Mill Meaning Quotes

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .

Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.

Okay, that was, I have to say, about the cheesiest thing I ever heard in my life,” I say to Angela as we’re milling around afterward. We hug, so Billy can take our picture. “I mean, seriously. Just be? You should write ads for Nike.

So true is that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.

The meaning of life has not much to do with good and evil, right and wrong, duty, honor, country, or any of that. It has to do with cutting the right deal.

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time. Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed. If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister… Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable. The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy. A long time a go a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty. You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You’re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist’s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That’s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That’s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you. If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill. Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Sometimes...around some people, I feel like I have to, like...try, you know?...But with you-- when I'm with you, I can just...exist. You know what I mean?

There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone

The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; type people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power.

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

There's no "magic secret"; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day—bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two.

Your scars are beautiful. It means you survived. It means you’re here with me.” He kissed my wrist, light as a feather—and changed everything about us. “It’s my favorite part of you,

This...this means everything. We are everlasting. Fucking forever. I love you so much. Seeing my words for you on your body makes me insane for you.

Are you ready to put the ‘fun’ in Fall Fun Fest?” he says as I slap his palm. “I can at least put the ‘trip’ in ‘Triple F.’” A pause. “By being clumsy, I mean. Not by, like, sharing drugs with the group.” Three sets of eyes are on me, and I can’t stop myself from talking. “I don’t have any drugs. In case you were worried. Or, in case you were … expecting me to have drugs.…” Gideon grins.

I’m heartened by our dissatisfaction, because dissatisfaction is a world away from indifference. The widespread nostalgia, the yearning for a past that never really was, suggests that we still have ideals, even if we have buried them alive. True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.

Protection, therefore, against tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.

-the phrase "lion's share" here means "the biggest part" and has nothing to do with lions or sharing-

I'm sorry. So sorry. Don't mean to interrupt. It's just...are you for fucking serious?

We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them—or else, by keeping them, rise through them to the fulness of freedom under God. God means us to be free. With divine daring, he gave us the power of choice.

Being human doesn’t mean you’re weak, it just means you’re subject to the same little quirks and foibles as the rest of us—for which you should be grateful.

The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short, of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications. To be truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims and fantasies and sicknesses....

I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as *my* product, as *my* choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I've never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live.

Perhaps I feel about you as the artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with love: he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he would never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and the beauty it bears for him.

Just because a person dies doesn't mean it should change the way you feel about them, or the way they really were. Just because they're gone doesn't mean that they weren't a bad person or that they never fucked up.

If God has come in the flesh, and if God keeps coming to us in our fleshly existence, then all of life is shot through with meaning. Earth is crammed with heaven, and heaven (when we finally get there) will be crammed with earth. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost. Nothing secular. Nothing absurd.... All are grist for the mill of a downto-earth spirituality.

concise mode of expressing the same meaning is, that inseparable accidents are properties which are universal to the species, but not necessary to it. Thus, blackness is an attribute of a crow,

It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that our former life has made for us -- the ties that have made others dependent on us -- and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could always see that one being first towards whom -- I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes, love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But I see -- I feel it is not so now; there are things we must renounce in life; some of us must resign love. Many thing are difficult and dark to me, but I see one thing quite clearly: that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural, but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned.

I mean, technically, he wasn’t fired,” Emilia clarified. “He was reassigned. But precision of language has never been the gossip mill’s forte, and I guess anything’s a pretty big step down after the White House.

Either A is B or C is D,” means, “if A is not B, C is D; and if C is not D, A is B.” All hypothetical propositions, therefore, though disjunctive in form, are conditional in meaning; and the words hypothetical and conditional may be, as indeed they generally are, used synonymously.

The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms. Religious fundamentalists also develop an exagerrated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This tendency makes critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feurerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feurerback, Marx, Ingersoll or Mill, these new Atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice and humiliation that has inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche , Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work.

I am not suggesting that everything bad that happens to us is sent directly by a knowing hand—cooked up specially for our personal development. Nor do I mean that by using the stuff of life as grist for the mill you will learn what you need to learn and move on into a problem-free world. And I also don’t recommend courting drama and disaster so that you can be broken open to the truth. A catastrophe is not a sign that God has singled you out for greatness. What I do mean is that you can use anything—everything—as a wake-up call; you can find a treasure trove of information about yourself and the world in the big trials and the little annoyances of daily life. If you turn around and face yourself in times of loss and pain, you will be given the key to a more truthful—and therefore a more joyful—life.

Alone didn’t always mean lonely, but sometimes it did, and even then, she reveled in it. Lunches in the music room. Afternoons reading in the park. Loneliness was a kind of wanting, but it was also this incredible freedom. Not having to rely on anyone or have anyone rely on her. No one to disappoint or be disappointed by. Alone was good and comforting and dependable.

A cultivated mind—I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties—finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it: in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future.

Most guys arrived here normal, and they were shocked and sickened by the behavior of the guys who'd been here a while. Then within a few weeks, they'd stop being shocked, and within a few months a lot of them joined the club of the crazies. And most of them, I think, went home and became normal again, though some didn't. But I never once saw anyone here who had gone around the bend ever return to normal while they were still here. It only got worse because in this environment they'd lost any sense of. . . humanity. Or you could be nice and say they'd become desensitized. It was actually more frightening than sickening. A guy who'd sliced off the ear of a VC he'd killed that morning would be joking with the village kids and the old Mama-sans that afternoon and handing out candy. I mean, they weren't evil or psychotic, we were normal, which is was really scared the hell out of me.

In India when we meet and part we often say, “Namasté,” which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where, if you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us. Namasté

Well, sonny, in my country, gun control means using both hands.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realised, until personal experience has brought it home

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of

This one phrase, "It is my life, I will do what I want," has done more damage than good. People choose to ignore the spirit and derive the meaning that is convenient to them. Such people have tied this phrase to selfishness and I'm sure that was not the intent. These people forget that we don't live in isolation. What you do affects me and what I do affects you. We are connected. We have to realize that we are sharing this planet and we must learn to behave responsibly. There are two kinds of people in this world--takers and givers. Takers eat well and givers sleep well. Givers have high self-esteem, a positive attitude, and they serve society. By serving society, I do not mean a run-of-the-mill pseudo leader-turned- politician who serves himself by pretending to serve others. As human beings, we all have the need to receive and take. But a healthy personality with high self-esteem is one that not only has its need to take but also to give.

[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.

I don't mean your resentment toward them," said Philip... "I mean your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who has too much sense and goodness to share their narrow prejudices. She has never entered into the family quarrels." "What does that signify? We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to. It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of marrying old Tulliver's daughter.

True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.” We have to direct our minds to the future. To stop consuming our own discontent through polls and the relentlessly bad news media. To consider alternatives and form new collectives. To transcend this confining zeitgeist and recognize our shared idealism.

When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. Signing the waiver means forever surrendering the right to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign the waiver may receive medical care under IBP's Workplace Injury Settlement Program. Or they may not. Once workers sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the job-related medical treatment - for life. Under the program's terms, seeking treatment from an independent physician can be grounds for losing all medical benefits. Workers who refuse to sign the IBP waiver not only risk getting no medical care from the company, but also risk being fired on the spot...Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital emergency room in order to obtain an injured worker's signature. When Lonita Leal's right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, a case manager talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the same plant, an IBP representative persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.

one guy I knew could put anything up his left nostril, so long as he could pick the item up and push it in that direction. But he didn’t know about it for the longest time. I mean, who really tries to put a chair up their nose, right?

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of external, audible sounds, but in terms of the swiftness and power of its inner flow. Then, like the rolling mass of a river’s current, which by its very movement polishes the stones of the bottom and turns the wheels of mills, flowing speech itself, by the force of its own laws, on its way, in passing, creates meter and rhyme and thousands of other forms and constructions, still more important, but as yet unrecognized, unconsidered, unnamed.

The wheels of the cars stormed underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dipping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled shells of the commuters' cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old New England mills, with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.

Mystic The air is a mill of hooks - Questions without answer, Glittering and drunk as flies Whose kiss stings unbearably In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer. I remember The dead smell of sun on wood cabins, The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets. Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? Once one has been seized up Without a part left over, Not a toe, not a finger, and used, Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains That lengthen from ancient cathedrals What is the remedy? The pill of the Communion tablet, The walking beside still water? Memory? Or picking up the bright pieces of Christ in the faces of rodents, The tame flower- nibblers, the ones Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable - The humpback in his small, washed cottage Under the spokes of the clematis. Is there no great love, only tenderness? Does the sea Remember the walker upon it? Meaning leaks from the molecules. The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats, The children leap in their cots. The sun blooms, it is a geranium. The heart has not stopped.

To many people today, slavery means white people holding black people in bondage. The vast millions of people around the world who were neither white nor black, but who were either slaves or enslavers for centuries, fade out of this vision of slavery, as if they had never existed, even though they may well have outnumbered both blacks and whites. It has been estimated that there were more slaves in India than in the entire Western Hemisphere. China during the era of slavery has been described as “one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world.” Slaves were a majority of the population in some of the cities in Southeast Asia. At some period or other in history, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, “almost every people, now civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves.

Logic, according to the conception here formed of it, has no concern with the nature of the act of judging or believing; the consideration of that act, as a phenomenon of the mind, belongs to another science. Philosophers, however, from Descartes downward, and especially from the era of Leibnitz and Locke, have by no means observed this distinction; and would have treated with great disrespect any attempt to analyze the import of Propositions, unless founded on an analysis of the act of Judgment.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.” It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” So

There were approximately twenty-five people milling around the door and the front of the classroom, but I immediately recognised Julie, the convenor, from Gene’s description: ‘blonde with big tits’. In fact, her breasts were probably no more than one and a half standard deviations from the mean size for her body weight, and hardly a remarkable identifying feature. It was more a question of elevation and exposure, as a result of her choice of costume, which seemed perfectly practical for a hot January evening.

