Massive Respect Quotes

Jem drew the bow back and let the arrow fly; it struck the creature in the side. The massive demon worm writhed in agony, undulating as it swept its great, blind head from side to side, uprooting shrubbery with its thrashings. Leaves filled the air and the boys choked on dust, Gideon backing up with his seraph blade in his hand, trying to see by its light. “It’s coming toward us,” he said in a low voice. And indeed it was, the arrow still protruding from its wet, grayish skin, humping its body along with incredible speed. A flick of its tail caught the edge of a statue, sending it flying into the dry ornamental pool, where it shattered into dust. “By the Angel, it just crushed Sophocles,” noted Will. “Has no one respect for the classics these days?

Massive respect for anyone who has the courage to choose their own path and not just accept the hand they were dealt. However, privileged or unprivileged their background.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

Intellectual property, more than ever, is a line drawn around information, which asserts that despite having been set loose in the world - and having, inevitably, been created out of an individual's relationship with the world - that information retains some connection with its author that allows that person some control over how it is replicated and used. In other words, the claim that lies beneath the notion of intellectual property is similar or identical to the one that underpins notions of privacy. It seems to me that the two are inseparable, because they are fundamentally aspects of the same issue, the need we have to be able to do something by convention that is impossible by force: the need to ringfence certain information. I believe that the most important unexamined notion - for policymakers and agitators both - in these debates is that they are one: you can't persuade people on the one hand to abandon intellectual property (a decision which, incidentally, would mean an even more massive upheaval in the way the world runs than we've seen so far since 1990) and hope to keep them interested in privacy. You can't trash privacy and hope to retain a sense of respect for IP.

That’s right,” I said. “Grand and complex. You say love because people believe in the word, it has a shared meaning and demands respect. It makes the strength stronger. But the strength can be unpredictable, it can gain a life of its own and turn on itself enough to make love into something too strong, this massive force. Something horrifying, brief flashes, this same strength.

By definition, posthumanism (I call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind transfer, or rather 'mind migration,' for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.

[...] les 8 900 milliards de dollars que les gouvernements des États industriels ont versés en 2008-2009 à leurs banques respectives correspondent à soixante-quinze ans d'aide publique au développement... (p. 87)

In 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a massive project to study 3,000 teachers in seven cities and learn what made them effective. The five metrics that most correlated with student learning were: 1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect. 2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to. 3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time. 4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day. 5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

he was usually preposterous yet somehow achieved a certain dignity by his remoteness and agelessness; he was still half-child, already half-veteran; there seemed no spark of contemporary life in him; he had a kind of massive rectitude and impermeability, an indifference to the world, which compelled respect.

For though I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister's gossips; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment someone’s—anyone’s—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain; more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the manor

I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuric-acid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn, or they don't know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh?

For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed. As a beginning it is important to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease. The strands of prejudice toward Negroes are tightly wound around the American character. The prejudice has been nourished by the doctrine of race inferiority. Yet to focus upon the Negro alone as the "inferior race" of American myth is to miss the broader dimensions of the evil. Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations. This is in sharp contrast to many nations south of the border, which assimilated their Indians, respected their culture, and elevated many of them to high position. It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness.

I looked at the huge charlatan with respect. Nicotine, dope, hash, barbiturates, speed, acid, smack, Colombian marching powder, ecstasy, alcohol in every form, all had entered the massive frame by some route and in quantities guaranteed to lay waste to the collected brains of three Melbourne universities or eight in Queensland. In theory, a scan of this man’s skull should reveal a place as grey and still as Kerguelen Island in winter. Yet from time to time there were clear signs of electrical activity.

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.

In a 2007 cable about Nauru, made public by WikiLeaks, an unnamed U.S. official summed up his government’s analysis of what went wrong on the island: “Nauru simply spent extravagantly, never worrying about tomorrow.” Fair enough, but that diagnosis is hardly unique to Nauru; our entire culture is extravagantly drawing down finite resources, never worrying about tomorrow. For a couple of hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere - because we can’t see them - will have no effect whatsoever. Or if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of whatever mess we have made. And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more “inputs” (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and arm their militias and then wonder why they hate us. We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can’t afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder why no one foresaw that a system built on bad debts would collapse. At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing - a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us.

on what warrant is it proposed that all this massive dying-out and occasional vast life-explosion (as in the Cambrian period) also had as its sole object the presence of ourselves? And isn’t it odd that religion, which continually enjoins an almost masochistic modesty upon us in the face of god, should encourage such an extreme and impossible form of self-centeredness and self-regard? By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And—most of all—what kind of designer or creator only chooses to “reveal” himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions? I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record of any human being who was remotely qualified to say that he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our “respect” from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

If Paul brought the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the anti-Christian Porphyry, summed it up, he 'introduced Greek ideas to foreign fables' -- that is, gave a barbarous eastern religion the intellectual respectability of a philosophical defense. Origen was also a phenomenon. As Eusebius put it admiringly, 'even the facts from his cradle are worth mentioning'. Origen came from Alexandria, the second city of the empire and then it's intellectual centre; his father's martyrdom left him an orphan at seventeen with six younger brothers. He was a hard working prodigy, at eighteen head of the Catechetical School, and already trained as a literary scholar and teacher. But at this point, probably in 203, he became a religious fanatic and remained one for the next fifty years. He gave up his job and sold his books to concentrate on religion. he slept on the floor, ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one coat and no shoes. He almost certainly castrated himself, in obedience to the notorious text, Matthew 19:12, 'there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.' Origen's learning was massive and it was of a highly original kind: he always went back to the sources and thought through the whole process himself. This he learned Hebrew and, according to Eusebius, 'got into his possession the original writings extant among the Jews in the actual Hebrew character'. These included the discovery of lost texts; in the case of the psalms, Origen collected not only the four known texts but three others unearthed, including 'one he found at Jericho in a jar'. The result was an enormous tome, the Hexapla, which probably existed in only one manuscript now lost, setting out the seven alternative texts in parallel columns. He applied the same principles of original research to every aspect of Christianity and sacred literature. He seems to have worked all day and though most of the night, and was a compulsive writer. Even the hardy Jerome later complained: 'Has anyone read everything Origen wrote?'

