen of my life’s importance.

Here from Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.12

It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought theory of everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times, but “strings”—tiny strands of energy. By vibrating in different ways, these strings produce the essential phenomena of nature, the way violin strings produce musical notes. String theory isn’t just powerful; it’s also mathematically beautiful. All that remains to be done is to write down the actual equations. This is taking a little longer than expected. But, with almost the entire theoretical-physics community working on the problem—presided over by a sage in Princeton, New Jersey—the millennia-old dream of a final theory is sure to be realized before long. It is the worst of times in physics. For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.’s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made; not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a theory of nothing. Yet the physics establishment promotes string theory with irrational fervor, ruthlessly weeding dissenting physicists from the profession. Meanwhile, physics is stuck in a paradigm doomed to barrenness.

The difference gave China a $420 billion trade surplus (the US carried the opposite, a $420 billion trade deficit with China). Americans paid for those goods with US dollars, and those payments were credited to China’s bank account at the Federal Reserve. Like any other holder of US dollars, China has the option to sit on those dollars or use them to buy something else. Uncle Sam doesn’t pay interest on the dollars China keeps in its checking account at the Fed, so China usually prefers to move them into what is effectively a savings account at the Fed. It does this by purchasing US Treasuries. “Borrowing from China” involves nothing more than an accounting adjustment, whereby the Federal Reserve subtracts numbers from China’s reserve account (checking) and adds numbers to its securities account (savings). It’s still just sitting on its US dollars, but now China is holding yellow dollars instead of green dollars. To pay back China, the Fed simply reverses the accounting entries, marking down the number in its securities account and marking up the number in its reserve account. It’s all accomplished using nothing more than a keyboard at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

Remember a blue hill, a crowd, a cross? Some up on the hill, sprinkled with blood, are busy nailing a body to the cross; others below, sprinkled with tears, are gazing upward. Does it not occur to you that the part which those above must play is the more difficult, the more important part? If it were not for them, how could that magnificent tragedy ever have been staged? True, they were hissed at by the dark crowd, but for that the author of the tragedy, God, should have remunerated them the more liberally, should He not? And the most clement, Christian God himself, who burned all the infidels on a slow fire, is He not an executioner? Was the number of those burned by the Christians less than the number of burned Christians? Yet (you must understand this!), yet this God was for centuries glorified as the God of love! Absurd? Oh, no. Just the contrary. It is instead a testament to the imperishable wisdom of man, written in blood. Even at the time when he still was wild and hairy, man knew that real, algebraic love for humanity must inevitably be inhuman, and that the inevitable mark of truth is cruelty—just as the inevitable mark of fire is its property of causing the sensation of burning. Could you show me a fire that would not hurt?

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.

With the thinnest possible layer of glass, we find that the number of photons arriving at A is nearly always zero-sometimes it's like 1. When we replace the thinnest layer with a slightly thicker one, we find that the amount of light reflected is higher-closer to the expected 8%. After a few more replacements the count of photons arriving at A increases past the 8% mark. As we continue to substitute still "thicker " layers of glass-we're up to about 5 millionths of an inch now-the amount of light reflected by the two surfaces reaches a maximum of 16%, and then goes down, through 8%, back to zero-if the layer of glass is just the right thickness, there is no reflection at all. (Do that with spots!) With gradually thicker and thicker layers of glass, partial reflection again increases to 16% and returns to zero-a cycle that repeats itself again and again(see Fig. 5). Newton discovered these oscillations and did one experiment that could be correctly interpreted only if the oscillations continued for 34,000 cycles! Today, with lasers (which produce a very pure, monochromatic light), we can see this cycle still going strong after more than 100,000,000 repetitions-which corresponds to glass that is more than 50 meters thick. (We don't see this phenomenon every day because the light source is normally not monochromatic.) So it turns out that our prediction of 8% is right as an overall average (since the actual amount varies in a regular pattern from zero to 16%), but it's exactly right only twice each cycle-like a stopped clock (which is right twice a day).

My best friend growing up was a boy named Barry,” Buzan recalled, sitting outside on his patio with his pink shirt unbuttoned and a pair of large, wraparound geriatric sunglasses protecting his eyes. “He was always in the 1-D classes, while I was in 1-A. One-A was for the bright kids, D for the dunces. But when we went out into nature, Barry could identify things by the way they flew over the horizon. Just from their flight patterns, he could distinguish between a red admiral, a painted thrush, and a blackbird, which are all very similar. So I knew he was a genius. And I got a top mark in an exam on nature, a perfect mark, answering questions like ‘Name two fish you can find living in an English stream.’ There are a hundred and three. But when I got back my perfect mark on the test, I suddenly realized that the kid sitting down the hall in the dunces’ class, my best friend, Barry, knew more than I knew—much more than I knew—in the subject in which I was supposedly number one. And therefore, he was number one, and I was not number one. “And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn’t know how to identify smart and not smart. They called me the best, when I knew I wasn’t, and they called him the worst, when he was the best. I mean, there could be no more antipodal environment. So I began to question: What is intelligence? Who says? Who says you’re smart? Who says you’re not smart? And what do they mean by that?” Those questions, at least according to Buzan’s tidy personal narrative, dogged him until he got to college. Buzan’s introduction

A shudder went through me at the thought of what I should still learn in this hour. How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible? And what would remain when I also learned about myself, about my own character and history from the knowledge stored in these archives? I must be prepared for anything. Suddenly I could bear the uncertainty and suspense no longer. I hastened to the section Chattorum res gestas, looked for my sub-division and number and stood in front of the part marked with my name. This was a niche, and when I drew the thin curtains aside I saw that it contained nothing written. It contained nothing but a figure, an old and worn-looking model made from wood or wax, in pale colours. It appeared to be a kind of deity or barbaric idol. At first glance it was entirely incomprehensible to me. It was a figure that really consisted of two; it had a common back. I stared at it for a while, disappointed and surprised. Then I noticed a candle in a metal candlestick fixed to the wall of the niche. A match-box lay there. I lit the candle and the strange double figure was now brightly illuminated. Only slowly did it dawn upon me. Only slowly and gradually did I begin to suspect and then perceive what it was intended to represent. It represented a figure which was myself, and this likeness of myself was unpleasantly weak and half-real; it had blurred features, and in its whole expression there was something unstable, weak, dying or wishing to die, and looked rather like a piece of sculpture which could be called "Transitoriness" or "Decay," or something similar. On the other hand, the other figure which was joined to mine to make one, was strong in colour and form, and just as I began to realise whom it resembled, namely, the servant and President Leo, I discovered a second candle in the wall and lit this also. I now saw the double figure representing Leo and myself, not only becoming clearer and each image more alike, but I also saw that the surface of the figures was transparent and that one could look inside as one can look through the glass of a bottle or vase. Inside the figures I saw something moving, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taking place there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing or melting; indeed, something melted or poured across from my image to that of Leo's. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo's, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear. As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets themselves. The candles burned low and went out. I was overcome by an infinite weariness and desire to sleep, and I turned away to find a place where I could lie down and sleep.