Now, if she’d said ‘bless your heart,’ we might have had a tussle. Everyone knows what that means. It’s pity with a dash of condescension.

The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

If we believed that those agencies were appointed by a benevolent Providence as the means of accomplishing wise purposes which could not be compassed if they did not exist, then everything done by mankind which tends to chain up these natural agencies or to restrict their mischievous operation, from draining a pestilential marsh down to curing the toothache, or putting up an umbrella, ought to be accounted impious ; which assuredly nobody does account them, notwithstanding an undercurrent of sentiment setting in that direction which is occasionally perceptible.

The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.

The artist’s job is to reveal the real nature of things through picture or story or song, to show the rest of us what is really there when we are content with the misleading surface of things. As Pope John Paul II has written, “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.” Through their work, in the words of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind.” DAVID MILLS, “Imaginative Orthodoxy: The Art of Telling the Christian Story,” Touchstone

It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for.

She turned her attention back to the book, and reread the sentence one more time, but this time she simply skipped the words she did not know. As often happens when one reads in this way, Violet's brain made a little humming noise as she encountered each word - or each part of a word - she did not know. So inside her head, the opening sentence of chapter twelve read as follows: "'Hypnosis is an hmmm yet hmmm method hmmm and should not be hmmmed by hmmms,'" and although she could not tell exactly what it meant, she could guess. "It could mean," she guessed to herself, "that hypnosis is a difficult method and should not be learned by amateurs," and the interesting thing is that she was not too far off.

Kyndel continued. “By calling forth, I mean they can actually shift from man to dragon and back again. Now, I see you think I’ve been smoking something really good, or maybe I drank the Kool-aid, but I’m telling you the absolute truth. If

What are your names?" "You know our names," Violet said curtly, a word which here means "tired of Count Olaf's nonsense." "That wig and that lipstick don't fool us any more than your pale-brown dress and sensible beige shoes. You're Count Olaf.

Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They’re nothing else – they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can’t make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it’s like taking a totalitarian state and saying “Be less brutal!” Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that’s not the point – the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it. Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press – there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there – they weren’t asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it. And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there’s nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism – namely Stalinism and Fascism – and they have no more legitimacy than they do. I mean yeah, let’s try and make the autocracy less brutal if that’s the short term possibility – but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it “those who work in the mills should own them ” And on to everything else, and that’s democracy – if you don’t have that, you don’t have democracy.

This, however, only shows that there is an ambiguity in the word is; a word which not only performs the function of the copula in affirmations, but has also a meaning of its own, in virtue of which it may itself be made the predicate of a proposition.

The Russian president is not a statesman, Isabel. He is the godfather of a nuclear-armed gangster regime. They are not ordinary, run-of-the-mill gangsters. They are Russian gangsters, which means they are among the cruelest, most violent people on earth.

I’ve always thought that creating machines for tasks we could just as easily accomplish ourselves is unforgiveable – the battery-powered pepper mill comes in for particularly venomous scorn in our household. It’s a potent symbol of a society that’s going backwards.

Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be compassed by it, are falling off. It may, then, be said truly, that money is desired not for the sake of an end, but as part of the end. From being a means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the individual's conception of happiness.

It is no idle boast of the vermin Socialists that their system is Christianity, and no other is genuine. And look at them! To a man […] they are atheists and in favor of Free Love—whatever that may mean. I have talked with many Socialists, but never with one who understood his subject. Empty babblers they are, muddle-headed philanthropists. They read a shilling abridgement of John Stuart Mill, and settle all economic problems over a --sirloin of turnips-- in some filthy crank food dive. Ask them any question about detail, and the bubble is pricked.

God will spare no pains necessary to bring us into relationship with Himself, even as that may mean permitting whatever pain is necessary to do so. Suffering is the grist by which the mill of faith yields the raw material of new character, greater insight and deeper relationship with God.

Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It’s what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same thing to gnats and to cedars? Two hundred years is young for the trees whose tops this morning are hung with mist. It’s an eyeblink of time for the river and nothing at all for the rocks. The rocks and the river and these very same trees are likely to be here in another two hundred years, if we take good care. As for me, and that chipmunk, and the cloud of gnats milling in a shaft of sunlight—we will have moved on.

When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty.

You know, we still have like, half an hour down here. Seems a shame to waste it.” I poked him in the ribs, and he gave an exaggerated wince. “No way, dude. My days of cellar, mill, and dungeon lovin’ are over. Go castle or go home.” “Fair enough,” he said as we interlaced our fingers and headed for the stairs. “But does it have to be a real castle, or would one of those inflatable bouncy things work?” I laughed. “Oh, inflatable castles are totally out of-“ I skidded to a stop on the first step, causing Archer to bump into me. “What the heck is that?” I asked, pointing to a dark stain in the nearest corner. “Okay, number one question you don’t want to hear in a creepy cellar,” Archer sad, but I ignored him and stepped off the staircase. The stain bled out from underneath the stone wall, covering maybe a foot of the dirt floor. It looked black and vaguely…sticky. I swallowed my disgust as I knelt down and gingerly touched the blob with one finger. Archer crouched down next to me and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a lighter, and after a few tries, a wavering flame sprung up. We studied my fingertip in the dim glow. “So that’s-“ “It’s blood, yeah,” I said, not taking my eyes off my hand. “Scary.” “I was gonna go with vile, but scary works.” Archer fished in his pockets again, and this time he produced a paper napkin. I took it from him and gave Lady Macbeth a run for her money in the hand-scrubbing department. But even as I attempted to remove a layer of skin from my finger, something was bugging me. I mean, something other than the fact that I’d just touched a puddle of blood. “Check the other corners,” I told Archer. He stood up and moved across the room. I stayed where I was, trying to remember that afternoon Dad and I had sat with the Thorne family grimoire. We’d looked at dozens of spells, but there had been one- “There’s blood in every corner,” Archer called from the other side of the cellar. “Or at least that’s what I’m guessing it is. Unlike some people, I don’t have the urge to go sticking my fingers in it.

Popinsh!" Sunny shrieked. "Sunny means," Violet said, "that Dr. Orwell hypnotized Klaus and caused that terrible accident, didn't she?" "Conceivably," Shirley said. "And he's being hypnotized again, right now, isn't he?" Violet asked. "It's within the bounds of the imagination," Shirley said.

What is characteristic of Socialism is the joint ownership by all the members of the community of the instruments and means of production; which carries with it the consequence that the division of the produce among the body of owners must be a public act, performed according to rules laid down by the community.

Yet the same gradual decay to which, after a certain age, all the language of psychology seems liable, has been at work even here. If you call virtue an entity, you are indeed somewhat less strongly suspected of believing it to be a substance than if you called it a being; but you are by no means free from the suspicion.

Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power—and that we hope it does have limits—does not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient.

Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

Since there is no difference of meaning between round, and a round object, it is only custom which prescribes that on any given occasion one shall be used, and not the other. We shall, therefore, without scruple, speak of adjectives as names, whether in their own right, or as representative of the more circuitous forms of expression above exemplified.

It may be objected that the meaning of names can guide us at most only to the opinions, possibly the foolish and groundless opinions, which mankind have formed concerning things, and that as the object of philosophy is truth, not opinion, the philosopher should dismiss words and look into things themselves, to ascertain what questions can be asked and answered in regard to them.

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions, that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

Not that St. Ogg's was empty of women with some tenderness of heart and conscience; probably it had as fair a proportion of human goodness in it as any other small trading town of that day. But until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid,–too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority. And the men at St. Ogg's were not all brave, by any means; some of them were even fond of scandal, and to an extent that might have given their conversation an effeminate character, if it had not been distinguished by masculine jokes, and by an occasional shrug of the shoulders at the mutual hatred of women. It was the general feeling of the masculine mind at St. Ogg's that women were not to be interfered with in their treatment of each other.

In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

In sum, the fruition of 50 years of research, and several hundred million dollars in government funds, has given us the following picture of sub-atomic matter. All matter consists of quarks and leptons, which interact by exchanging different types of quanta, described by the Maxwell and Yang-Mills fields. In one sentence, we have captured the essence of the past century of frustrating investigation into the subatomic realm, From this simple picture one can derive, from pure mathematics alone, all the myriad and baffling properties of matter. (Although it all seems so easy now, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the creators of the Standard Model, once reflected on how tortuous the 50-year journey to discover the model had been. He wrote, "There's a long tradition of theoretical physics, which by no means affected everyone but certainly affected me, that said the strong interactions [were] too complicated for the human mind.")

Well, honey, it’s capitalism that brings out the meanness and greed,” says I. “Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enjoy the freedoms the Constitution offers. But capitalism came along without a constitution or a bill of rights and the industrialists grabbed unrestricted power. The capitalists wrote their own ‘Declaration of Capitalism’.” — Mother Jones

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place. […] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […] The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

Much that has passed for ‘science’ is now felt to be dubious philosophy; much that is held to be ‘real science’ is often felt to provide only confused fragments of the realities among which men live. Men of science, it is widely felt, no longer try to picture reality as a whole or to present a true outline of human destiny. Moreover, ‘science’ seems to many less a creative ethos and a manner of orientation than a set of Science Machines, operated by technicians and controlled by economic and military men who neither embody nor understand science as ethos and orientation. In the meantime, philosophers who speak in the name of science often transform it into ‘scientism,’ making out its experience to be identical with human experience, and claiming that only by its method can the problems of life be solved. With all this, many cultural workmen have come to feel that ‘science’ is a false and pretentious Messiah, or at the very least a highly ambiguous element in modern civilization.