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

I can imagine some other world in which a conference of learned, and totally blind, bat-like creatures is flabbergasted to be told of animals called humans that are actually capable of using the newly discovered inaudible rays called "light" for finding their way about. These otherwise humble humans are almost totally deaf (well, they can hear after a fashion and even utter a few ponderously slow, deep drawling growls, but they only use these sounds for rudimentary purposes like communicating with each other; they don't seem capable of using them to detect even the most massive objects). They have, instead, highly specialized organs called "eyes" for exploiting "light" rays. The sun is the main source of light rays, and humans, remarkably, manage to exploit the complex echoes that bounce off objects when light rays from the sun hit them. They have an ingenious device called a "lens", whose shape appears to be mathematically calculated so that it bends these silent rays in such a way that there is an exact one-to-one mapping between objects in the world and an "image" on a sheet of cells called the "retina". Theses retinal cells are capable of, in some mysterious way, of rendering the light "audible" (one might say), and they relay their information to the brain. Our mathematicians have shown that it is theoretically possible, by doing the right highly complex calculations, to navigate safely through the world using these light rays, just as effectively as one can in the ordinary way using ultrasound -- in some respects even more effectively! But who would have thought that a humble human could do these calculations?

In the late 1960's, physicists Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam, and Sheldon Glashow conquered the next unification frontier. In a phenomenal piece of scientific work they showed that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are nothing but different aspects of the same force, subsequently dubbed the electroweak force. The predictions of the new theory were dramatic. The electromagnetic force is produced when electrically charged particles exchange between them bundles of energy called photons. The photon is therefore the messenger of electromagnetism. The electroweak theory predicted the existence of close siblings to the photon, which play the messenger role for the weak force. These never-before-seen particles were prefigured to be about ninety times more massive than the proton and to come in both an electrically charged (called W) and a neutral (called Z) variety. Experiments performed at the European consortium for nuclear research in Geneva (known as CERN for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) discovered the W and Z particles in 1983 and 1984 respectively.

As for denying the existence of fairies, good and bad, you have to be blind not to see them. They are everywhere, and naturally I have links of affection or dislike with all of them. The wealthy, spendthrift ones squander fortunes in Venice or Monte Carlo: fabulous, ageless women whose birthdays and incomes and origins nobody knows, putting charms on roulette wheels for the dubious pleasure of seeing the same number come up more often than it ought. There they sit, puffing smoke from long cigarette-holders, raking in the chips, and looking bored. Others spend the hours of darkness hanging their apartments in Paris or New York with Gothic tapestries, hitherto unrecorded, that drive the art-dealers demented-gorgeous tapestries kept hidden away in massive chests beneath deserted abbeys and castles since their own belle epoque in the Middle Ages. Some stick to their original line of country, agitating tables at seances or organizing the excitement in haunted houses; some perform kind deeds, but in a capricious and uncertain manner that frequently goes wrong, And then there are the amorous fairies, who never give up. They were to be seen fluttering through the Val Sans Retour in the forest of Broceliande, where Morgan la Fee concealed the handsome knight Guyomar and many lost lovers besides, or over the Isle of Avallon where the young knight Lanval lived happily with a fairy who had stolen him away. Now wrinkled with age, the amorous ones contrive to lure young men on the make who, immaculately tailored and bedecked with baubles from Cartier, escort them through the vestibules of international hotels. Yet other fairies, more studious and respectable, devote themselves to science, whirring and breathing above tired inventors and inspiring original ideas-though lately the unimaginable numbers,the formulae and the electronics, tend to overwhelm them. The scarcely comprehensible discoveries multiply around them and shake a world that is not theirs any more, that slips through their immaterial fingers. And so it goes on-all sorts and conditions of fairies, whispering together, purring to themselves, unnoticed on the impercipient earth. And I am one of them.

In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister's gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one's own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's—any one's—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.

Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind and the earth are experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man developed his sense of dependence on—and respect for—the natural environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check. The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed obscured nature's role in human experience—hiding the sun with a pall of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the earth with sprawling cities. Man's dependence on the natural world became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the subject matter of textbooks, monographs and lectures. True, this theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (partial ones at best) into the natural world, but its onesidedness robbed us of all sensuous dependence on and all visible contact and unity with nature. In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally inanimate, totally synthetic—a purely inorganic physical milieu that promoted the deanimization of man and his thought.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

If we look honestly at the way many people manage their dogs today, we are faced with a staggering reflection of irresponsibility and lack of compassion. It is difficult to refer to a dog as “man’s best friend” when more than six million unwanted adult dogs and puppies are euthanized every year. We are not speaking here of the humane killing of animals done out of a sense of responsible stewardship but of the massive human negligence that leads to euthanasia. For those who doubt the serious implications of this situation, a trip to the local animal shelter can be a real eye-opener. We recall one client who dismissed our advice about spaying her female shepherd, explaining she felt it was important for her children to have the experience of seeing puppies born. When we asked her how she intended to care for and give homes to the puppies, she responded that she really had not thought about it at all and that she would probably leave them at the local humane society when it was time for them to be weaned. We then asked her what value such an experience would have if the principal lesson her children would learn is that puppies are cute little playthings who, when sufficiently used, may then be conveniently disposed of. Fortunately, our questioning convinced her of her faulty thinking, and she left with a new respect for the implications of bringing puppies into the world.

Bodies influence the space that surrounds them; they tell us whatever we can learn about that space. Does this mean that, possibly, there is no such thing as space by itself? Could it be that space is nothing but a theoretical construction invented for the purpose of giving the observed world an ordered framework? Could it be that we perceive as the reality of space is nothing but the influence of abstract laws of nature on the behavior of massive objects or bodies? That space is wedded to these bodies and will vanish if they do? This is a respectable position to take. For more than two thousand years, it has coexisted with the view of space as the primary stage that permits material objects to make their appearance. Natural philosophers who theorized about space can easily be charted on a scale between these two extreme positions. On the left is Thales of Miletus, whose "space" is nothing but one shapeless fluid; on the other side, there is Democritus, with his empty space in which material objects whir around. Leibniz on the left, Von guericke and Newton on the right. Albert Einstein juxtaposed these two concepts of space as, on one hand, the positional qualities of the physical world (left) and, on the other, the container of all physical objects (right) in his left-hand case, there is no space without an object; on the right, such an object cannot be thought of except in conjunction with the space that surrounds it-thereby assigning to space a higher reality than that possessed by objects.