We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out. Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

The next day, it was still raining when Lee issued his final order to his troops, known simply as General Orders Number 9. After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to the result from no distrust of them. But feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that would compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen. By the terms of the agreement officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extended to you His blessing and protection. With an increasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous considerations for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell. For generations, General Orders Number 9 would be recited in the South with the same pride as the Gettysburg Address was learned in the North. It is marked less by its soaring prose—the language is in fact rather prosaic—but by what it does say, bringing his men affectionate words of closure, and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t say. Nowhere does it exhort his men to continue the struggle; nowhere does it challenge the legitimacy of the Union government that had forced their surrender; nowhere does it fan the flames of discontent. In fact, Lee pointedly struck out a draft paragraph that could have been construed to do just that.

Testament prophet.39 However, what was this prophet doing? Why was he encouraging Israelites to be baptized in the Jordan River? The answer to these questions comes from John’s actions as well as from his words concerning his ministry. First, John appeared “baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Then all the land of Judea, and those from Jerusalem, went out to him and were all baptized by him in the Jordan River” (Mark 1:4–5). There are two issues that merit attention: the significance of the Jordan River and the repentance of sins. The geographical location of John’s baptismal ministry is key. John could have chosen a number of places to perform his baptizing ministry, but he chose the Jordan, which was the gate to the Promised Land and the place where Israel re-enacted the Red Sea crossing. When the feet of the Levites touched the waters of the Jordan, the waters stopped flowing and the Israelites crossed the river on dry ground (Josh. 3:11–17). Just as the Holy Spirit in the glory cloud led Israel through the Red Sea, the ark of the Lord led Israel through the Jordan on dry ground to the Land of Promise. The connection between the two events is manifest in the word play in both narratives. The priests, for example, stood on dry ground (בחרבה) (Josh. 3:17), just as Moses turned the sea into dry land (לחרבה) (Ex. 14:21).40 Likewise, the waters of the Jordan “stood still, and rose in a heap” (קמו נד אחד) (Josh. 3:16), just as the waters of the Red Sea “stood upright like a heap” (נצבו כמו נד) (Ex. 15:8; cf. Ps. 78:13).41 Given these parallels between the Red Sea and Jordan River crossings, it seems that John’s activity in the Jordan was connected not only to the idea of a cleansing ritual, but also to the redemptive-historical significance of the Jordan. The connections between the Red Sea, the Jordan River, and John’s

Blood pressure check!” The doorknob rattled, as if the nurse were intending just to walk in, but the lock held, thank God. The nurse knocked again. “Oh, shit,” Gina breathed, laughing as she scrambled off of him. She reached to remove the condom they’d just used, encountered . . . him, and met his eyes. But then she scooped her clothes off the floor and ran into the bathroom. “Mr. Bhagat?” The nurse knocked on the door again. Even louder this time. “Are you all right?” Oh, shit, indeed. “Come in,” Max called as he pulled up the blanket and leaned on the button that put his bed back up into a sitting position. The same control device had a “call nurse” button as well as the clearly marked one that would unlock the door. “It’s locked,” the nurse called back, as well he knew. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, as he wiped off his face with the edge of the sheet. Sweat much in bed, all alone, Mr. Bhagat? “I must’ve . . . Here, let me figure out how to . . .” He took an extra second to smooth his hair, his pajama top, and then, praying that the nurse had a cold and couldn’t smell the scent of sex that lingered in the air, he hit the release. “Please don’t lock your door during the day,” the woman scolded him as she came into the room, around to the side of his bed. It was Debra Forsythe, a woman around his age, whom Max had met briefly at his check-in. She had been on her way home to deal with some crisis with her kids, and hadn’t been happy then, either. “And not at night either,” she added, “until you’ve been here a few days.” “Sorry.” He gave her an apologetic smile, hanging on to it as the woman gazed at him through narrowed eyes. She didn’t say anything, she just wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his arm, and pumped it a little too full of air—ow—as Gina opened the bathroom door. “Did I hear someone at the door?” she asked brightly. “Oh, hi. Debbie, right?” “Debra.” She glanced at Gina, and then back, her disgust for Max apparent in the tightness of her lips. But then she focused on the gauge, stethoscope to his arm. Gina came out into the room, crossing around behind the nurse, making a face at him that meant . . .? Max sent her a questioning look, and she flashed him. She just lifted her skirt and gave him a quick but total eyeful. Which meant . . . Ah, Christ. The nurse turned to glare at Gina, who quickly straightened up from searching the floor. What was it with him and missing underwear? Gina smiled sweetly. “His blood pressure should be nice and low. He’s very relaxed—he just had a massage.” “You know, I didn’t peg you for a troublemaker when you checked in yesterday,” Debra said to Max, as she wrote his numbers on the chart. Gina was back to scanning the floor, but again, she straightened up innocently when the nurse turned toward her. “I think you’re probably looking for this.” Debra leaned over and . . . Gina’s panties dangled off the edge of her pen. They’d been on the floor, right at the woman’s sensibly clad feet. “Oops,” Gina said. Max could tell that she was mortified, but only because he knew her so well. She forced an even sunnier smile, and attempted to explain. “It was just . . . he was in the hospital for so long and . . .” “And men have needs,” Debra droned, clearly unmoved. “Believe me, I’ve heard it all before.” “No, actually,” Gina said, still trying to turn this into something they could all laugh about, “I have needs.” But it was obvious that this nurse hadn’t laughed since 1985. “Then maybe you should find someone your own age to play with. A professional hockey player just arrived. He’s in the east wing. Second floor.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Lots of money. Just your type, I’m sure.” “Excuse me?” Gina wasn’t going to let one go past. She may not have been wearing any panties, but her Long Island attitude now waved around her like a superhero’s cape. She even assumed the battle position, hands on her hips.