Yet men do not usually define the roubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they take part. - pg 4

Nelle clarified her feelings then. As far as she was concerned, Truman lied about people and belittled them as a way of life and he didn’t care whom he hurt. “Truman was a psychopath, honey.” That stopped me short. Nelle used language precisely. She wasn’t just tossing out the word like kids on a playground do, calling one another “psycho.” “You mean in the clinical sense?” I asked. “If I understand the meaning of the term,” she answered. “He thought the rules that apply to everybody else didn’t apply to him.

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

All the profits that Papa made by the sweat of his brow from his mill she extorted from him and spent the lot on expensive dressmakers who made her luxurious dresses. But she was too mean to wear them: she saved them up at the back of her wardrobe, and most of the time she wore an old mouse-coloured housecoat round the house. Only a couple of times a year she got herself up like the Tsar’s carriage to go to synagogue or to some charity ball, so the whole town could see her and burst with envy. Yet she shouted at us that we were ruining Papa. Fania,

Dashed if I don't think he's begun to get queer in his attic! Well, what I mean is, hubble-bubble! I don't set up as one of these clever coves, but I've got more sense in my knowledge-box than to say such an addle-brained thing as that! Seems to me it don't make a ha'porth of difference whether you keep the dashed mill, or whether you don't, because that's where all your gingerbread came from, whichever way you look at it. And don't you tell me it's repugnant to him to have you coming down with the derbies, because all I've got to say to that is, Gammon!

The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers—knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter—he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process. It

The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I’ve made and the things I’ve felt, as my product, as my choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I’ve never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live.

So long as the sufferers by the bad law do not invoke assistance from other communities, I cannot admit that persons entirely unconnected with them ought to step in and require that a condition of things with which all who are directly interested appear to be satisfied, should be put an end because it is a scandal to persons some thousands of miles distant, who have no part of concern in it. Let them send missionaries, if they please, to preach against it; and let them, by any fair means (of which silencing the teachers is not one) oppose the progress of similar doctrines among their own people.

Do the people in this country approve of this war?" [...]. "Approve? You don't think we'd lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!" "But I mean the people, not the government. The... the people who must fight." "What's it to them? They're used to mass conscriptions. It's what they're for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there's no better soldier on earth than the Ioti man of the ranks, once he's broken in to taking orders. In peacetime he may spout sentimental pacifism, but the grit's there, underneath. The common soldier hs always been our greatest resource as a nation. It's how we became the leader we are." "By climbing up on a pile of dead children?" [...]. "No,"[...] "you'll find the soul of the people true as steel, when the country's threatened. A few rabble-rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise between wars, but it's grand to see how people close ranks when the flag's in danger. You're unwilling to believe that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, [...], is that it's womanish. It simply doesn't include the virile side of life. 'Blood and steel, battle's brightness,' as the old poet says. It doesn't understand courage--love of the flag." [...] "That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags.

At most puppy mills, they pack the dogs into wire cages, usually for the entirety of their lives, often in pitch-black conditions. There are waste collection trays beneath these cages, but they’re rarely emptied. Flies are a constant. With no air-conditioning in the summer and no heat in the winter, dogs freeze to death or die from heatstroke with regularity. During the hottest months, when the cage metal heats up, puppies have been known to cook on the wires. The food is poor and veterinary care infrequent. Open sores, tissue damage, blindness, deafness, ulcers, tooth decay—even rotting jaws because the tooth decay has gotten so bad—are more the rule than the exception.

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

It’s been my experience that ninety-five percent of the people who walk the earth are simply inert, Johnny. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are the people who do what they say they can do. I’m in that three percent, and so are you. You earned that money. I’ve got people in the mills that take home eleven thousand dollars a year for doing little more than playing with their dicks. But I’m not bitching. I’m a man of the world, and all that means is I understand what powers the world. The fuel mix is one part high-octane to nine parts pure bullshit. You’re no bullshitter. So you put that money in your wallet and next time try to value yourself a little higher.

But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.

I want to be married,” I blurted. “I want you to marry me.” Fuuuuuuuck. And so my entire carefully constructed speech was thrown out the window. My grandmother’s antique ring was in a box in the dresser—nowhere near me—and my plan to kneel and do everything right just evaporated. In the circle of my arms, Chloe grew very still. “What did you just say?” I had completely botched the plan, but it was too late to turn back now. “I know we have only been together for a little over a year,” I explained, quickly. “Maybe it’s too soon? I understand if it’s too soon. It’s just that how you feel about the way we kiss? I feel that way about everything we do together. I love it. I love to be inside you, I love working with you, I love watching you work, I love fighting with you, and I love just sitting on the couch and laughing with you. I’m lost when I’m not with you, Chloe. I can’t think of anything, or anyone, who is more important to me, every second. And so for me, that means we’re already sort of married in my head. I guess I wanted to make it official somehow. Maybe I sound like an idiot?” I looked over at her, feeling my heart try to jackhammer its way up my throat. “I never expected to feel this way about someone.” She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and fuck, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to you, I mean.” Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.” Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—” She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face. I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the fuck is that? “What the fuck is that?” I asked. “You tell me, genius.” “Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.” “It’s a ring, dummy. For you.” My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for me?” She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle. “You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?” She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.” “So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?” “You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling. “Technically you haven’t asked yet.” “Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!” “Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing. “Will you marry me?” With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.

But Mills also pointed to the common phenomenon known as the “winner’s curse,” in which two companies bid competitively to acquire a third, until the price climbs so high that it becomes less an economic activity than a war of egos. The winning bidders will be damned if they’ll let their opponents get the prize, so they buy the target company at an inflated price. “It tends to be the assertive people who carry the day in these kinds of things,” says Mills. “You see this all the time. People ask, ‘How did this happen, how did we pay so much?’ Usually it’s said that they were carried away by the situation, but that’s not right. Usually they’re carried away by people who are assertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.

But the conclusion of the HOS theory critically depends on the assumption that productive resources can move freely across economic activities. This assumption means that capital and labour released from any one activity can immediately and without cost be asbsorbed by other activities. With this assumption-known as the assumption of 'perfect factor mobility' among economists-adjustments to changing trade patterns pose no problem. If a steel mill shuts down due to an increase in imports because, say the government reduces tariffs, the resources employed in the industry (the workers, the buildings, the blast furnaces) will be employed (at the same or higher levels of productivity and thus higher returns) by another industry that has become relatively more profitable, say, the computer industry. No one loses from the process.

It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveler respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of land-marks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by: the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular: but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always must remain, without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of human life, is as high a pitch, I think, as absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.

The West is dying because of its cynicism, scepticism, agnosticism, atheism, nihilism, liberalism, political correctness, scientific materialism and capitalism – which all go together as a dreadful, despairing, grim vision of a soulless universe devoid of any value and purpose whatsoever. The West is nothing but a “dark Satanic mill”, as Blake put it. As Nietzsche said, we must revalue all values. We can only beat mad religions by replacing them with better, more rational religions ... and that’s exactly what Illuminism provides. The West will fail totally unless it can regain its spirit, and that means finding religion again, but this time Logos rather than Mythos religion. Forget the old Gods. Humans themselves are the new Gods ... if they did but know it! Nietzsche said that God is dead. It’s time for him to be reincarnated ... in us!

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own

This—this is going to sound really weird, but …” I swallowed, getting my nerve up. I mean, I thought he was in love with me, but was he? I sucked in a sharp breath and gathered my courage. Be brave. “I—I have a mountain to climb in life, and I want you next to me. I want you to walk up it with me—behind me to give me a push or next to me when I need to hold your hand. And when there’s a jungle there, I want you to fight with me. We’ll have machetes, and it will be tough some days when I try to figure out who I am and what I need, but with you next to me, it’ll be okay. I want you to carry me when I’m tired, and I’ll carry you when you’re tired. I want you to rub my fingers when I’ve worked a hard day making pretty things, and I’ll rub your muscles when they get hurt. I want to be the blanket that covers you when you are cold. Or vice versa. I want all of it—all the blood, sweat, and tears—no matter what dream you decide to follow. I’m here. Forever. I love you.

The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn’t minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean you aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances. It just means that you’re not special. Often, it’s the realization - that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain - that is the first and most important step toward solving them. But for some reason, it appears that more and more people, particularly young people, are forgetting this. Numerous professors and educators have noted a lack of emotional resilience and an excess of selfish demands in today’s young people. It’s not uncommon now for books to be removed from the class is curriculum for no other reason then they made someone feel bad. Speakers and professors are shouted down and banned from campuses for in fractions as simple as suggesting that maybe some Halloween costumes really aren’t that offensive. School counsellors note that more students than ever are exhibiting severe signs of emotional distress over what are otherwise run-of-the-mill daily college experiences, such as an argument with her roommate, or getting a low grade in the class. It’s strange that in an age when we are more connected than ever, entitlement seems to be at an all time high. Something about recent technology seems to allow our insecurities to run amok like never before. The more freedom were given to express ourselves, the more we want to be free of having to deal with anyone who may disagree with us or upset us. The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints exist. The easier and more problem free our lives become, the more we seem to feel entitled for them to get even better.

With the two sides entrenched, each began a campaign for public sympathy. The focus was wages. How much did Lawrence textile workers really earn? Ettor told the press that the average mill wage was $6 a week; mill owners countered that it was $9.71 The difference depended on who did the math, and how. Ettor was using a mathematical mean, dividing the mills’ $150,000 weekly payroll by twenty-five thousand workers.72 Mill owners relied on what statisticians call the median. Taking a weaver’s average wage of $13 a week and a doffer’s average of $4.50, they found the midpoint, then rounded up. Strikers protested. For every weaver, they pointed out, there were dozens of doffers, sweepers, and bobbin boys earning $4.50 a week or less. Mill owners countered that such low pay was earned only by the least skilled workers, few in number and not prime wage earners. But neither weekly wage figure factored in the several weeks each year that work was slow and thousands were laid off.