I know that you are preparing to fight." There were screams amongst the students, some of whom clutched each other, looking around in terror for the source of the sound. "Your efforts are futile. You cannot fight me. I do not want to kill you. I have great respect for the teachers of Hogwarts. I do not want to spill magical blood." There was silence in the Hall now, the kind of silence that presses against the eardrums, that seems too huge to be contained by walls. "Give me Harry Potter," said Voldemort's voice, "and they shall not be harmed.Give me Harry Potter and I shall leave the school untouched. Give me Harry Potter and you will be rewarded. "You have until midnight." The silence swallowed them all again. Every head turned, every eye in the place seemed to have found Harry, to hold him forever in the glare of thousands of invisible beams. Then a figure rose from the Slytherin table and he recognized Pansy Parkinson as she raised a shaking arm and screamed, "But he's there! Potter's there. Someone grab him!" Before Harry could speak, there was a massive movement. The Gryffindors in front of him had risen and stood facing, not Harry, but the Slytherins. Then the Hufflepuffs stood, and almost at the same moment, the Ravenclaws, all of them with their backs to Harry, all of them looking toward Pansy instead, and Harry, awestruck and overwhelmed, saw wands emerging everywhere, pulled from beneath cloaks and from under sleeves. "Thank you, Miss Parkinson." said Professor McGonagall in a clipped voice."You will leave the Hall first with Mr. Filch. If the rest of your House could follow.

Actual estate is a form of funding Real estate is a form of funding and is shortly being adopted by many individuals. The advantages of real property investments are many as mentioned here.There's a widespread adage that says don't put all your eggs in a single basket. That is the place actual property steps in to provide diversification. Diversification means spreading the danger of your cash. Real estate gives one other way of investing money relatively than investing it multi function place. One other advantage of real estate investment is that it ensures one a supply five on shenton of income for a very long time. It's because actual estate will at all times have shoppers who need to purchase or lease homes or premises for residential or enterprise functions respectively. This form of funding serves as a further income other than the normal wage one receives. Better still while you retire it is going to nonetheless be your revenue source. The other benefit is that one doesn't should be bodily present to get the revenue. Thirdly, you get to have leverage over all OPMS. It's easy for an individual who is in actual property to get a house and pay it off over a long time period. Generally the deal is so good that some brokers get as many as 30 years to pay off their mortgages! It's also a way of leaving one’s legacy behind that will probably be remembered for a few years to come even after one’s demise. Regardless of the very fact of the massive sum of money required to begin, the benefits of real estate investments that you're going to get are simply many.

Flywheel, which provides an app for users to summon taxicabs with their smartphones, will offer a flat $10 rate for all Flywheel-summoned cab rides within San Francisco from 8 p.m. Wednesday to 3 a.m. Thursday. The same price will apply in Seattle and Flywheel’s new markets of San Diego and Sacramento. “Uber can charge 30 times (normal) or whatever they hell they want to do, but we want to make sure anyone who takes a taxi pays a flat fee,” said Flywheel CEO Rakesh Mathur. (He clarified that the 30-times number was “just made up.”) That promotion will cost Flywheel a pretty penny. The startup will pay cabbies double what the metered rates would have been — so in effect, they receive surge pricing, without passengers having to pay it. While Flywheel doesn’t have the massive war chest of Uber, which has raised about $3 billion, it has a respectable $30 million in venture backing, including a recent $12 million round.

It’s interesting that wealth tends to skip a generation. Overwhelming abundance often leads to a lackadaisical mentality, which brings about a sedentary lifestyle. Children of the wealthy are especially susceptible. They weren’t the ones who developed the discipline and character to create the wealth in the first place, so it makes sense that they may not have the same sense of value for wealth or understand what’s necessary to keep it. We frequently see this entitlement mentality in children of royalty, movie stars, and corporate executives—and to a lesser degree, in children and adults everywhere. As a nation, our entire populace seems to have lost appreciation for the value of a strong work ethic. We’ve had two, if not three, generations of Americans who have known great prosperity, wealth, and ease. Our expectations of what it really takes to create lasting success—things like grit, hard work, and fortitude—aren’t alluring, and thus have been mostly forgotten. We’ve lost respect for the strife and struggle of our forefathers. The massive effort they put forth instilled discipline, chiseled their character, and stoked the spirit to brave new frontiers. The truth is, complacency has impacted all great empires, including, but not limited to, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Why? Because nothing fails like success. Once-dominant empires have failed for this very reason. People get to a certain level of success and get too comfortable.

Hegel is frequently presented as embodying a post-critical resurgence of metaphysics, a recrudescence of what seemed to have been safely stowed in its grave. True, one finds interpretations in which Hegel as metaphysician is subordinated to Hegel the true heir of the Kantian project. Nevertheless, Hegel's continuity with the prior tradition is so massively evident, and not least for his respect to the Greeks, especially Aristotle, that this interpretation has much to do with the commentators own embarrassments with metaphysics. Yet Hegel has been a contributor, sometimes witting, sometimes not, to metaphysics’ contested place.

I greatly respect my colleagues from Kiev and their massive integrity, even if they do occasionally poison the shit out of one another as part of the natural flow of democratic give-and-take.

The discourse has moved on, you know. It’s like fairy stories. In the old days, the princess always had to get the prince, or it wasn’t considered a happy ending. Then came the first wave of feminism, and that suddenly felt like a cop-out—no self-respecting princess would sell her soul by marrying a prince. (Chuck me another orange cream, will you?) It must’ve been a massive breath of fresh air after what went before. But, these days, fairy-tale endings come in all shapes and sizes. It’s okay for the princess to end up with the prince, it’s okay for her to end up with the footman, it’s okay for her to end up on her own. It’s also okay for her to end up with another princess, or with six cats, or to decide she wants to be a prince. None of those make her any more or less a feminist. It’s about finding out who you are and what you want, and then being true to it.” “Maybe. You know, we mightn’t always agree with each other, but I like the fact that you have opinions on things. At least you can be bothered.