Okay.” The leader stood on the bed of his truck and clapped his hands over his head. “Listen up, everyone.” No one was really listening, though they had dressed right. Everyone was all in black. A few guys wore ski masks, and others had black marks on their cheeks like football players. Personally, I didn’t understand the need for the black camouflage. Caden had explained that the cops had already been looped in on the operation. A few of the lawns getting flocked tonight actually belonged to cops, and anyway the whole blending-with-the-night effect didn’t work when you were carrying a bright neon-pink flamingo. Still, I couldn’t deny the little spark of excitement building in my stomach. We were all standing in some guy’s driveway, and as I looked around, I seemed to be the only girl. These guys meant business. I was in the middle of a real life Call of Duty operation. The leader began speaking, his voice booming. “This is going to happen with precision and professionalism. No lingering, loitering, acting like stupid shits, and definitely no joking around. We’re not ladies. This isn’t going to be run like a bunch of pansy-shopping, pink-nail-polish pussies. You got that?!” I frowned, tucking my nails inside my jacket. “Every vehicle’s been filled with birds. The driver should have a text with all the locations, and the number of birds for each target. Pull up, find the group of birds labeled for that house, and work together. Take one bird a trip, two if you can manage, and ram those suckers down in the grass. Hurry back to the truck and keep going until all the birds for that location are in the ground. Shotgun Sally is in charge of hanging the sign on the bird closest to the street. Once the sign is hung, get back in the truck, and move to the next target. NO TALKING! This mission is all radio silent. Communicate with signals, and if you don’t know the appropriate signals, just SHUT THE HELL UP! Okay? Now, go flock some fuckers!

Drawing aside so as not to impede passersby, he answered. “Oggy?” said his ex-colleague’s voice. “What gives, mate? Why are people sending you legs?” “I take it you’re not in Germany?” said Strike. “Edinburgh, been here six weeks. Just been reading about you in the Scotsman.” The Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police had an office in Edinburgh Castle: 35 Section. It was a prestigious posting. “Hardy, I need a favor,” said Strike. “Intel on a couple of guys. D’you remember Noel Brockbank?” “Hard to forget. Seventh Armoured, if memory serves?” “That’s him. The other one’s Donald Laing. He was before I knew you. King’s Own Royal Borderers. Knew him in Cyprus.” “I’ll see what I can do when I get back to the office, mate. I’m in the middle of a plowed field right now.” A chat about mutual acquaintances was curtailed by the increasing noise of rush-hour traffic. Hardacre promised to ring back once he had had a look at the army records and Strike continued towards the Tube. He got out at Whitechapel station thirty minutes later to find a text message from the man he was supposed to be meeting. Sorry Bunsen cant do today ill give you a bell This was both disappointing and inconvenient, but not a surprise. Considering that Strike was not carrying a consignment of drugs or a large pile of used notes, and that he did not require intimidation or beating, it was a mark of great esteem that Shanker had even condescended to fix a time and place for meeting. Strike’s knee was complaining after a day on his feet, but there were no seats outside the station. He leaned up against the yellow brick wall beside the entrance and called Shanker’s number. “Yeah, all right, Bunsen?” Just as he no longer remembered why Shanker was called Shanker, he had no more idea why Shanker called him Bunsen. They had met when they were seventeen and the connection between them, though profound in its way, bore none of the usual stigmata of teenage friendship.

My head snaps around at the hiss, but it takes awhile to believe he’s real. How could he have gotten here? I take in the claw marks from some wild animal, the back paw he holds slightly above the ground, the prominent bones in his face. He’s come on foot, then, all the way from 13. Maybe they kicked him out or maybe he just couldn’t stand it there without her, so he came looking. “It was the waste of a trip. She’s not here,” I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. “She’s not here. You can hiss all you like. You won’t find Prim.” At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow hopefully. “Get out!” He dodges the pillow I throw at him. “Go away! There’s nothing left for you here!” I start to shake, furious with him. “She’s not coming back! She’s never ever coming back here again!” I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. “She’s dead.” I clutch my middle to dull the pain. Sink down on my heels, rocking the pillow, crying. “She’s dead, you stupid cat. She’s dead.” A new sound, part crying, part singing, comes out of my body, giving voice to my despair. Buttercup begins to wail as well. No matter what I do, he won’t go. He circles me, just out of reach, as wave after wave of sobs racks my body, until eventually I fall unconscious. But he must understand. He must know that the unthinkable has happened and to survive will require previously unthinkable acts. Because hours later, when I come to in my bed, he’s there in the moonlight. Crouched beside me, yellow eyes alert, guarding me from the night. In the morning, he sits stoically as I clean the cuts, but digging the thorn from his paw brings on a round of those kitten mews. We both end up crying again, only this time we comfort each other. On the strength of this, I open the letter Haymitch gave me from my mother, dial the phone number, and weep with her as well. Peeta, bearing a warm loaf of bread, shows up with Greasy Sae. She makes us breakfast and I feed all my bacon to Buttercup.

Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons. Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users. You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.” If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you. Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.

Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons. Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users. You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.” If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you. Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.