Bless me, readers, for I have published. It's been five years since my last book. Greetings, fellow sinners! If you picked up a copy of this book, it means you are either: 1) wracked with guilt and are looking for penance, or 2) need to spend over $10.00 at the airport newsstand so you can use your credit card. Either way, welcome to Stephen Colbert's Midnight Confessions. As America's foremost TV Catholic, it was natural for me to do a segment inspired by the church. After all, the Catholic Church and late night TV actually have a lot in common: our shows last about an hour, we're obsessed with reaching younger demographics, and the hosts are almost always men. This religious-adjacent tome contains all my favorite confessions from The Late Show. These are things that aren't necessarily sins, but I do feel guilty about them. For instance, repackaging material from the show and selling it in a book. I've always been a big fan of confession. The confessional is a great place to go to relieve yourself of your sins. Unless you're claustrophobic, in which case it's a suffocating death trap of despair! And while most confession books just give you run-of-the-mill mortal sins, I go one step further and provide you with mortal sins, venial sins, deadly sins, and even sins of omission (Notice that the previous sentence didn't have a period!) This book is a throwback to a simpler life when people would go to a priest to confess their sins. As opposed to how it's done now - getting drunk and weeping to Andy Cohen on Bravo. Confessing your sins is a great way to get things off your chest. Second only to waxing. The only downside is that you get introduced to it as a kid, before you have any juicy sins to confess. Oh, you stole a cookie? That's adorable, Becky. Come back when you total your dad's Chevy. Now you might be asking yourself, "What if I'm not Catholic - can I still enjoy this book?" Of course. After all, no matter what religion you are - be it Jewish, Muslim, Lutheran, Pagan, or SoulCycle - we all have things to feel guilty about. For example, not being Catholic.

The object is to want money, and to become so determined to have it that you CONVINCE yourself you will have it. Only those who become "money conscious" ever accumulate great riches. "Money consciousness" means that the mind has become so thoroughly saturated with the DESIRE for money, that one can see one's self already in possession of it. To the uninitiated, who has not been schooled in the working principles of the human mind, these instructions may appear impractical. It may be helpful, to all who fail to recognize the soundness of the six steps, to know that the information they convey, was received from Andrew Carnegie, who began as an ordinary laborer in the steel mills, but managed, despite his humble beginning, to make these principles yield him a fortune of considerably more than one hundred million dollars. It may be of further help to know that the six steps here recommended were carefully scrutinized by the late Thomas A. Edison, who placed his stamp of approval upon them as being, not only the steps essential for the accumulation of money, but necessary for the attainment of any definite goal. The steps call for no "hard labor." They

How is my English?” Tatiana asked Alexander in English. “It’s good,” Alexander replied in English. It was late morning. They were walking through the dense deciduous riverbank woods a few kilometers from home, with two buckets for blueberries, and they were supposed to be talking only in English, but Tatiana backtracked and said in Russian, “I’m reading much better than I’m talking, I think. John Stuart Mill is simply unreadable now instead of unintelligible.” Alexander smiled. “That’s a fine distinction.” He yanked up a couple of mushrooms. “Tania, can we eat these?” Taking them out of his hands and throwing them back on the ground, Tatiana said, “Yes. But we will only be able to eat them once.” Alexander laughed. She said, “I have to teach you how to pick mushrooms, Shura. You can’t just rip them out of the ground like that.” “I have to teach you how to speak English, Tania,” said Alexander. In English, Tatiana continued, “This is my new husband, Alexander Barrington.” And in English, Alexander replied with a smile of pleasure on his face, “And this is my young wife, Tatiana Metanova.” He kissed the top of her braided head and in Russian said, “Tatiana, now say the other words I taught you.” She turned the color of a tomato. “No,” she stated firmly, in English. “I am not saying them.” “Please.” “No. Look for blueberries.” Still in English. She saw that Alexander couldn’t have been less interested in blueberries. “What about later? Will you say them later?” he asked. “Not now, not later,” Tatiana replied bravely. But she was not looking at him. Alexander drew her to him. “Later,” he continued in English, “I will insist that you please me by using your English-speaking tongue in bed with me.” Struggling slightly against him, Tatiana said in English, “It is good I am not understand what you say to me.” “I will show you what I mean,” said Alexander, putting down his bucket. “Later, later,” she acquiesced. “Now, pick up your backet. Collect blueberries.” “All right,” he said in English, not letting go of her. “And it’s bucket. Come on, Tania. Say the other words.” He held her. “Your shyness is an aphrodisiac to me. Say them.” Tatiana, breathless inside and out, said, “All right,” in English. “Pick up your bucket. Let us go house. I will practice love with you.” Alexander laughed. “Make love to you, Tania. Make love to you.

At this crisis certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufactures of the north, which, greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and left them without legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened. Distress reached its climax. Endurance, overgoaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition. The throes of a sort of moral earthquake were felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties. But, as is usual in such cases, nobody took much notice. When a food-riot broke out in a manufacturing town, when a gig-mill was burnt to the ground, or a manufacturer’s house was attacked, the furniture thrown into the streets, and the family forced to flee for their lives, some local measures were or were not taken by the local magistracy. A ringleader was detected, or more frequently suffered to elude detection; newspaper paragraphs were written on the subject, and there the thing stopped. As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost that inheritance — who could not get work, and consequently could not get wages, and consequently could not get bread — they were left to suffer on, perhaps inevitably left. It

We have now recognised the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

She submitted to walk slowly on, with downcast eyes. He put her hand to his lips, and she quietly drew it away. ‘Will you walk beside me, Mr Wrayburn, and not touch me?’ For, his arm was already stealing round her waist. She stopped again, and gave him an earnest supplicating look. ‘Well, Lizzie, well!’ said he, in an easy way though ill at ease with himself ‘don’t be unhappy, don’t be reproachful.’ ‘I cannot help being unhappy, but I do not mean to be reproachful. Mr Wrayburn, I implore you to go away from this neighbourhood, to-morrow morning.’ ‘Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie!’ he remonstrated. ‘As well be reproachful as wholly unreasonable. I can’t go away.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Faith!’ said Eugene in his airily candid manner. ‘Because you won’t let me. Mind! I don’t mean to be reproachful either. I don’t complain that you design to keep me here. But you do it, you do it.’ ‘Will you walk beside me, and not touch me;’ for, his arm was coming about her again; ‘while I speak to you very seriously, Mr Wrayburn?’ ‘I will do anything within the limits of possibility, for you, Lizzie,’ he answered with pleasant gaiety as he folded his arms. ‘See here! Napoleon Buonaparte at St Helena.’ ‘When you spoke to me as I came from the Mill the night before last,’ said Lizzie, fixing her eyes upon him with the look of supplication which troubled his better nature, ‘you told me that you were much surprised to see me, and that you were on a solitary fishing excursion. Was it true?’ ‘It was not,’ replied Eugene composedly, ‘in the least true. I came here, because I had information that I should find you here.’ ‘Can you imagine why I left London, Mr Wrayburn?’ ‘I am afraid, Lizzie,’ he openly answered, ‘that you left London to get rid of me. It is not flattering to my self-love, but I am afraid you did.’ ‘I did.’ ‘How could you be so cruel?’ ‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she answered, suddenly breaking into tears, ‘is the cruelty on my side! O Mr Wrayburn, Mr Wrayburn, is there no cruelty in your being here to-night!’ ‘In the name of all that’s good—and that is not conjuring you in my own name, for Heaven knows I am not good’—said Eugene, ‘don’t be distressed!’ ‘What else can I be, when I know the distance and the difference between us? What else can I be, when to tell me why you came here, is to put me to shame!’ said Lizzie, covering her face. He looked at her with a real sentiment of remorseful tenderness and pity. It was not strong enough to impell him to sacrifice himself and spare her, but it was a strong emotion. ‘Lizzie! I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who could affect me so much by saying so little. But don’t be hard in your construction of me. You don’t know what my state of mind towards you is. You don’t know how you haunt me and bewilder me. You don’t know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life, won’t help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes almost wish you had struck me dead along with it.

The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity—the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life. As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus—an absent God. The end result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch, among many others. None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism. A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair. According to the grandiose theories today’s atheists have inherited from Positivism, religion will wither away as science continues its advance. But while science is advancing more quickly than it has ever done, religion is thriving—at times violently. Secular believers say this is a blip—eventually, religion will decline and die away. But their angry bafflement at the re-emergence of traditional faiths shows they do not believe in their theories themselves. For them religion is as inexplicable as original sin. Atheists who demonize religion face a problem of evil as insoluble as that which faces Christianity. If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see what a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Münster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding. Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.

la felicidad no es algo que sucede. No es el resultado de la buena suerte o del azar. No es algo que pueda comprarse con dinero o con poder. No parece depender de los acontecimientos externos, sino más bien de cómo los interpretamos. De hecho, la felicidad es una condición vital que cada persona debe preparar, cultivar y defender individualmente. Las personas que saben controlar su experiencia interna son capaces de determinar la calidad de sus vidas, eso es lo más cerca que podemos estar de ser felices. De todos modos, no se puede alcanzar la felicidad mediante la búsqueda consciente de ella. «Pregúntese a sí mismo si es feliz –decía J.S. Mill– y dejará de serlo». Es al estar totalmente involucrados en cada detalle de nuestras vidas, sea bueno o malo, cuando encontramos la felicidad, no intentando buscarla directamente. Viktor Frankl, el psicólogo austríaco, lo resumió bellamente en el prefacio de su libro Man’s Search for Meaning: «No aspiren al éxito: cuanto más aspiren a él y más lo conviertan en su objetivo, con mayor probabilidad lo perderán. Puesto que el éxito, como la felicidad, no puede conseguirse, debe seguirse… como si fuese el efecto secundario no intencionado de la dedicación personal a algo mayor que uno mismo.» Así, ¿cómo podemos alcanzar esta meta tan escurridiza que no puede alcanzarse por una ruta directa? Mis estudios durante este último cuarto de siglo me han convencido de que existe un modo. Es un camino tortuoso que empieza consiguiendo el control sobre los contenidos de nuestra conciencia. Nuestras percepciones sobre nuestras vidas son el resultado de muchas fuerzas que conforman nuestra experiencia, y cada