With these ideas in mind, I decided to create a blog, Council of European Canadians, early in the summer of 2014 ‘dedicated to the promotion and defence of the ethnic interests of European Canadians.’ I called for a strategy in which European Canadians would make use of the current policy of multiculturalism in Canada, using this policy for their own ends by asking for a seat at the table as a people concerned for the preservation of Canada’s European heritage. As part of the ‘beliefs and goals’ of the Council, I stated: We believe Canada is a nation founded by Anglo and French Europeans. In 1971, over 100 years after Confederation, the Anglo and French composition of the Canadian population stood at 44.6 percent and 28.7 percent respectively. All in all, over 96 percent of the population was European in origin. We therefore oppose all efforts to deny or weaken the European character of Canada. We believe that the pioneers and settlers who built the Canadian nation are part of the European people. Therefore we believe that Canada derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and that Canada should remain majority European in its ethnic composition and cultural character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into Canada that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority within our lifetime. In subsequent months I posted articles on a whole range of subjects. From the beginning the blog became a subject of controversy with numerous complaints filed against me to the president of the university where I was working, The University of New Brunswick, and to other members of the administration, followed by TV interviews, many articles in the mainstream media, student university papers, and radio debates. It was obvious I had hit a nerve in the Western establishment. You must not question mass immigration in the name of the ethnic interests of Europeans.

The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.

Edison soon made an announcement that thrilled his new Florida neighbors. For his Fort Myers laboratory to function properly, it must have electricity and lights. Accordingly, he would import a massive dynamo/generator system and electrify the entire isolated community. To this point, Fort Myers homes were lit with kerosene lanterns and candles. Outside of a few major cities, this was true all over Florida. By this one act of its new favorite son, a tiny backwater would leap forward in both reputation and self-respect. A town with electricity mattered.

I asked him what he did. He said his name was John Lord and that he was in the software business. “What kind of software?” I asked. He said that his company’s goal was to make “lawyers obsolete” wherever possible by creating software applications that enable individuals to do more and more legal work without the aid of an attorney. Indeed, Neota Logic, his company, says that its goal is to massively improve access to advice and justice for “the 40+% of Americans who can’t afford an attorney when they need one”—in order to produce wills and basic legal documents and even to handle crucial life events such as home foreclosure, domestic abuse, or child protection. Neota Logic is part of a new strain of software called “expert systems” that aims to identify a large chunk of business that clients need, and that lawyers charge for, but that actually can be done by software: think TurboTax for the legal profession. The company’s website quoted one commentator complaining that Neota Logic’s technology cannot “read between the lines … [or] hold hands and wipe away tears.” To which Neota Logic responded: “You will surely see a press release when we can.” Lord later explained to me that “I have always had a special respect for trial lawyers and hope it will be a long time before algorithms replace them and juries.” Alas, he added, that is “not beyond the realm of possibility of course, but not yet Neota’s mission.” Suddenly I was glad my daughters were not planning to be lawyers.

I think I have to take issue with you on that,” the Archbishop responded. “The people who go around becoming bullies are people who have a massive sense of insecurity, who want to prove that they are somebody, often because they did not get enough love.” “I think, yes, circumstances, environment, education all matter,” the Dalai Lama replied. “Especially today; there is not much focus on inner values in education. Then, instead of inner values, we become self-centered—always thinking: I, I, I. A self-centered attitude brings a sense of insecurity and fear. Distrust. Too much fear brings frustration. Too much frustration brings anger. So that’s the psychology, the system of mind, of emotion, which creates a chain reaction. With a self-centered attitude, you become distanced from others, then distrust, then feel insecure, then fear, then anxiety, then frustration, then anger, then violence.” It was fascinating to hear the Dalai Lama describe the process of mind that leads to fear, alienation, and ultimately to violence. I pointed out that so often our parenting in the West is too focused on our children, and their needs alone, rather than helping them to learn to care for others. The Dalai Lama responded, “Yes, there is too much self-centeredness also among parents—‘my children, my children.’ That’s biased love. We need unbiased love toward entire humanity, entire sentient beings, irrespective of what their attitude is toward us. So your enemies are still human brothers and sisters, so they also deserve our love, our respect, our affection. That’s unbiased love. You might have to resist your enemies’ actions, but you can love them as brothers and sisters. Only we human beings can do this with our human intelligence. Other animals cannot do this.

Here is why the wellbeing economy comes at the right time. At the international level there have been some openings, which can be exploited to turn the wellbeing economy into a political roadmap. The first was the ratification of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. The SDGs are a loose list of 17 goals, ranging from good health and personal wellbeing to sustainable cities and communities as well as responsible production and consumption. They are a bit scattered and inconsistent, like most outcomes of international negotiations, but they at least open up space for policy reforms. For the first time in more than a century, the international community has accepted that the simple pursuit of growth presents serious problems. Even when it comes at high speed, its quality is often debatable, producing social inequalities, lack of decent work, environmental destruction, climate change and conflict. Through the SDGs, the UN is calling for a different approach to progress and prosperity. This was made clear in a 2012 speech by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who explicitly connected the three pillars of sustainable development: ‘Social, economic and environmental wellbeing are indivisible.’82 Unlike in the previous century, we now have a host of instruments and indicators that can help politicians devise different policies and monitor results and impacts throughout society. Even in South Africa, a country still plagued by centuries of oppression, colonialism, extractive economic systems and rampant inequality, the debate is shifting. The country’s new National Development Plan has been widely criticised because of the neoliberal character of the main chapters on economic development. Like the SDGs, it was the outcome of negotiations and bargaining, which resulted in inconsistencies and vagueness. Yet, its opening ‘vision statement’ is inspired by a radical approach to transformation. What should South Africa look like in 2030? The language is uplifting: We feel loved, respected and cared for at home, in community and the public institutions we have created. We feel understood. We feel needed. We feel trustful … We learn together. We talk to each other. We share our work … I have a space that I can call my own. This space I share. This space I cherish with others. I maintain it with others. I am not self-sufficient alone. We are self-sufficient in community … We are studious. We are gardeners. We feel a call to serve. We make things. Out of our homes we create objects of value … We are connected by the sounds we hear, the sights we see, the scents we smell, the objects we touch, the food we eat, the liquids we drink, the thoughts we think, the emotions we feel, the dreams we imagine. We are a web of relationships, fashioned in a web of histories, the stories of our lives inescapably shaped by stories of others … The welfare of each of us is the welfare of all … Our land is our home. We sweep and keep clean our yard. We travel through it. We enjoy its varied climate, landscape, and vegetation … We live and work in it, on it with care, preserving it for future generations. We discover it all the time. As it gives life to us, we honour the life in it.83 I could have not found better words to describe the wellbeing economy: caring, sharing, compassion, love for place, human relationships and a profound appreciation of what nature does for us every day. This statement gives us an idea of sufficiency that is not about individualism, but integration; an approach to prosperity that is founded on collaboration rather than competition. Nowhere does the text mention growth. There’s no reference to scale; no pompous images of imposing infrastructure, bridges, stadiums, skyscrapers and multi-lane highways. We make the things we need. We, as people, become producers of our own destiny. The future is not about wealth accumulation, massive