Mark swings his own door open and meets us by the tailgate. "Why don't we ask Emma who she's coming with? I mean, it's her choice, right?" The look Galen gives me is clear: Take care of this, or I will. Or maybe it's more like, It would be my pleasure to take care of this. Either way, I don't want Mark taken care of. Standing between them, the testosterone-to-air ratio is almost suffocating. If I pick Galen, the chances of Mark ever calling me again are as good as Galen eating a whole cheesecake by himself. If I choose Mark, the changes of Galen not wielding his built-in brass knuckles are as good as Rayna giving someone a compliment. My desire to salvage this date with Mark is almost as strong as my desire to salvage his face from certain disfigurement. But salvaging the date as opposed to his face would be selfish in the long run. I sigh in defeat. "I'm sorry, Mark." Mark lets out a gust of air. "Ouch." Scratching the back of his neck, he chuckles. "I guess I should be more superstitious, huh?" He's right. I screwed this up. I should have salvaged the date, his pride. And I should have broken Galen's Royal nose with my own Syrena fist. I turn to His Highness. "Galen, could you give me a minute please? You'll have the next hour to talk to me since you're taking me straight home." Without a word, Galen nods and walks away. I can't quite meet Mark's eyes when I say, "I'm so sorry. I don't know what his deal is. He never acts like this." Except that time he beat Toraf like a stepchild on the beach when he kissed me. But only because Toraf betrayed Rayna. Right? Mark smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "Can't say I blame him. I can already tell you're worth it. I just never had the guts to ask you out. Chloe threatened my life. You know that chick could hit like a man, right? She said you were too good for me. I think she was right." "Wh...what? Chloe knew you liked me?" "Yeah. She never told you? Course not. She thought I was a player." I not, still too stunned that my best friend also acted as my bodyguard without me knowing. "She did think you were a player. And she couldn't definitely hit like a man." "That's what my friend Jax says anyway." Then a little lower, "Geez, Galen's watching me like a hawk right now. He has serial-killer eyes, you know that?" I giggle. "What do you think he'd do if I kissed you good-bye on the cheek?" he whispers conspiratorially. "Don't worry, I'll protect you." He has no idea how serious I am. As he leans in, I brace myself. At the slightest spark of electricity, I'm prepared to turn around with my fists up. But the lightning doesn't strike. Galen is behaving for now. As Mark pulls away from his barely there peck, he sighs. "Do me a favor," he whispers. "Mmm?" "Keep my number. Give me a call if he screws up again." I smile. "I will, I promise. I had a good time tonight." Did the date and Mark's face get salvaged? Do I have a chance to redeem myself with him? He chuckles. "Yeah, glad we got to drive here from Middle Point together. next time, we'll make it a real adventure and take the bus. See you at school, Emma." "Bye.

Naomi stretched as she woke with an exaggerated yawn in her own bed. How the hell did I get here? Recollection of the dirty trick the two men played on her the previous night made her sit up abruptly. The sheet fell away and she noticed her clothing of the previous eve gone, replaced with a t-shirt and shorts. “Those dirty, rotten pigs,” she cursed as she swung her legs out of bed and sat on the edge. “You called?” A head topped with tousled hair poked out from around the door frame of the bathroom. Number sixty-nine’s dark eyes twinkled and his lips curled in a sensual smile. Despite her irritation, her body flooded with warmth. “You!” She pointed at him and shot him a dark glare. He grinned wider. “What about me, darling?” “I’m going to kick your balls so hard you’re going to choke on them. How dare you drug me and then do despicable things to my body while I was unconscious?” Stepping forward from the bathroom, he raised his arms in surrender and her eyes couldn’t help drinking in the sight of him. No one should look that delicious, especially in the morning, was her disgruntled thought. Shirtless, Javier’s tight and toned muscles beckoned. Encased in smooth, tanned skin, his muscular torso tapered down to lean hips where his jeans hung, partially unbuttoned and displayed a bulge that grew as she watched. Unbidden heat flooded her cleft and her nipples shriveled so tight she could have drilled holes with them. She forced herself to swallow and look away before she did something stupid— say, like, licking her way down from his flat nipples to the dark vee of hair that disappeared into his pants. “It would take a braver man than me to disobey your mother’s orders. Besides, you needed the sleep,” he added in a placating tone. Scowling, Naomi mentally planned a loud diatribe for her mother. “Let me ask you, how does your head feel now?” His question derailed her for a second, and she paused to realize she actually felt pretty damned good— but now I’m horny and it’s all his friggin’ fault. She dove off the bed and stalked toward him, five foot four feet of annoyed woman craving coffee, a Danish, and him— naked inside her body. The first two she’d handle shortly, the third, she’d make him pay for. He stood his ground as she approached, the idiot. “What did you do to me while I was out?” she growled as she patted her neck looking for a mating mark. “Nothing. Contrary to your belief, snoring women with black and blue faces just don’t do it for me.” His jibe hurt, but not as much as her foot when it connected with his undefended man parts. He ended up bent over, wheezing while Naomi smirked in satisfaction. “That’s for knocking me out. But, if I find out you did anything to me other than dress me, like cop a feel or take nudie pictures, I’m going hurt you a lot worse.” “Has anyone ever told you you’re hot when you’re mad?” said the man with an obvious death wish. Only his speed saved him from her swinging fist as she screeched at him. “Go away. Can’t you tell I’m not interested?” “Liar.” He threw that comment at her from the other side of her bed. “I can smell your arousal, sweetheart. And might I say, I can’t wait to taste it.

And at 10:23 p.m. Central Time, a cornfield in Buttercup, Iowa split open and It emerged: that selfsame deity that the Pre-Atlantean, Post-Lemurian Serpent Priests addressed by Seven-Thousand-and-Twelve Sacred Names (Number Eleven translating to “Whatever It Is, We Wish It Would Just Leave Us Alone”); that lugubrious critter known to the ancient Aztecs as He-Who-Drips-Sweat-All-Over-Our-Nice-Clean-Temple, to whom they sacrificed the lymph nodes of their enemies after they’d given the hearts to gods they actually liked.

Lily fought like a lynx caught in a steel trap. She scratched and bit and kicked with a force that took Connell by surprise. Her teeth sank into the sensitive flesh of his palm and forced him to let go. “Calm down, Lily. It’s just me, Connell.” The beginning of her scream died away, and she spun on him, her eyes flashing with fury. “Why did you sneak up on me like that?” “I didn’t mean to.” He brought his smarting hand to his mouth and sucked at the blood she’d drawn. “When you didn’t hear me approach, I thought I might startle you. And I didn’t want you to scream—a sure way to get every shanty boy in the camp to come running.” The tempest in her eyes turned into a low gale. He glanced at the teeth marks she’d left in his hand. “You sure know how to greet a fellow.” “And you sure know how to scare a girl half to death.” “Why exactly were you so scared?” “Because I thought you were someone else.” “And what if I had been someone else?” She paused, her pretty lips stalled around the shape of her next word. “Any number of the rough men from this camp could have followed you out here.” He’d seen the way the men were looking at her, how they hadn’t been able to take their eyes off her from the moment she’d arrived. “What would you have done then?” When she’d run off into the woods after the stupid cat, he’d had to yell at several of the men to stop them from chasing after her. “I would have screamed.” She pulled herself up to her full height, which he estimated to be five feet six inches. “Since apparently I’d get lots of attention that way.” “I’m serious,” he started. But then at the glimpse of the twinkle in her eyes, his ready lecture stalled. He stuck his aching hand into his pocket and pressed his wound against the scratchy wool. “I appreciate your concern,” she offered with the hint of a smile. “But I’m a much stronger woman than you realize.” She’d be no match for any of his strong shanty boys. “You were reckless to wander off by yourself.” He tried to soften his accusation, but he wanted her to realize the constant danger she was in simply by being an attractive woman in a place populated by lusty men. “I strongly suggest you refrain from doing so again—especially if you hope to avoid any further run-ins.