I sucked on a blade of grass and watched the millwheel turn. I was lying on my stomach on the stream's opposite bank, my head propped in my hands. There was a tiny rainbow in the mist above the froth and boil at the foot of the waterfall, and an occasional droplet found its way to me. The steady splashing and the sound of the wheel drowned out all other noises in the wood. The mill was deserted today, and I contemplated it because I had not seen its like in ages. Watching the wheel and listening to the water were more than just relaxing. It was somewhat hypnotic. … My head nodding with each creak of the wheel, I forced everything else from my mind and set about remembering the necessary texture of the sand, its coloration, the temperature, the winds, the touch of salt in the air, the clouds... I slept then and I dreamed, but not of the place that I sought. I regarded a big roulette wheel, and we were all of us on it-my brothers, my sisters, myself, and others whom I knew or had known-rising and falling, each with his allotted section. We were all shouting for it to stop for us and wailing as we passed the top and headed down once more. The wheel had begun to slow and I was on the rise. A fair-haired youth hung upside down before me, shouting pleas and warnings that were drowned in the cacophony of voices. His face darkened, writhed, became a horrible thing to behold, and I slashed at the cord that bound his ankle and he fell from sight. The wheel slowed even more as I neared the top, and I saw Lorraine then. She was gesturing, beckoning frantically, and calling my name. I leaned toward her, seeing her clearly, wanting her, wanting to help her. But as the wheel continued its turning she passed from my sight. “Corwin!” I tried to ignore her cry, for I was almost to the top. It came again, but I tensed myself and prepared to spring upward. If it did not stop for me, I was going to try gimmicking the damned thing, even though falling off would mean my total ruin. I readied myself for the leap. Another click... “Corwin!” It receded, returned, faded, and I was looking toward the water wheel again with my name echoing in my ears and mingling, merging, fading into the sound of the stream. … It plunged for over a thousand feet: a mighty cataract that smote the gray river like an anvil. The currents were rapid and strong, bearing bubbles and flecks of foam a great distance before they finally dissolved. Across from us, perhaps half a mile distant, partly screened by rainbow and mist, like an island slapped by a Titan, a gigantic wheel slowly rotated, ponderous and gleaming. High overhead, enormous birds rode like drifting crucifixes the currents of the air. We stood there for a fairly long while. Conversation was impossible, which was just as well. After a time, when she turned from it to look at me, narrow-eyed, speculative, I nodded and gestured with my eyes toward the wood. Turning then, we made our way back in the direction from which we had come. Our return was the same process in reverse, and I managed it with greater ease. When conversation became possible once more, Dara still kept her silence, apparently realizing by then that I was a part of the process of change going on around us. It was not until we stood beside our own stream once more, watching the small mill wheel in its turning, that she spoke.

The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia, who patrols the sweat-smelling halls of one of the empire's far-flung prisons at midnight. Back to my neighbor's eighty-year-old father, who remembers getting paid $2 apiece for literally cracking open the heads of union organizers at our textile and sewing mills during the days of Virginia's Byrd political machine. (It was the Depression and the old man needed the money to support his family.) The brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people. Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle. It is about making sure that they—and we—refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom." Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat-screen televisions and the idea of an American empire. ("American Empire! I like the sound of that!" they think to themselves, without even the slightest idea what it means historically.)

The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest. As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years. Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It's bracing, ice-cold, addictive- summer food from the days before air conditioning. In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. "I'm not interested in something like hiyashi chūka," says my alter ego Yamaoka. It's a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains. Later, however, Yamaoka relents. "Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings," he muses. "The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one." Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka's mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine. When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I'd never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total agreement that hiyashi chūka needs to be made with quality ingredients, but they disagree about what kind of dish it is: Chinese, Japanese, or somewhere in between? Unlike American food, Japanese cuisine has boundary issues.

You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.’ Let me introduce myself. I’m River. I’m your current boyfriend. Cross my heart and hope to die—not really, but you know what I mean. There are three things about you that caught my attention: First, you’re smart, too smart for me, but for some reason, you don’t care. Two, if you had wings, they’d be the colors of the rainbow. Three, you touch me, and I have peace. You’re a River-whisperer. Dad told me to take care of Mom, be a good brother to Rae, and wait for Anastasia. He somehow knew you were mine. Where are you from? Apparently, everywhere. Do you know how cool I think you are? Growing up moving around must have been hard, but it created a woman who looks at someone and sees underneath to the parts others don’t. What are you doing after this? I hope after this night, in the future, we’ll be together, in some city, crazy in love. Please tell me you’re single. You aren’t single, Anastasia. You’re mine. Also… I’m not a serial killer. True. Or an alien. (People in Walker really dig that stuff.) True. Or a player. I had my moments. Or a douchebag. Again, had some moments. Or a dick. Okay…maybe once or twice. I’m just the guy in front of you on a snow-covered mountain, baring his soul to the most beautiful girl in the world. You have dreams and I get it. I’ll wait for you forever. No matter how long it takes for us to come back to a place where we can be together for real. Your first reaction to this note may be to run as far as you can, but you only live once, and we can’t lose what we have. Fate has a way of bringing people together, and, baby girl, we’re meant to be. Kappa Boy AKA River Tate AKA Snake AKA Fake River AKA Anastasia’s Man

there is so much injustice in the world.” “And you do not believe God can fix it. So you see people starve puppies or cut down trees, and you take over the job you think God should be doing. This is not our way. Outsiders disagree with us, but we have always believed that we belong to the kingdom of heaven, not the kingdoms of men. It’s the reason we don’t vote or fight in wars. Puppy mills and new roads are the affairs of men. We concern ourselves with the things of God. We believe in submitting our will to the will of Heavenly Father. Gelassenheit.” “And let evil men go unpunished?” Dawdi raised a finger to the sky. “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ God allows people and animals to suffer at the hands of wicked men so that His judgments will be just at the last day. The wicked will have their reward, even as the righteous will. Do not rob anyone of the reward God has in store for them.” Aden swallowed the lump in his throat. “Dawdi, do you remember when I had that accident at the lake?” “Your mamm wrote us six pages about it.” “The car filled with water, and we couldn’t get out.” He ran a hand across his forehead and shivered. He still felt the ice in his bones. “I thought I was going to die. I’ve never told anyone this before, but someone grabbed my hand and pulled me to the surface.” “An angel?” “I heard a voice urging me to choose the good part.” Nothing seemed to surprise Dawdi. “That’s wonderful gute.” “Not really. I mean, it is wonderful gute that an angel saved my life, but I have been so confused. I feel like God is calling my number, but I can’t answer Him because I don’t have a phone.” “I’ve never needed a phone to talk to God,” Dawdi said. “But it would be much easier if I knew exactly what He wants to tell me.” “If God made it easy, we would not grow from the struggle.” “I know.

The best advice came from the legendary actor the late Sir John Mills, who I sat next to backstage at a lecture we were doing together. He told me he considered the key to public speaking to be this: “Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” Inspired words. And it changed the way I spoke publicly from then on. Keep it short. Keep it from the heart. Men tend to think that they have to be funny, witty, or incisive onstage. You don’t. You just have to be honest. If you can be intimate and give the inside story--emotions, doubts, struggles, fears, the lot--then people will respond. I went on to give thanks all around the world to some of the biggest corporations in business--and I always tried to live by that. Make it personal, and people will stand beside you. As I started to do bigger and bigger events for companies, I wrongly assumed that I should, in turn, start to look much smarter and speak more “corporately.” I was dead wrong--and I learned that fast. When we pretend, people get bored. But stay yourself, talk intimately, and keep the message simple, and it doesn’t matter what the hell you wear. It does, though, take courage, in front of five thousand people, to open yourself up and say you really struggle with self-doubt. Especially when you are meant to be there as a motivational speaker. But if you keep it real, then you give people something real to take away. “If he can, then so can I” is always going to be a powerful message. For kids, for businessmen--and for aspiring adventurers. I really am pretty average. I promise you. Ask Shara…ask Hugo. I am ordinary, but I am determined. I did, though--as the corporation started to pay me more--begin to doubt whether I was really worth the money. It all seemed kind of weird to me. I mean, was my talk a hundred times better now than the one I gave in the Drakensberg Mountains? No. But on the other hand, if you can help people feel stronger and more capable because of what you tell them, then it becomes worthwhile for companies in ways that are impossible to quantify. If that wasn’t true, then I wouldn’t get asked to speak so often, still to this day. And the story of Everest--a mountain, like life, and like business--is always going to work as a metaphor. You have got to work together, work hard, and go the extra mile. Look after each other, be ambitious, and take calculated, well-timed risks. Give your heart to the goal, and it will repay you. Now, are we talking business or climbing? That’s what I mean.