The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux’s free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks’s Law I counter-propose the following: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Your body isn’t a thing to be looked at and judged against some standard of perfection that doesn’t even really exist. It’s the vessel that takes you through life, allowin’ you to experience all the beautiful things life has to offer. Food. Sex. Sunsets. Music. Hugs. Laughter. A healthy body is a gift. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t treat it like some cheap one-night stand. Treat it like the love of your life. Treat it with respect and tenderness, but most of all, gratitude. And a healthy dose of awe, too. Your body is made of remnants of stars and massive explosions in the galaxies. Every few years, the bulk of your body is newly created by the regeneration of your cells, but you have things in you that are as old as the universe. We’re literally stardust. Every one of us is a little miracle. You’re a miracle, Joellen. Think about that the next time you’re standin’ naked in front of the mirror and want to focus on some stray dimple you don’t like.

Your body isn’t a thing to be looked at and judged against some standard of perfection that doesn’t even really exist. It’s the vessel that takes you through life, allowin’ you to experience all the beautiful things life has to offer. Food. Sex. Sunsets. Music. Hugs. Laughter. A healthy body is a gift. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t treat it like some cheap one-night stand. Treat it like the love of your life. Treat it with respect and tenderness, but most of all, gratitude. And a healthy dose of awe, too. Your body is made of remnants of stars and massive explosions in the galaxies. Every few years, the bulk of your body is newly created by the regeneration of your cells, but you have things in you that are as old as the universe. We’re literally stardust. Every one of us is a little miracle. You’re a miracle, Joellen. Think about that the next time you’re standin’ naked in front of the mirror and want to focus on some stray dimple you don’t like.

There's still a hefty amount of protocol, and even if the bride and groom look like they've respectively stepped out of The Nightmare Before Christmas and an Archie comic, the royal tradition is---" "The brandy-soaked, raisin spotted, intestine-clogging brick known as fruitcake," Pet interrupted. "Will look and taste the same whether it was made yesterday or two decades ago. And at no time during its lengthy existence will anyone want to eat it. I've told you, the bride likes chocolate cake. Specifically and vitally, she apparently likes your Death by Chocolate fudge cake. Very little about this couple conforms to royal standards, which is half the reason the bookies are already taking revolting odds on how long the marriage will last, or if they'll actually make it to the altar. Rose is infamously a strong personality and a massive pain in her family's arse. I guarantee that however she has to bend to tradition, she'll wrangle final say over details like the inside of her cake.

As it happens, the Sun-Earth system is anomalous in two clear respects. First, the Sun’s mass—330,000 times that of Earth—makes it more massive than 95 percent of all known stars. And while this does not rule out our interest in searching for life on planets orbiting more statistically average stars, given that we have limited resources of time and money, it encourages us to look for stars that are especially massive, like the one that sustains us.

Your body isn’t a thing to be looked at and judged against some standard of perfection that doesn’t even really exist. It’s the vessel that takes you through life, allowin’ you to experience all the beautiful things life has to offer. Food. Sex. Sunsets. Music. Hugs. Laughter. A healthy body is a gift. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t treat it like some cheap one-night stand. Treat it like the love of your life. Treat it with respect and tenderness, but most of all, gratitude. “And a healthy dose of awe, too. Your body is made of remnants of stars and massive explosions

Replay your breathtaking efforts. You have already pulled massive bars of the impossibilities.