Obesity is so rampant that it seems contagious. It’s an epidemic now, and it’s spreading to other countries— the British are gaining, the Chinese are gaining, even the French are gaining— which makes it a pandemic. There are frantic efforts to make it stop. Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous were just early tactics in a long war that would go on to include the Pritikin Principle, the Scarsdale Medical Diet, Slimfast, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, The Zone, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, the Blood Type Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the Master Cleanse, the DASH diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Paleo Diet, and the Raw Diet. Americans have eaten fat- burning grapefruits, consumed cabbage soup for seven straight days, calculated their daily points target, followed the easy and customizable menu plan, dialed the 1- 800 number to speak to a live weight- loss counselor, taken cider vinegar pills, snacked strategically, eliminated high- glycemic vegetables during the fourteen- day induction phase, achieved a 40:30:30 calorie ratio, brought insulin and glucagon into balance, sought scientific guidance from celebrities, abstained from the deadly cultural practice known as cooking, tanned and then bled themselves to more fully mimic the caveman state, asked that the chef please prepare the omelet with no yolks, and attained the fat- burning metabolic nirvana known as ketosis. It has all been a terrible, amazing failure.

We were sexual targets, marked as eternal sluts for exploring the desires only acceptable in men.

Lord, when the alarm clock, stove clock, and time clock demand my presence, When the pace of life is hectic, When I wish there were six more hours in a day, When the traffic light is stuck on red And my family’s schedule demands I be in three places at one time, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, when people expect too much of me, When the boss has forgotten about the eight-hour day, When I am constantly at others’ beck and call, When the cell phone, Twitter, fax, and email all go off at once And I begin to hate the human race, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, when work occupies all my waking hours, When television commercials say I must have more, When my neighbors flaunt their newest toys, When alcoholic does not apply but workaholic does And I decide to go to the office on Sunday to catch up, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, when money means more than people, When I read The Wall Street Journal more than my Bible, When overtime becomes my primetime, When promotions and pay hikes are my ultimate goals And looking out for number one has become my slogan in life, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, may I refocus my life on you. May I restore my thoughts in your Word. May I refresh my schedule by meditating on all your blessings. May I relax my activity every week to enjoy the life you gave me. May I take time to rest, Lord.

Ponder this: From 1983 to 2008, the number of people in the world with diabetes increased sevenfold, from 35 to 240 million. In just three years, from 2008 to 2011, we added another 110 million diabetics to our global population. Shouldn’t the main question we ask be why is this happening? instead of what new drug can we find to treat it?

Somewhat unnerved by what he felt were Germanic currents in a man whom he had taken to be just an Italian intellectual who ate flowers, Strassnitzky cautiously argued that "the records are secret, part of the War Office. How do you expect to match the number with the man?" "I haven't the slightest idea," Alessandro said, almost arrogantly, "but God is directly in charge of all things relating to life and death. That I've learned in the war." "You think God is going to get you the operations records of the Austrian army?" "I don't know, but if He were, wouldn't you imagine that the first thing He'd do would be to have me conveyed to Vienna?

Anything, anything at all can be logical. For something to be logical, it just has to be a valid example of reasoning from some set of premises.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke were all written in Greek. But Jesus probably did not speak Greek. He was a Jewish peasant. He might have known a little Greek, but his normal tongue would have been the Semitic dialect commonly spoken by the peasants of Palestine in the first century CE, Aramaic. The original oral tradition associated with Jesus would have been communicated among the peasants of Galilee also in Aramaic. Now, here is the problem. When we compare the same stories in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they agree not just in general or in gist, but often word for word, verbatim. Not 100 percent verbatim, but often as much as 80 percent, and sometimes even more. How shall we explain this? Does a theory of oral transmission work? Say a set of stories circulated orally in Aramaic; they were told and retold in great variety. They usually communicated the gist but were never word for word the same. Then, gradually, bilingual listeners began to repeat the stories, now sometimes in Aramaic, sometimes in Greek. Greek versions began to circulate orally, told and retold in great variety, usually communicating the gist but never being told word for word the same. Imagine the various ways in which any particular story might have been told, in two different languages, by dozens of different people, in myriad different contexts. Now imagine a story from this oral tradition beginning with Jesus, spreading around in Aramaic, then trickling over into Greek, and spreading around again in the new language; finally one particular version falls on the ears of, say, the author of Matthew, who includes it in his gospel. Now imagine that a different author, say, the author of Luke, hears the same story, but a version of it that has taken a different route through that complex process of being passed on, and he also decides to include it in his gospel. What are the chances that these two versions of the story will agree with one another, in Greek, nearly verbatim? A clever mathematician could perhaps compute the odds. Let us just say, they would be astronomical. But that’s not all. Jesus was an aphorist and a storyteller. How many times would he have told one of his parables, a good one like the Sower? Dozens of times? Probably. But when a gospel writer includes a parable in his narrative, he can only really use it once. If he were to repeat it as Jesus actually had done, over and over again, that would be tedious. He has to choose one place to put it and one way to tell it. Now, when the authors of Matthew and Mark include the Parable of the Sower in their gospels, they both just happen to portray Jesus telling it right after a scene in which Jesus is accused of having a demon, Beelzebul, so that his family must come to try and take him away. And that story, in both gospels, follows close after a story in which Jesus is healing and exorcizing multitudes. And that story, in both gospels, follows one in which Jesus heals a man with a withered hand. And before that, in both gospels, there is a story about Jesus and his disciples passing through the grain fields of Galilee, feeding themselves from the gleanings. It is not just that Matthew, Mark, and Luke share a large number of stories, sayings, and parables, or that these common traditions often agree almost verbatim from gospel to gospel. They also present these things in the same order. Could oral tradition account for all of that? Never.