There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre heads, because they are most appropriate for them; there are truths which have charm and seductive power only for mediocre minds: — at this very point we are pushed back onto this perhaps unpleasant proposition, since the time the spirit of respectable but mediocre Englishmen — I cite Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer — is successfully gaining pre-eminence in the middle regions of European taste. In fact, who could doubt how useful it is that such spirits rule from time to time? It would be a mistake to think that highly cultivated spirits who fly off to great distances would be particularly skilful at establishing many small, common facts, collecting them, and pushing to a conclusion: — they are, by contrast, as exceptional men, from the very start in no advantageous position vis-à-vis the “rules.” In the final analysis, they have more to do than merely have knowledge — for they have to be something new, to mean something new, to present new values! The gap between knowing something and being able to do something is perhaps greater as well as more mysterious than people think. It’s possible that the man who can act in the grand style, the creating man, will have to be a person who does not know; whereas, on the other hand, for scientific discoveries of the sort Darwin made a certain narrowness, aridity, and conscientious diligence, in short, something English, may not be an unsuitable arrangement. Finally we should not forget that the English with their profoundly average quality have already once brought about a collective depression of the European spirit. What people call “modern ideas” or “the ideas of the eighteenth century” or even “French ideas” — in other words, what the German spirit has risen against with a deep disgust — were English in origin. There’s no doubt of that. The French have been only apes and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, as well, and at the same time unfortunately their first and most complete victims. For with the damnable Anglomania of “modern ideas” the âme française [French soul] has finally become so thin and emaciated that nowadays we remember almost with disbelief its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profoundly passionate power, its resourceful nobility. But with our teeth we must hang on to the following principle of historical fairness and defend it against the appearance of the moment: European noblesse [nobility] — in feeling, in taste, in customs, in short, the word taken in every higher sense — is the work and invention of France; European nastiness, the plebeian quality of modern ideas, the work of England.

ACT I Dear Diary, I have been carrying you around for a while now, but I didn’t write anything before now. You see, I didn’t like killing that cow to get its leather, but I had to. Because I wanted to make a diary and write into it, of course. Why did I want to write into a diary? Well, it’s a long story. A lot has happened over the last year and I have wanted to write it all down for a while, but yesterday was too crazy not to document! I’m going to tell you everything. So where should we begin? Let’s begin from the beginning. I kind of really want to begin from the middle, though. It’s when things got very interesting. But never mind that, I’ll come to it in a bit. First of all, my name is Herobrine. That’s a weird name, some people say. I’m kinda fond of it, but that’s just me I suppose. Nobody really talks to me anyway. People just refer to me as “Him”. Who gave me the name Herobrine? I gave it to myself, of course! Back in the day, I used to be called Jack, but it was such a run-of-the-mill name, so I changed it. Oh hey, while we’re at the topic of names, how about I give you a name, Diary? Yeah, I’m gonna give you a name. I’ll call you… umm, how does Doris sound? Nah, very plain. I must come up with a more creative name. Angela sounds cool, but I don’t think you’ll like that. Come on, give me some time. I’m not used to coming up with awesome names on the fly! Yes, I got it! I’ll call you Moony, because I created you under a full moon. Of course, that’s such a perfect name! I am truly a genius. I wish people would start appreciating my intellect. Oh, right. The story, right, my bad. So Moony, when it all started, I was a miner. Yep, just like 70% of the people in Scotland. And it was a dull job, I have to say. Most of the times, I mined for coal and iron ore. Those two resources were in great need at my place, that’s why so many people were miners. We had some farmers, builders, and merchants, but that was basically it. No jewelers, no booksellers, no restaurants, nothing. My gosh, that place was boring! I had always been fascinated by the idea of building. It seemed like so much fun, creating new things from other things. What’s not to like? I wanted to build, too. So I started. It was part-time at first, and I only did it when nobody was around. Whenever I got some free time on my hands, I spent it building stuff. I would dig out small caves and build little horse stables and make boats and all. It was so much fun! So I decided to take it to the next level and left my job as a miner. They weren’t paying me well, anyway. I traveled far and wide, looking for places to build and finding new materials. I’m quite the adrenaline junkie, I soon realized, always looking for an adventure.

HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES: Part I THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place, There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind, (Don't you remember that time after a dance, Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry, And old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz, With old Jane, Tom's wife; and we got Joe to sing 'I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me, 'There's not a man can say a word agin me'). Then we had dinner in good form, and a couple of Bengal lights. When we got into the show, up in Row A, I tried to put my foot in the drum, and didn't the girl squeal, She never did take to me, a nice guy - but rough; The next thing we were out in the street, Oh it was cold! When will you be good? Blew in to the Opera Exchange, Sopped up some gin, sat in to the cork game, Mr. Fay was there, singing 'The Maid of the Mill'; Then we thought we'd breeze along and take a walk. Then we lost Steve. ('I turned up an hour later down at Myrtle's place. What d'y' mean, she says, at two o'clock in the morning, I'm not in business here for guys like you; We've only had a raid last week, I've been warned twice. Sergeant, I said, I've kept a decent house for twenty years, she says, There's three gents from the Buckingham Club upstairs now, I'm going to retire and live on a farm, she says, There's no money in it now, what with the damage don, And the reputation the place gets, on account off of a few bar-flies, I've kept a clean house for twenty years, she says, And the gents from the Buckingham Club know they're safe here; You was well introduced, but this is the last of you. Get me a woman, I said; you're too drunk, she said, But she gave me a bed, and a bath, and ham and eggs, And now you go get a shave, she said; I had a good laugh, couple of laughs (?) Myrtle was always a good sport'). treated me white. We'd just gone up the alley, a fly cop came along, Looking for trouble; committing a nuisance, he said, You come on to the station. I'm sorry, I said, It's no use being sorry, he said; let me get my hat, I said. Well by a stroke of luck who came by but Mr. Donovan. What's this, officer. You're new on this beat, aint you? I thought so. You know who I am? Yes, I do, Said the fresh cop, very peevish. Then let it alone, These gents are particular friends of mine. - Wasn't it luck? Then we went to the German Club, Us We and Mr. Donovan and his friend Joe Leahy, Heinie Gus Krutzsch Found it shut. I want to get home, said the cabman, We all go the same way home, said Mr. Donovan, Cheer up, Trixie and Stella; and put his foot through the window. The next I know the old cab was hauled up on the avenue, And the cabman and little Ben Levin the tailor, The one who read George Meredith, Were running a hundred yards on a bet, And Mr. Donovan holding the watch. So I got out to see the sunrise, and walked home. * * * * April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land....

Evie shook her head in confusion, staring from her husband’s wrathful countenance to Gully’s carefully blank one. “I don’t understand—” “Call it a rite of passage,” Sebastian snapped, and left her with long strides that quickly broke into a run. Picking up her skirts, Evie hurried after him. Rite of passage? What did he mean? And why wasn’t Cam willing to do something about the brawl? Unable to match Sebastian’s reckless pace, she trailed behind, taking care not to trip over her skirts as she descended the flight of stairs. The noise grew louder as she approached a small crowd that had congregated around the coffee room, shouts and exclamations renting the air. She saw Sebastian strip off his coat and thrust it at someone, and then he was shouldering his way into the melee. In a small clearing, three milling figures swung their fists and clumsily attempted to push and shove one another while the onlookers roared with excitement. Sebastian strategically attacked the man who seemed the most unsteady on his feet, spinning him around, jabbing and hooking with a few deft blows until the dazed fellow tottered forward and collapsed to the carpeted floor. The remaining pair turned in tandem and rushed at Sebastian, one of them attempting to pin his arms while the other came at him with churning fists. Evie let out a cry of alarm, which somehow reached Sebastian’s ears through the thunder of the crowd. Distracted, he glanced in her direction, and he was instantly seized in a mauling clinch, with his neck caught in the vise of his opponent’s arm while his head was battered with heavy blows. “No,” Evie gasped, and started forward, only to be hauled back by a steely arm that clamped around her waist. “Wait,” came a familiar voice in her ear. “Give him a chance.” “Cam!” She twisted around wildly, her panicked gaze finding his exotic but familiar face with its elevated cheekbones and thick-lashed golden eyes. “They’ll hurt him,” she said, clutching at the lapels of his coat. “Go help him— Cam, you have to—” “He’s already broken free,” Cam observed mildly, turning her around with inexorable hands. “Watch— he’s not doing badly.” One of Sebastian’s opponents let loose with a mighty swing of his arm. Sebastian ducked and came back with a swift jab. “Cam, why the d-devil aren’t you doing anything to help him?” “I can’t.” “Yes, you can! You’re used to fighting, far more than he—” “He has to,” Cam said, his voice quiet and firm in her ear. “He’ll have no authority here otherwise. The men who work at the club have a notion of leadership that requires action as well as words. St. Vincent can’t ask them to do anything that he wouldn’t be willing to do himself. And he knows that. Otherwise he wouldn’t be doing this right now.” Evie covered her eyes as one opponent endeavored to close in on her husband from behind while the other engaged him with a flurry of blows. “They’ll be loyal to him only if he is w-willing to use his fists in a pointless display of brute force?” “Basically, yes.

If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, "fascism is an ideology." The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or "worldview," an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world. Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed. A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology - an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project... It would seem to follow that we should "start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes." Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an "ism" like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing. The other "isms" were created in an era when politics was a gentleman's business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other's reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them. Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville. In a way utterly unlike the classical "isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this. "We [Fascists] don't think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearances? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities." The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.

There was an accident," she says. "I'm sorry." Grandma knows what Jenny means right away. She freezes up in the doorway like someone hit pause. It takes Shelly a little longer. What Jenny means is the car was so old is could only play tapes. She means the brakes needed replacing. She means the weather was bad and the world was dark. She means Shelly's mother was tired and coming off a long shift. She means there was an accident and Shelly's mom didn't walk away from it. (Pg. 61-62)

And she’d released the Kraken.

we also encounter the issue of accumulation through dispossession. As all of this is going on, producers, workers, peasants, and so forth, are displaced from their own means of production, which is why we see the growth, enormous growth, of slum populations around the world. These are people being thrown off the land. These are people being deprived of their means of subsistence and production. As capital takes over resources, whether those are land resources or other resources, people are displaced. This becomes part of the refugee stream that we see, in addition to conflict and war and so forth. But these processes of accumulation through dispossession are entailing the planet’s population in the capitalist sphere, whether they are directly, as I say, exploited by capitalism or not. C. Wright Mills in his book The Power Elite describes a phenomenon that he calls “the higher immorality,” in which, he says, “in a civilization so thoroughly business-penetrated as America,” money becomes “the one unambiguous marker of success, the sovereign American value” (Mills 1956) You can begin to see how this operates. We become a society, as Mills argues, of organized irresponsibility, where the legal often supplants the moral. We see this in US society and in other places, where litigiousness is a marker of how the society works. Whether something is right or wrong is not nearly as relevant as whether it’s legal or illegal, and sometimes illegality doesn’t even really matter that much. But the idea that we bump up against—this whole notion of morality versus legality—is derived from, as at least Wright Mills argues, this notion of higher immorality.