The gelding had a broad back, making for a comfortable ride. Yedan rode at a canter. Ahead, the hills thickened with scrub, and beyond was a forest of white trees, branches like twisted bones, leaves so dark as to be almost black. Just before them and running the length of the wooded fringe rose dolmens of grey granite, their edges grooved and faces pitted with cup-shaped, ground-out depressions. Each stone was massive, twice the height of a grown man, and crowding the foot of each one that he could see were skulls. He slowed his mount, reined in a half-dozen paces from the nearest standing stone. Sat motionless, flies buzzing round the horse’s flickering ears, and studied those grisly offerings. Cold judgement was never short of pilgrims. Alas, true justice had no reason to respect secrets, as those close-fisted pilgrims had clearly discovered. A final and fatal revelation. Minute popping sounds in the air announced the approach of dread power, as the buzzing flies ignited in mid-flight, black bodies bursting like acorns in a fire. The horse shied slightly, muscles growing taut beneath Yedan, and then snorted in sudden fear. ‘Hold,’ Yedan murmured, his voice calming the beast. Those of the royal line among the Shake possessed ancient knowledge, memories thick as blood. Tales of ancient foes, sworn enemies of the uncertain Shore. More perhaps than most, the Shake rulers understood that a thing could be both one and the other, or indeed neither. Sides possessed undersides and even those terms were suspect. Language itself stuttered in the face of such complexities, such rampant subtleties of nature. In this place, however, the blended flavours of compassion were anathema to the powers that ruled. Yet the lone figure that strode out from the forest was so unexpected that Yedan Derryg grunted as if he had been punched in the chest. ‘This realm is not yours,’ he said, fighting to control his horse. ‘This land is consecrated for adjudication,’ the Forkrul Assail said. ‘I am named Repose. Give me your name, seeker, that I may know you—’ ‘Before delivering judgement upon me?’ The tall, ungainly creature, naked and weaponless, cocked his head. ‘You are not alone. You and your followers have brought discord to this land. Do not delay me—you cannot evade what hides within you. I shall be your truth.’ ‘I am Yedan Derryg.’ The Forkrul Assail frowned. ‘This yields me no ingress—why is that? How is it you block me, mortal?’ ‘I will give you that answer,’ Yedan replied, slipping down from the horse. He drew his sword. Repose stared at him. ‘Your defiance is useless.’ Yedan advanced on him. ‘Is it? But, how can you know for certain? My name yields you no purchase upon my soul. Why is that?’ ‘Explain this, mortal.’ ‘My name is meaningless. It is my title that holds my truth. My title, and my blood.’ The Forkrul Assail shifted his stance, lifting his hands. ‘One way or another, I will know you, mortal.’ ‘Yes, you will.’ Repose attacked, his hands a blur. But those deadly weapons cut empty air, as Yedan was suddenly behind the Forkrul Assail, sword chopping into the back of the creature’s elongated legs, the iron edge cutting between each leg’s two hinged knees, severing the buried tendons—Repose toppled forward, arms flailing. Yedan chopped down a second time, cutting off the Assail’s left arm. Blue, thin blood sprayed on to the ground. ‘I am Shake,’ Yedan said, raising his sword once more. ‘I am the Watch.’ The sudden hiss from Repose was shortlived, as Yedan’s sword took off the top of the Forkrul Assail’s head.

The latest of these exponentially growing parallel universes is the world of the Internet and the global information systems. Here too, the irresistible growth, the outgrowth of information, could be posted up in real time in terms of millions of individuals and millions of operations - that information now so extensive that it no longer has any connection with the acquisition of knowledge. As of now, we can say that this immense potential will never be redeemed, in the sense of a use or purpose ever being found for it. Things here, then, are exactly as they are with debt: information is as inexpiable as debt, in the sense that we shall never be able to settle our account with it. Moreover, the storage of data, the accumulation and worldwide circulation of information, in every respect resemble the build-up of an irremissible debt. And, here again, as soon as this proliferating information far exceeds the needs and capacities of the individual and the species in general, it has no other meaning than to bind all humanity in a single destiny of cerebral automatism and mental underdevelopment. For it is clear that, though a certain dose of information reduces our ignorance, a massive dose of artificial intelligence can only convince us of the failings of our natural intelligence and plunge us deeper into them. The worst thing in a human being is to know too much and not to be equal to one's knowledge. It is the same with responsibility and emotional capacity: the media, by perpetually assailing us with violence, misfortune and catastrophe, far from firing some kind of collective solidarity, merely demonstrate our real impotence and plunge us into panic and remorse.

Instead of focusing, in the style of the “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC) approach, on a single exemplary conscious experience—like the experience of “seeing the color red”—Tononi and Edelman asked what was characteristic about conscious experiences in general. They made a simple but profound observation: that conscious experiences—all conscious experiences—are both informative and integrated. From this starting point, they made claims about the neural basis of every conscious experience, not just of specific experiences of seeing red, or feeling jealous, or suffering a toothache. The idea of consciousness as simultaneously informative and integrated needs a little unpacking. Let’s start with information. What does it mean to say that conscious experiences are “informative”? Edelman and Tononi did not mean this in the sense that reading a newspaper can be informative, but in a sense that, though it might at first seem trivial, conceals a great deal of richness. Conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other conscious experience that you have ever had, ever will have, or ever could have. Looking past the desk in front of me through the window beyond, I have never before experienced precisely this configuration of coffee cups, computer monitors, and clouds—an experience that is even more distinctive when combined with all the other perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that are simultaneously present in the background of my inner universe. At any one time, we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is—mathematically—what is meant by “information.” The informativeness of a particular conscious experience is not a function of how rich or detailed it is, or of how enlightening it is to the person having that experience. Listening to Nina Simone while eating strawberries on a roller coaster rules out just as many alternative experiences as does sitting with eyes closed in a silent room, experiencing close to nothing. Each experience reduces uncertainty with respect to the range of possible experiences by the same amount. In this view, the “what-it-is-like-ness” of any specific conscious experience is defined not so much by what it is, but by all the unrealized but possible things that it is not. An experience of pure redness is the way that it is, not because of any intrinsic property of “redness,” but because red is not blue, green, or any other color, or any smell, or a thought or a feeling of regret or indeed any other form of mental content whatsoever. Redness is redness because of all the things it isn’t, and the same goes for all other conscious experiences.

But if IOTA lost the confidence of some of the most respected cryptographers in the blockchain community, it continued to generate enthusiasm among a variety of big-name enterprises. That’s perhaps because, quite apart from how badly or otherwise it developed and managed its cryptography, the IOTA team’s economic model is enticing. If its cryptographic flaws can be fixed, the tangle idea could in theory be far less taxing and expensive in terms of computing power than Bitcoin and Ethereum’s methods, which require every computer in their massive networks of validators to process and confirm the entire list of new transactions in each new block. German engineering and electronics giant Bosch has been running a range of experiments with IOTA, including one involving payments between self-driving trucks arranged in an energy-saving linear “platoon.” The idea is that the trucks at the back that are enjoying the benefits of the slipstream would pay IOTA tokens to those at the front to compensate them for bearing the bulk of energy costs in creating that slipstream. Meanwhile, IOTA and Bosch are both part of a consortium called the Trusted IoT Alliance that’s committed to building and securing a blockchain infrastructure for the industry. Other members include Foxconn, Cisco, BNY Mellon, and a slew of blockchain-based startups, such as supply-chain provider Skuchain and Ethereum research lab ConsenSys.