Come Let Us Worship Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. —PSALM 95:6     A recent point of frustration, debate, and tension in many churches has been about defining worship and agreeing what it should look like. Older Christians are confused because of changes made to the style of worship. They wonder whatever happened to the old hymns that were so beloved. They knew the page numbers and all the old verses by heart. Today there are no hymnals, the organs have been silenced, and guitars, drums, and cymbals have taken over. The choir and their robes have been abandoned, and now we have five to seven singers on stage leading songs. We stand for 30 minutes at a time singing song lyrics that we aren’t familiar with from a large screen. What’s happening? If the church doesn’t have these components, the young people leave and go to where it’s happening. Are we going to let the form of worship divide our churches? I hope not! The origins of many of the different expressions of worship can be found in the Psalms, which portray worship as an act of the whole person, not just the mental sphere. The early founders established ways to worship based on what they perceived after reading this great book of the Bible. Over the centuries, Christian worship has taken many different forms, involving various expressions and postures on the part of churchgoers. The Hebrew word for “worship” literally means “to kneel” or “to bow down.” The act of worship is the gesture of humbling oneself before a mighty authority. The Psalms also call upon us to “sing to the LORD, bless His name” (96:2 NASB). Music has always played a large part in the sacred act of worship. Physical gestures and movements are also mentioned in the Psalms. Lifting our hands before God signifies our adoration of Him. Clapping our hands shows our celebration before God. Some worshipers rejoice in His presence with tambourines and dancing (see Psalm 150:4). To worship like the psalmist is to obey Jesus’ command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). There are many more insights for worship in the book of Psalms: • God’s gifts of instruments and vocal music can be used to help us worship (47:1; 81:1-4). • We can appeal to God for help, and we can thank Him for His deliverance (4:3; 17:1-5). • Difficult times should not prevent us from praising God (22:23- 24; 102:1-2; 140:4-8).

A semi-cirque of flying rooks, just seven in number, flapped with creaking wings across the top of the tower, making their way northwest towards Mark Moor. Little did they reck of the cracking of the skull of a man upon a patch of grass! As for a tiny earth beetle that was foraging for its insect prey just there, it scurried away from Tom's blood as if it had been a lake of brimstone.

Probably just a coincidence though.

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (KJV) God has commanded you and I to study His Word. Under

not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. 2 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” (KJV) This promise states that Jesus is coming for

And there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast and them which worshiped his image.” In Revelation

they happen just by seeing certain predictive patterns in a person’s algorithm. If you think this sounds too futuristic or just too crazy to be true, well, think again. A small amount of research on your own will find that many governments

I wonder, are you ready?

In 1 John chapter 2 verse 28 it says, “And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.” (KJV)

Society today has mastered the art of “sin creep”. What I mean by that is that there is so much taking up our time, and so much being poured into our minds from every direction, that many times we aren't even aware of how far we have drifted from the shoreline of grace and truth. We must

It’s true that low rep workouts, consisting of powerful and explosive movements, will build more size (but not less definition) than high rep workouts, because the “fast twitch” muscle fibers required in explosive movements are much larger than “slow twitch” fibers required for more enduring tasks. But really, for mass, wouldn’t you want to recruit all possible muscle fibers and not just the fast twitch? Likewise, for “definition”–that is, losing body fat so the striations in your muscles show more–wouldn’t you want to recruit all possible muscle fibers, especially since the number one factor affecting our resting metabolic rate, and thus fat loss, is muscle mass? The only thing you should alter depending on your goal–whether it’s to tone or bulk up–is nutrition.

Just adding (for some only mind number ONE)4 ‘I, I shall go in, when the major has done:’ The Sub, who was, now, a most terrible plight, in; And, not quite aware of priority S---ING, Squeez’d awhile; ‘Well!’ says he, ‘then, the best friends MUST PART;’ Crap! Crap! ’twas a moist one! a right Brewer’s ****! And, finding it vain, to be stopping the lake; ‘Zounds!’ says he, ‘then, here goes man! I’ve brew’d; so, I’ll bake.

As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and "vive la guerre éternelle"—till the New Jerusalem, of course!

Apparently, I’m known as a “reader.” I read two or three books a week, which normally comes in at around one hundred and twenty-five books a year. And I feel pretty good about that. At least I did. Until I read Charles Chu’s calculations. The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours. TV…2,737.5 hours. Meaning, for just a fraction of the time we give to social media and television, we could all become avid readers to the nth degree. Chu lamented: Here’s the simple truth behind reading a lot of books. It’s not that hard. We have all the time we need. The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.

I’ll focus on two of these patents, both issued in 2018,” I said to Mark Russell’s audience. “The first is entitled, Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device. This one involves an aerospace-underwater craft of incredible speed and maneuverability. A vehicle capable of flying just as well in space, air, or water without leaving a heat signature. “Sound familiar? If you’re thinking this patent has to have come from the reverse engineering of an alien craft, you aren’t alone.” I paused for effect as I put the title pages of both patents on the screen. “The how of it all is quite interesting, taking me back to my grad school days. The invention involves the creation of a quantum vacuum around a vehicle using a dense, spinning, electromagnetic energy field. Such a quantum vacuum would repel matter that would otherwise impede the craft, greatly reducing the ship’s inertia, decreasing resistance, and leading to extreme speeds.” I smiled. “Let me read you a sentence from the actual, issued patent. I’m a science fiction writer, and even I wouldn’t have been crazy enough to write a sentence this bold. Here it is: this invention would also enable us to ‘engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level.’ “That’s in the actual patent. Really! You can find the patent and read it for yourself. All you have to do is Google its official USPTA number, which is US10144532B2.

Finding the Competitive Levers When there’s a battle between two networks, there are competitive levers that shift users from one into the other—what are they? The best place to focus in the rideshare market was the hard side of the network: drivers. More drivers meant that prices would be lower, attracting valuable high-frequency riders that often comparison shop for fares. Attract more riders, and it more efficiently fills the time of drivers, and vice versa. There was a double benefit to moving drivers from a competitor’s network to yours—it would push their network into surging prices while yours would lower in price. Uber’s competitive levers would combine financial incentives—paying up for more sign-ups, more hours—with product improvements to improve Acquisition, Engagement, and Economic forces. Drawing in more drivers through product improvements is straightforward—the better the experience of picking up riders and routing the car to their destination, the more the app would be used. Building a better product is one of the classic levers in the tech industry, but Uber focused much of its effort on targeted bonuses for drivers. Why bonuses? Because for drivers, that was their primary motivation for using the app, and improving their earnings would make them sticky. But these bonuses weren’t just any bonuses—they were targeted at quickly flipping over the most valuable drivers in the networks of Uber’s rivals, targeting so-called dual apping drivers that were active on multiple networks. They were given large, special bonuses that compelled them to stick to Uber, and every hour they drove was an hour that the other networks couldn’t utilize. There was a sophisticated effort to tag drivers as dual appers. Some of these efforts were just manual—Uber employees who took trips would just ask if the drivers drove for other services, and they could mark them manually in a special UI within the app. There were also behavioral signals when drivers were running two apps—they would often pause their Uber session for a few minutes while they drove for another company, then unpause it. On Android, there were direct APIs that could tell if someone was running Uber and Lyft at the same time. Eventually a large number of these signals were fed into a machine learning model where each driver would receive a score based on how likely they were to be a dual apper. It didn’t have to be perfect, just good enough to aid the targeting.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