I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

KREMLIN in your language means fortress inside a city, but most people don’t know this.

The wineries attract tourists who like to talk about wine. I mean, do I talk about beer? It’s beer. Drink it and shut up.

Cops say that FBI means “fabulously boring individuals

No, you need someone who isn’t like you at all. You need someone to teach you the mighty ways of the sword, grasshopper, and by sword, I mean stick, and by stick, I mean dick.

According to Plato, internal strife, class war, fomented by self-interest and especially material or economic self-interest, is the main force of ‘social dynamics’. The Marxian formula ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggle’ fits Plato’s historicism nearly as well as that of Marx. The four most conspicuous periods or ‘landmarks in the history of political degeneration’, and, at the same time, ‘the most important … varieties of existing states’, are described by Plato in the following order. First after the perfect state comes ‘timarchy’ or ‘timocracy’, the rule of the noble who seek honour and fame; secondly, oligarchy, the rule of the rich families; ‘next in order, democracy is born’, the rule of liberty which means lawlessness; and last comes ‘tyranny … the fourth and final sickness of the city’. As can be seen from the last remark, Plato looks upon history, which to him is a history of social decay, as if it were the history of an illness: the patient is society; and, as we shall see later, the statesman ought to be a physician (and vice versa)—a healer, a saviour. [...] We see that Plato aimed at setting out a system of historical periods, governed by a law of evolution; in other words, he aimed at a historicist theory of society. This attempt was revived by Rousseau, and was made fashionable by Comte and Mill, and by Hegel and Marx; but considering the historical evidence then available, Plato’s system of historical periods was just as good as that of any of these modern historicists. (The main difference lies in the evaluation of the course taken by history. While the aristocrat Plato condemned the development he described, these modern authors applauded it, believing as they did in a law of historical progress.) [...] It is important to note that Plato explicitly identified this best and oldest among the existing states with the Dorian constitution of Sparta and Crete, and that these two tribal aristocracies did in fact represent the oldest existing forms of political life within Greece. Most of Plato’s excellent description of their institutions is given in certain parts of his description of the best or perfect state, to which timocracy is so similar. (Through his doctrine of the similarity between Sparta and the perfect state, Plato became one of the most successful propagators of what I should like to call ‘the Great Myth of Sparta’—the perennial and influential myth of the supremacy of the Spartan constitution and way of life.)

According to Plato, internal strife, class war, fomented by self-interest and especially material or economic self-interest, is the main force of ‘social dynamics’. The Marxian formula ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggle’8 fits Plato’s historicism nearly as well as that of Marx. The four most conspicuous periods or ‘landmarks in the history of political degeneration’, and, at the same time, ‘the most important … varieties of existing states’, are described by Plato in the following order. First after the perfect state comes ‘timarchy’ or ‘timocracy’, the rule of the noble who seek honour and fame; secondly, oligarchy, the rule of the rich families; ‘next in order, democracy is born’, the rule of liberty which means lawlessness; and last comes ‘tyranny … the fourth and final sickness of the city’. As can be seen from the last remark, Plato looks upon history, which to him is a history of social decay, as if it were the history of an illness: the patient is society; and, as we shall see later, the statesman ought to be a physician (and vice versa)—a healer, a saviour. [...] We see that Plato aimed at setting out a system of historical periods, governed by a law of evolution; in other words, he aimed at a historicist theory of society. This attempt was revived by Rousseau, and was made fashionable by Comte and Mill, and by Hegel and Marx; but considering the historical evidence then available, Plato’s system of historical periods was just as good as that of any of these modern historicists. (The main difference lies in the evaluation of the course taken by history. While the aristocrat Plato condemned the development he described, these modern authors applauded it, believing as they did in a law of historical progress.) [...] It is important to note that Plato explicitly identified this best and oldest among the existing states with the Dorian constitution of Sparta and Crete, and that these two tribal aristocracies did in fact represent the oldest existing forms of political life within Greece. Most of Plato’s excellent description of their institutions is given in certain parts of his description of the best or perfect state, to which timocracy is so similar. (Through his doctrine of the similarity between Sparta and the perfect state, Plato became one of the most successful propagators of what I should like to call ‘the Great Myth of Sparta’—the perennial and influential myth of the supremacy of the Spartan constitution and way of life.)

Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: On the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself, an ideal end. Aiming thus, at something else, they find happiness, by the way.

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray, Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses! As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women's children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses. As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread. Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too. As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days, The rising of the women means the rising of the race. No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes, But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.

How to Apologize Ellen Bass Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying silver carp that's invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling the others into oblivion. If you don't live near a lake, you'll have to travel. Walking is best and shows you mean it, but you could take a train and let yourself be soothed by the rocking on the rails. It's permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful human. When my mother was in the hospital, my daughter and I had to clear out the home she wouldn't return to. Then she recovered and asked, incredulous, How could you have thrown out all my shoes? So you'll need a boat. You could rent or buy, but, for the sake of repairing the world, build your own. Thin strips of Western red cedar are perfect, but don't cut a tree. There'll be a demolished barn or downed trunk if you venture further. And someone will have a mill. And someone will loan you tools. The perfume of sawdust and the curls that fall from your plane will sweeten the hours. Each night we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night we could dream back everything lost. So grill the pale flesh. Unharness yourself from your weary stories. Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt. There is much to fear as a creature caught in time, but this is safe. You need no defense. This is just another way to know you are alive. “How to Apologize” originally appeared in The New Yorker (March 15, 2021).

Leonardo da Vinci has been called “the most relentlessly curious man in history.”7 That’s hyperbole, perhaps, but Leonardo asked a lot of questions, both of others and of himself. Consider, for example, a single day’s “to-do” list that he wrote while in Milan around 1495.8 Calculate the measurement of Milan and its suburbs. Find a book describing Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio. Discover the measurement of the Corte Vecchia [old courtyard of the duke’s palace]. Ask the Master of Arithmetic [Luca Pacioli] to show you how to square a triangle. Ask Benedetto Portinari [a Florentine merchant passing through Milan] by what means they go on ice at Flanders? Draw Milan. Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night. Examine the crossbow of Maestro Gianetto. Find a Master of Hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill, in the Lombard manner. Ask about the measurement of the sun, promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese.

His notorious comment in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is well known to, and often cited by, black intellectuals: “So fundamental is the difference between [the black and white] races of man . . . it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” so that “a clear proof that what [a Negro] said was stupid” was that “this fellow was quite black from head to foot.”68 The point of Eze’s essay is that this remark is by no means isolated or a casual throwaway line that, though of course regrettable, has no broader implications. Rather, it comes out of a developed theory of race and corresponding intellectual ability and limitation. It only seems casual, unembedded in a larger theory, because white academic philosophy as an institution has had no interest in researching, pursuing the implications of, and making known to the world this dimension of Kant’s work.

Formerly, different ranks, different neighborhoods, different trades and professions, lived in what might be called different worlds; at present, to a great degree in the same. Comparatively speaking, they now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them. Great as are the differences of position which remain, they are nothing to those which have ceased. And the assimilation is still proceeding. All the political changes of the age promote it, since they all tend to raise the low and to lower the high. Every extension of education promotes it, because education brings people under common influences, and gives them access to the general stock of facts and sentiments.

We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you. As John Stuart Mill remarked, “That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.” In the right environment, bad can be good and odd can be beautiful.

Skepticism, constant inquiry, fallibilism, self-doubt—these don’t mean not knowing. They mean knowing more all the time. All of the consequences of these values seem “merely” material, but they are what enable us to live a richer life, accept our mortality, and find the path to unselfish attainment. They allow us to pass on a better world to our children—to spend every day, as Mill and Taylor would have wanted, with better music, more poetry, better food, better wine grown in more places.

Hey, Gabe's here," I say. "I am." "He is." I look at Remy. Remy looks back at me. I raise my eyebrows emphatically, but he just scrunches his lower in confusion. Don't say anything about the painting, my eyes are trying to say. I have no idea what you mean, his eye are saying back.

Hey, Gabe's here," I say. "I am." "He is." I look at Remy. Remy looks back at me. I raise my eyebrows emphatically, but he just scrunches his lower in confusion. Don't say anything about the painting, my eyes are trying to say. I have no idea what you mean, his eyes are saying back.

If our people had not gone to war without counting the cost, they were, nevertheless, involved in it without means of providing for its necessities. It has been heretofore stated that we had no powder-mills. It would be needless to say that the new-born Government had no depots of powder, but it may be well to add that, beyond the small supply required for sporting purposes, our local traders had no stock on hand. Having no manufacturing industries which required saltpeter, very little of that was purchasable in our markets. The same would have been the case in regard to sulphur, but for the fact that it had been recently employed in the clarification of sugar-cane juice, and thus a considerable amount of it was found in New Orleans.

So what does that mean in a world where some of us find being locked down a minor nuisance while others are still crowded in refugee camps or in third-world cities where ‘social distancing’ is about as easy as flying to the moon? We need to think globally and act locally–but, in doing both, to work with Church leaders from around the world to find policies that will prevent a mad rush back to profiteering with the devil taking the hindmost. Of course, in the middle of that, we need to strengthen the World Health Organization and insist that all countries of the world stick firmly to its policies and protocols. There are, no doubt, big questions to be asked of some of the world’s superpowers who have used the current crisis as an occasion for grandstanding or other political game-playing. The electronic rumour mills and the ‘fake news’ channels have been working overtime as well.