The morality of the situation becomes more complicated when compared to the massive US bombing campaign that intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and Japan during World War II. Whereas this campaign was much more brutal than the Madrid bombings, it is generally considered acceptable. The discrepancy that we may entertain between condemning the Madrid bombers (easy) and condemning the even more bloody-handed American pilots (not so easy, perhaps because among them we may find our own relatives — my grandfather, for example) should make us question whether our condemnation of terrorism really has anything to do with a respect for life.

sleeves rolled up as if they were to intimidated by his massive forearms and had shriveled out of respect.

There should be enough boundaries to respect each other’s privacy, there is a massive difference between being protective and being possessive.

When you go above and beyond to do something for someone that you’re not obligated to, you form a massive respect that stays lifetime.

Are you attracting money, or repelling it? This is important to understand. If you were conditioned and programmed your whole life that “money is the root of all evil” or “money makes people do bad things,” no wonder you do not have an abundance of it. You are repelling it away from you. Subconsciously, because you do not like money, your actions are causing you to get rid of what money you do earn. If you can change your mind, you can change your bank account. Money is not evil, it is paper. The greed of, or doing bad things for or with the money, is the issue. Money can make you more of what you already are. If you are a bad person, you can now afford to be a worse person. If you are a good person, you can now do more nice things for others. So decide today to respect and appreciate why money is an instrument for good. Begin to attract money rather than repel it. This mental shift will have an enormous effect on your life from today forward if you make this shift in thinking. Decide today that you want more money, and determine what you need the money for. Then attach those good reasons for the need to your dominating thoughts about money. When you connect money with those reasons that compel you to want to earn more, you will begin to attract more.

For several years, I taught Sunday school in my church. As an object lesson, I distributed several excerpts from recent news articles. I had students read the excerpt and then explain to the class what they believed was happening. One news excerpt stated: The huge black triangular-shaped flying object came silently out of nowhere over the treetops and was gone in seconds. The lights – three on each side – were huge, seemingly as big as cars and bright yellow…. After the craft flew over the Laurie area around 8:30 p.m. Oct. 5, a handful of Laurie area residents questioned what this unidentified object flying in the night sky could be. A second excerpt from another article read: The UFO was spotted by hundreds of witnesses with many believing it was the work of an ‘alien’ craft. One saw orangey-yellow spheres skimming across the sky. Another reported a ‘massive ball of light’ with ‘tentacles going right down to the ground.’ Then witnesses told of an ear splitting bang at 4 a.m. Come dawn the plot thickens. At the nearby wind farm one of the 60ft blades from a 200ft turbine was found ripped off. Another had been left twisted and useless.…the strange goings on at a wind farm in Conisholme, Lincolnshire, can be explained by a flying saucer crashing into the turbine in a close encounter that could, at last, provide the evidence of other life forms they have been waiting for all their lives. After reading the excerpts, I asked the students to explain what the article was about. Hesitantly, the students said the articles were about a UFO sighting and crash; after all, that is specifically what the excerpt said. I then held up a printout of the actual news articles, which were titled respectively, “UFO over Laurie ID’d as stealth bomber” and “Unmanned Stealth Bomber Could Have Been UFO Responsible for Destroying Wind Turbine.” The whole article described a US military exercise with the Stealth bomber. The aircraft crashed into a turbine on the wind farm. The local residents were unfamiliar with the Stealth Bomber and some believed it to be a UFO. The problem in accurately interpreting the news excerpts, for my students, was that I did not give them the full article. They did not understand the background or the whole story so they were left to fill in the gaps with their own ideas and interpretations. Sadly, we often do this same thing when interpreting the Bible. Very few of us are well versed in the customs and traditions of the ancient Jews during Jesus’ time. That background provides a context in which the books of the Bible were written. It is a context that shaped the very foundation of Christianity and it is a context that without, we cannot possibly hope to truly understand what the Bible’s authors were trying to teach us.

The Second Himalayan Expedition, by the Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray:        Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a great respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:      “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.      Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

Alone of the Germanic tongues, it had received a massive influx of words from Latin and French, which doubled its vocabulary. Between 1250 and 1450, of 27,000 new words identified, 22 percent were derived from French, and most others from Latin. English often acquired several words for the same concept. They were sometimes used in tandem to make meaning sure, or just for rhetorical purposes, as in “aiding and abetting,” “fit and proper,” “peace and quiet.” In due course they could acquire nuances of meaning, as with “kingly,” “royal” and “regal,” or “loving,” “amorous” and “charitable,” from English, French and Latin respectively. Linguistic flexibility was greatly enhanced by bolting together grammatical elements from each language. Prefixes and suffixes made word creation easy: for example, the Old English “ful” added to French nouns (beautiful, graceful); or French suffixes with Old English verbs (knowable, findable). It has been argued that this made it really a new language.37 But the basics remained, and remain, Anglo-Saxon: in modern written English, the hundred most frequently used words are all derived from Old English.

She didn’t know what to do. Should she run? Climb a tree? Feign death and hope it lost interest and went away? She’d become separated from the others some ways back—stupid, stupid. Would they even hear her, if she called? “Denny?” she ventured. The animal cocked its head, and Cecily cleared her throat to try again. “Portia? Mr. Brooke?” The beast shuffled toward her, great slabs of muscle flexing beneath its hoary coat. “Not you,” she told it, taking a quick step back. “Shoo. Go home.” It bristled and snarled, revealing a narrow row of jagged teeth. Moonlight pooled like liquid around its massive jaw. Good Lord, the thing was drooling. Truly panicked now, she drew a deep breath and called as loud as she could. “Denny! Help!” No answer. Oh, Lord. She was going to be slaughtered, right here in the forest. Miss Cecily Hale, a lady of perfectly good breeding and respectable fortune, not to mention oft-complimented eyes, would die unmarried and childless because she’d wasted her youth pining for a man who didn’t love her. She would perish here in Swinford Woods, alone and heartbroken, having received only two kisses in the entirety of her three-and-twenty years.