Mark Allin and Richard Burton started Capstone, their book-publishing venture, with high hopes. False modesty aside, they knew they were excellent editors, with a great track record at two publishing giants. I could vouch for Mark Allin’s profit-making abilities, since he gave me the idea for writing The 80/20 Principle, my bestselling book. Richard and Mark envisaged Capstone as a star venture, the leader in a new category of ‘funky business books’. They convinced me that this idea was plausible and I became their financial backer. I reckoned that I had an ‘each-way bet’ - either their star business would materialise, or, at worst, they would pick a few great winners, making Capstone highly profitable. The business appeared to start well. They commissioned a stream of trendy books from interesting authors. The product looked great, with distinctive trendy designs. Mark and Richard were full of ideas and enthusiasm, confidently projecting sales that would give us good profits. The only thing was, the forecasts never materialised. Whenever we looked at the numbers we were constantly disappointed. I kept injecting cash, and it kept vanishing. To this day I don’t know why their books didn’t sell in quantities we could reasonably expect.The favoured explanation was the weakness of the sales force - inevitably, it was difficult to acquire distribution muscle from scratch. Maybe they just had bad luck in not commissioning any smash hits. Whatever the reason, Capstone was a financial black hole. I remember a rather difficult meeting at my home in Richmond some three years after the start. Richard and Mark asked for a further loan to commission new books. I had to say no. We had to face facts. Capstone was not a star; the category of ‘funky business books’ had not established itself. Capstone was a rather weak follower in the business-books arena. Capstone had none of the financial attributes of a star. If it looked like a dog, behaved like a dog and barked like a dog, it probably was a dog.

Revelation 6:9–11 (HCSB): When He opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the people slaughtered because of God’s word and the testimony they had. They cried out with a loud voice: “Lord, the One who is holy and true, how long until You judge and avenge our blood from those who live on the earth?” So a white robe was given to each of them, and they were told to rest a little while longer until the number would be completed of their fellow slaves and their brothers, who were going to be killed just as they had been.

Bosch dropped the carton to the floor of the car and held the pistol in his left hand. There was no brand name or marking on the bluing. Just serial and model numbers, but the five-point star stamped into the grip told Bosch the weapon was a Black Star pistol manu factured by the government of China. He had seen them on occasion in L.A. They were made by the tens of thousands for the Chinese military and a growing number ended up being stolen and smuggled across the ocean. Many of them obviously stayed in China and were smuggled into Hong Kong.

During the bust, fuckedcompany.com—a snarky twist on the technology magazine Fast Company—became popular with the tech crowd. As its name suggested, Fucked Company logged the era’s many misadventures. Several X.com employees remembered browsing Fucked Company daily during this period—not out of schadenfreude, but out of fear that they might be next. That Confinity and X.com didn’t end up in the Valley’s discard bin was attributable to a number of factors, not least that it had enough runway to ride out a rocky year. “Back then, there were probably five to seven other little piddling online money moving services… that just got starved of oxygen over time. And they all died out by the fall,” said Vince Sollitto. Former employees point to the $100 million round’s timing as a watershed for PayPal. “I don’t think people know how precarious it was,” Klement offered. “If we hadn’t raised that $100 million round, there would be no PayPal.” Mark Woolway extended the counterfactual: “If the team hadn’t closed that one hundred million,” Woolway said, “there would be no SpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.

Has nobody not told you, Brian, that you've got this kind of gleeful preoccupation with the future? I wouldn't even mind, but you don't even have a fuckin' future, I don't have a future. Nobody has a future. The party's over. Take a look around you man, it's all breaking up. Are you not familiar with the book of Revelations of St. John, the final book of the Bible prophesying the apocalypse?... He forced everyone to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one shall be able to buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the name of the beast, or the number of his name, and the number of the beast is 6-6-6... What can such a specific prophecy mean? What is the mark? Well the mark, Brian, is the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode that you'll find on every bog roll and packet of johnnies and every poxy pork pie, and every fuckin' barcode is divided into two parts by three markers, and those three markers are always represented by the number 6. 6-6-6! Now what does it say? No one shall be able to buy or sell without that mark. And now what they're planning to do in order to eradicate all credit card fraud and in order to precipitate a totally cashless society, what they're planning to do, what they've already tested on the American troops, they're going to subcutaneously laser tattoo that mark onto your right hand, or onto your forehead. They're going to replace plastic with flesh. Fact! In the same book of Revelations when the seven seals are broken open on the day of judgment and the seven angels blow the trumpets, when the third angel blows her bugle, wormwood will fall from the sky, wormwood will poison a third part of all the waters and a third part of all the land and many many many people will die! Now do you know what the Russian translation for wormwood is?... Chernobyl! Fact. On August the 18th, 1999, the planets of our solar system are gonna line up into the shape of a cross... They're gonna line up in the signs of Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, and Scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocalypse, as mentioned in the book of Daniel, another fuckin' fact! Do you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Brian, the game is up!

It’s like a scene from Orwell’s 1984, except it is real, and it is now. We are all just cases and numbers.