She didn’t know what to do. Should she run? Climb a tree? Feign death and hope it lost interest and went away? She’d become separated from the others some ways back—stupid, stupid. Would they even hear her, if she called? “Denny?” she ventured. The animal cocked its head, and Cecily cleared her throat to try again. “Portia? Mr. Brooke?” The beast shuffled toward her, great slabs of muscle flexing beneath its hoary coat. “Not you,” she told it, taking a quick step back. “Shoo. Go home.” It bristled and snarled, revealing a narrow row of jagged teeth. Moonlight pooled like liquid around its massive jaw. Good Lord, the thing was drooling. Truly panicked now, she drew a deep breath and called as loud as she could. “Denny! Help!” No answer. Oh, Lord. She was going to be slaughtered, right here in the forest. Miss Cecily Hale, a lady of perfectly good breeding and respectable fortune, not to mention oft-complimented eyes, would die unmarried and childless because she’d wasted her youth pining for a man who didn’t love her. She would perish here in Swinford Woods, alone and heartbroken, having received only two kisses in the entirety of her three-and-twenty years. The second of which she could still taste on her lips, if she pressed them together tightly enough. It tasted bitter. Luke, you unforgivable cad. This is all your fault. If only you hadn’t— A savage grunt snapped her back into the present. Cecily looked on in horror as the vile creature lowered its head, stamped the ground— And began to charge. God, she truly was going to die. Whose brilliant idea had it been, to go hunting a legendary beast in a cursed forest, by the light of a few meager torches and a three-quarters moon? Oh, yes. Hers. Three

The sieges of Gvozdansko, Croatia and Alamo, U.S. tell the true stories of small bands of heroes who stood against massive armies to defend their homelands. They echo innate human devotion to the idea of fighting for freedom across the world. Alamo was designate by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2015. Gvozdansko deserves more research and the same level of respect and protection for its equal relevance. The Croatian landmark was the site of the pivotal 103-day Battle of Gvozdansko in 1578 against the Ottoman army. Among those who fought and died there were the common miners together with their families.

We are massively going against the grain of our culture by daring to give birth to ourselves anew as a way to recover from our childlessness. It is an act of colossal courage and given little regard, respect or credence by most others. There is very little support, hardly any recognition and no award ceremonies for remaking our lives around a new core of meaning.

The David Dao incident is a classic example of how a poor articulation of company values can weaken the culture. The employees on the ground believed they needed to bump passengers from the flight so that United could get another flight crew to their plane (i.e., “flying right”) and that meeting metrics such as on-time departures and flight cancellations was more important than treating customers with “respect and dignity” (which most of us would agree does not include breaking their noses and knocking out their teeth). In contrast, Southwest Airlines is not only clear about its company values but makes them the emphasis of hiring and management. The mentality isn’t: “We’ll know it when we see it.” Instead, it is: “Does this person already live the way we do?” The company uses behavioral interview questions to determine whether candidates are a cultural fit. For example, to determine someone’s ability to be a selfless team player, they might ask her to describe a time when she went above and beyond to help a coworker succeed. The airline acknowledges that certain positions call for specific skill sets. As Southwest puts it, “We’re not going to hire a pilot who has a great attitude but can’t fly a plane!” But, when it comes down to two equally qualified candidates, the one who lives Southwest’s values receives the offer. And, even when Southwest finds a qualified candidate who doesn’t have the right values, it will keep looking until it finds someone who does—no matter how long the job has gone unfilled.

Even if AI can be made robust enough for us to trust that a robojudge is using the legislated algorithm, will everybody feel that they understand its logical reasoning enough to respect its judgment? This challenge is exacerbated by the recent success of neural networks, which often outperform traditional easy-to-understand AI algorithms at the price of inscrutability. If defendants wish to know why they were convicted, shouldn’t they have the right to a better answer than “we trained the system on lots of data, and this is what it decided”? Moreover, recent studies have shown that if you train a deep neural learning system with massive amounts of prisoner data, it can predict who’s likely to return to crime (and should therefore be denied parole) better than human judges. But what if this system finds that recidivism is statistically linked to a prisoner’s sex or race—would this count as a sexist, racist robojudge that needs reprogramming? Indeed, a 2016 study argued that recidivism-prediction software used across the United States was biased against African Americans and had contributed to unfair sentencing.36 These are important questions that we all need to ponder and discuss to ensure that AI remains beneficial.

The drawback is that while we can use fashion as a back-door method of confronting prejudice, this also results in massive pressure for fat people to be extra put-together, all the time, to be respectable fatasses, to stand in opposition to those unacceptable fat people, the ones who wear sweatpants and shirts with grease stains on them. You know them. The ones who make fat people look bad, like every stereotype is deserved, like we really are the disgusting horrors that we’re made out to be.

You all might want to look in the crate that was delivered from Winterborne’s this morning,” he said. “I’m sure it contains some Christmas finery.” All movement and sound in the hall was instantly extinguished as everyone looked at him. “What crate?” Kathleen demanded. “Why did you keep it a secret until now?” West gave her a speaking glance and pointed to the corner, where a massive wooden crate had been set. “It’s hardly been a secret--it’s been there for hours. I’ve been too busy with this blasted tree to make conversation.” “Did you order it?” “No. Devon mentioned in his last letter that Winterborne was sending some holiday trimmings from his store, as a gesture of appreciation for inviting him to stay.” “I did not invite Mr. Winterborne,” Kathleen retorted, “and we certainly can’t accept gifts from a stranger.” “They’re not for you, they’re for the household. Hang it all, it’s just a few baubles and wisps of tinsel.” She stared at him uncertainly. “I don’t think we should. I’m not certain of the etiquette, but it doesn’t seem proper. He’s an unmarried gentleman, and this is a household of young women who have only me as a chaperone. If I were ten years older and had an established reputation, it might be different, but as things are…” “I’m a member of the household,” West protested. “Doesn’t that make the situation more respectable?” Kathleen looked at him. “You’re joking, aren’t you?” West rolled his eyes.

short, several generations, including my own, were not taught the skills they would need in order to see, understand, and respect other people in all their depth and dignity. The breakdown in basic moral skills produced disconnection, alienation, and a culture in which cruelty was permitted. Our failure to treat each other well in the small encounters of everyday life metastasized and, I believe, led to the horrific social breakdown we see all around us. This is a massive civilizational failure. We need to rediscover ways to teach moral and social skills. This