Naturally, we even made snow angels in the backyard as we stumbled around, and passed out. No one cared what we did really, thus far that was the fun of it all. Oh, and Kenneth was just the boy that only wanted one thing from Jenny. He had no personality to speak of… he would hit on me all the time, and sometimes he would get it from me too, or I would be out of the group by her if he said I was the one that wanted it from him. We could break widows out of old buildings and homes, and who would stop us. Sure, we got chased by the cops, yet that was the fun of it too. There is nothing else for us to do. I remember Maddie leaving her handprints in the wet mud, Jenny her butt, and some of her lady-ness, when the town thought it was time for new sidewalks. Yet we all did, something that would last forever, we thought. Maddie drew a few other things too. You can get the picture! All inappropriate… all there for life. She was just crazy like that, like squatting down pissing, and doing number two in the old man Jackups yard. She has more balls than most guys… I knew. Old man Jackups called us, ‘Mindless slutty hooligans’ So that was payback. At the time- I thought like what is wrong with that, we're just having some fun here… your old windbag, like go and sit on your cane! You know what I mean… I think? I remember being so smashed at my sweet sixteen too, that I don’t even remember it. Yet that is what having a good time was all about, so they say. Bumping and grinding on all the boys with loud music. And as the twinkling lights shine on your skin, that lights the way up to your bedroom. You know that your puffy dress is going to be pushed up a couple of times on that night. I just don’t remember how many times it was, and I didn’t remember who it was with, I am not even sure if I know them at all… all of them or not. All I know is I did it all and was happy to do whatever they asked me to do. But- but I thought I was having the time of my life. I was the birthday girl that had the rosiest pink lipstick on most boys at the party. I thought it was such a horror. In my mind at the time, I thought that I high-jacked the rainbow, and crashed into a pot of gold! All the girls my age did it, yet I was the best at it! I recall the time Liv and I went trick or treating. I was dressed as Hermione from the Harry Potter movies. Liv was a sexy witch! With the pointed hat. So, original…! That is what I told her. That was the night we scared the pants off of Ray in the not-so-scary haunted house. And before you ask, he was dressed as Harry. So, I wanted to play with his wand, that's why I dressed the way I did at the time. Liv was one of those good friends… I thought, which would tell everyone what you all did the day after, to all the girls at the lunch table. She can text faster than anyone I know. Anyways… we jumped out at him, and he nearly craps his nicely pressed pants. I am sure there was a skid mark on his tighty- whities or something. Yet he did yack on Liv’s chest, and that was hilarious to me. She was dancing around, and flapping her hands doing the funky chicken while yelling, ‘Ou- ou- ou- wah!’ As I dibble over in lather, I guess it was funnier when it doesn’t happen to you too many times.

A class of people who worked for the temple (which functioned as a proto–city hall) figured out how to keep track of stuff by elaborating on the tokens-pressed-in-clay system. They used a reed stylus to make marks on a little clay tablet and started using abstract symbols for numbers themselves. The first writers weren’t poets; they were accountants. For a long time, that’s all writing was. No love notes. No eulogies. No stories. Just IOU six sheep. Or, as a tablet from a famous mound in a Sumerian city called Uruk, in present-day Iraq, said: “Lu-Nanna, the head of the temple, received one cow and its two young suckling bull calves from the royal delivery from [a guy named] Abasaga.

A class of people who worked for the temple (which functioned as a proto–city hall) figured out how to keep track of stuff by elaborating on the tokens-pressed-in-clay system. They used a reed stylus to make marks on a little clay tablet and started using abstract symbols for numbers themselves. The first writers weren’t poets; they were accountants. For a long time, that’s all writing was. No love notes. No eulogies. No stories. Just IOU six sheep. Or, as a tablet from a famous mound in a Sumerian city called Uruk, in present-day Iraq, said: “Lu-Nanna, the head of the temple, received one cow and its two young suckling bull calves from the royal delivery from [a guy named] Abasaga.” Silver—a metal people had used previously for jewelry and rituals—was desirable and scarce and easy to store and divide, and it became money-ish in Mesopotamia, but for lots of people—maybe most people—money still wasn’t a thing.

I'm just a poet, writing about the world I experience; agree or not, take it for what it's worth. What I do know, is the human will and desire can be a force for good or ill. At its best, in a very small number of people, it can uplift and encourage but at its worst, it can be a detriment to whole nations, for everyone wishes to make a mark on the world, and those that desire success above all else are willing to do anything to achieve it. They will say it's all in the name of progress but their desire to make a name for themselves can blind them to their cause and bring down their wrath upon people whom they do not know, nor wish to know, because their desire to achieve negates any empathy they may have.

Jaylynn has a halo of spikes and thorns over her head, which digs into her forehead, and the blood runs down her shadowy brown wavy wispy hair. Her eyes can glow the color of pink. ‘I call them Olivia Cooper eyes! You know, with the black teardrops!’ and her dark cherry black blood flows from them too, as we talk. I think I saw from time to time a black widow crawling on her, making webs on her body. (So- hair-raising.) Along with the markings of unlucky, thirteen were tattooed on her and chiseled into her chest. Other insignias are cataloging her, she has numbers on her marking her like a beast. She has the cereal barcode numbers of- (J-N-0069699611) on her left butt cheek, which glows lime green in the dark! You are nothing but a number along with your first and last initials when you are a dark angel. She can have fire readily available at her fingertips, sharp retracting claws. Along with withdrawing fangs and horns. She also has a very elaborate samurai-like sword with a curved blade. As well as, yes you guessed it! She can sparkle like many thousands of little reflective broken mirrors in the brilliant full moonlight. I never thought I would speak to a black angel, yet she is my little girl, how could I not? ‘To live is to be haunted, to die is to be unperturbed.’ I remember back when she was on the edge of fifteen, and my life was entertaining, pleasurable, and stimulating. Not at all like now; I remember her first days of high school everything seemed flawless, little did I know, that the tower's children had their children, and their evil spirits were passed down to the next demons in the circle of pain; his clan started torturing my little girl until her end. Just as there, mothers did with me. All my life I have tried to prove this story… but how do I write a story that seems so silly to other people that do not understand?

What counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in re-writing the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

Throughout the over 200 years of the field of biogeography, its researchers have discovered some strikingly general patterns in biological diversity, and have advanced an equally intriguing set of explanations for the forces driving those patterns. Despite the many levels, qualitative features, and potential quantitative means of measuring biological diversity, the overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on just one or two relatively simple, but intuitively valuable measures—species richness and endemicity. Species richness is a simple count of the number of species in a particular area of interest (e.g. the number of fish in a pond, lake, or ocean basin). It is a direct, albeit simplistic expression of our innate value for the more complex. But our instinctive valuation of diversity is a bit more ecologically sophisticated than this, as it is also influenced by our apparently innate attraction to the rarest, most precious “gems” of the natural world. A simple thought experiment should bear this out: given two assemblages with the same species richness—one comprising species common to most other ecosystems, and the other solely comprising endemics (so rare that they occur nowhere else), nearly all of us would be drawn to the latter assemblage because it has high endemicity. Beyond this instinctive attraction to the most rare, there clearly is a more pragmatic reason for valuing endemic species over the more broadly distributed (cosmopolitan) ones. If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well.