If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'.

Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank’s Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Huxley’s Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media.

Now we may be well assured that the case was not thus, but far otherwise, with the early Christians. Had it been thus, Christianity never would have expanded from an obscure sect of the despised Hebrews into the religion of the Roman empire. When their enemies said, “See how these Christians love one another” (a remark not likely to be made by anybody now), they assuredly had a much livelier feeling of the meaning of their creed than they have ever had since.

A cultivated mind—I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties—finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind past and present, and their prospects in the future.

Mind. Blown. I've created him just from memory. Maybe I did get some of the artist gene from my parents." Lila scrunches her nose. "But, don't you think it's weird that all three of us see him? I mean, I understand you seeing him, but how are you getting in our heads at the same time? Is is telepathy?" "Pot makes us powerful.

I checked my speed, but I was only doing ten mph over the limit, which in Georgia means you’re obstructing the flow of traffic.

Bureaucracy appears in English from mC19. Carlyle in Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) wrote of `the Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy" ', and Mill in 1848 wrote of the inexpediency of concentrating all the power of organized action `in a dominant bureaucracy'. In 1818, using an earlier form, Lady Morgan had written of the `Bureaucratic or office tryanny, by which Ireland had been so long governed'. The word was taken from fw bureaucratie, F, rw bureau - writing-desk and then office. The original meaning of bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The English use of bureau as office dates from eC18; it became more common in American use, especially with reference to foreign branches, the French influence being predominant. The increasing scale of commercial organization, with a corresponding increase in government intervention and legal controls, and with the increasing importance of organized and professional central government, produced the political facts to which the new term pointed.

Child hood is a shield to the disgust and nausea of life. It is the only time in which a man escapes from the mill of life. Ah! To be a child again, when the notions of poverty, wealth and success means nothing.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.

The West is dying because of its cynicism, scepticism, agnosticism, atheism, nihilism, liberalism, political correctness, scientific materialism and capitalism – which all go together as a dreadful, despairing, grim vision of a soulless universe devoid of any value and purpose whatsoever. The West is nothing but a “dark Satanic mill”, as Blake put it. As Nietzsche said, we must revalue all values. We can only beat mad religions by replacing them with better, more rational religions ... and that’s exactly what Illuminism provides. The West will fail totally unless it can regain its spirit, and that means finding religion again, but this time Logos rather than Mythos religion. Forget the old Gods. Humans themselves are the new Gods ... if they did but know it! Nietzsche said that God is dead. It’s time for him to be reincarnated ... in us!

The philosopher John Stuart Mill wouldn’t have been surprised. “Those only are happy,” he wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

Who are we taking?” Ed straightens, catching the cork in his palm. “Why can’t we all go together?” “Because it’s not junior prom,” Chris says. “We can’t just go solo?” “I mean, you could,” Chris says, “but this is gonna be a big deal with dancing and coupley stuff. Go solo and be the loner, go in a group and we’re the table of dudes—and Mills—sitting there awkwardly. We should get dates.” Reid rolls his dice and begins counting out his turn. “I call Millie.” “You call me?” “Whoa, whoa.” Derailed from his initial argument, Chris turns to Reid with a frown. “If we’re just going to pair up, why’d you pick her?” Reid shrugs and gives a vague nod in my direction. “She looks better in a ball gown.” Ed seems genuinely insulted. “You have obviously never seen me in one.” “I took you to the Deans’ Banquet last year,” Chris reminds Reid. “We had an awesome time.” His turn completed, Reid drops the dice onto the center of the board and picks up his drink. “We did. I’m just being fair and going with someone else this time.” Ed smacks Chris’s shoulder. “I’m more Reid’s type. Remember that cute bartender he liked? The one with the curly hair?” He makes a show of pointing to his head and the mass of auburn curls there. “Tell me we wouldn’t look great together.” “I can beat that.” Alex brings up a foot to rest on the table and rolls up the hem of his jeans, flexing his calf muscle. “Reid is a leg man. Just look at these stems. I could spin you all around that dance floor.” Reid watches each of them, bemused. “I mean, technically speaking, Millie is my type. Being female and whatnot.” “Is it weird to anyone that this roomful of straight men is fighting over Reid and not me?” I ask. Chris, Alex, and Ed seem to give this fair consideration before answering “No” in unison. I lift my glass of wine and take a deep swallow. “Okay, then.” Finally, Reid stands, carrying his empty glass into the kitchen. “Millie, you need anything?” “Other than tips on how to develop an alluring female presence?” I ask. “I’m good. Thanks.

I told August this, and he nodded I consideration. "Could be possible." "Fifty grand to fix your vacuum." "I mean, that's a deal. My vacuum cost twelve million dollars." "Really." "Uh-huh. Military-grade. It could drain a lake." I grinned. "If you aim it at the sky, it's capable of tearing a hole in the fabric of space.

I wonder if you fully understand just how very little love there is in this world for Jewish people. I don’t mean in Germany, either, under the Nazis. I mean in run-of-the-mill Americans, Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy, who otherwise you and I consider perfectly harmless. Nathan, it is there. I guarantee you it is there. I know it is there. I have seen

Luke 4: 18, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” The word poor in this text (ptochos) literally means those who are experiencing economic destitution—beggars or paupers. Interpreting this word to mean spiritual poverty, White evangelicals today avoid addressing the problem of racial wealth inequality, focusing instead on personal pietism independent of concrete demands for justice.

Robert Carr believed in a God of justice. He recognized that those who have been empowered to oppress on earth will not be empowered to do the same in the afterlife. Carr also did not confuse religious practice with true discipleship and was undeterred by false piety. Three types of justice can be seen here in Exodus 6: 6–8. There is retributive justice—God punishes Egypt. Then there is restorative justice, which means God’s promises to restore Israel as a nation. Finally, there is redistributive justice: God is taking them to the land and will redistribute the land. African Americans have yet to experience each of these forms of justice. While no longer in legal bondage, far too many Blacks are constrained by economic, societal, and educational inequities. Many Blacks are in prison bondage or, as Douglas Blackmon refers to it, “Black reenslavement,” which continues on in the twenty-first century. Although the Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished Slavery, Congress provided itself with an important loophole—no one can be held bound in servitude except for a crime. This tragic loophole became the basis for a new form of Slavery or, as it is often called, Slavery by another name: mass incarceration. Blacks are profiled and once charged with a crime find themselves in the prison industrial complex pipeline, their Black bodies kept in bondage and leased out to private businesses without pay for their work. 1 Never-theless, many faithful believers, like Carr, trust that the injustices that prevail today will be nonexistent tomorrow.

His girlfriend of eight years, Lindsay Mills, joined him in June on Oahu, which means ‘the gathering place’. Mills grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art, and had been living with Snowden in Japan.

Bullshit still thrives, and rumour is rife, but an early grounding in media literacy means a generation of people who will doubt first impressions, who will not settle for single-source news. This is a generation much, much harder to manipulate. A generation that expects it is being lied to. And eventually, a generation of feminists raised by feminists will find a way to hold our political system accountable for one of its greatest lies: the lie that we could expect full equality in our lifetimes. (Jennifer Mills)

We do not perceive what is "out ther," rather we perceive what is "in here." Our senses can only inform us of their own status. They can inform us of the elesctrical status of neurons or the physical or the chemical status of the receptors. The outside world is never taken into our consciousness. The outside world is rather our own creation, psychologically synthesized from the mass of sensations that envelope us. In many respects, the ultimate question that perception must ask was stated by John Stuart Mill in 1865. He asked, "What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts?" That remains, perhaps, the ultimate, unresolved perceptual puzzle.

If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.

We do not perceive what is "out there," rather we perceive what is "in here." Our senses can only inform us of their own status. They can inform us of the electrical status of neurons or the physical or the chemical status of the receptors. The outside world is never taken into our consciousness. The outside world is rather our own creation, psychologically synthesized from the mass of sensations that envelope us. In many respects, the ultimate question that perception must ask was stated by John Stuart Mill in 1865. He asked, "What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts?" That remains, perhaps, the ultimate, unresolved perceptual puzzle.

When an ideology conveys such universal meanings and commands such obedience, it has become, in fact, a religion, and its imperatives have the dynamic force of a myth. Those who would question its principles or defy its orders do so at their peril, as groups of rebellious workers continued to discover for the next three or four centuries. From the nineteenth century on, this refurbished religion united thinkers of the most diverse temperaments, backgrounds, and superficial beliefs: minds as different as Marx and Ricardo, Carlyle and Mill, Comte and Spencer, subscribed to its doctrines; and from the beginning of the nineteenth century on, the working classes, finding themselves helpless to resist these new forces, countered the capitalist and militarist expressions of this myth with myths of their own-those of socialism, anarchism, or communism-under which the machine would be exploited, not for a ruling elite, but for the benefit of the proletarian masses. Against this machine-conditioned utopia only a handful of heretics, mostly poets and artists, dared to hold out.

WAY PAST ALL OUR BEDTIMES and loving it, the kids and I were soaked to the skin and shivering around the bonfire. I heard Seamus clear his throat to tell one of his famous ghost stories. I remembered them from when I was a kid. Run-of-the-mill ghost stories were for pansies. Seamus’s tales were H. P. Lovecraft–inspired yarns about fish creatures so horrifying, just the sight of them made people go insane. I mean, anyone can scare a little child. Few can introduce them to cosmic horror.

For himself, Sanjay wasn’t too certain what the election was all about. In a press conference on 25 January 1977 he seemed in characteristic verbal form: Q.: Mr Gandhi, earlier you were against having elections. Are you personally in favour of them now? A.: All in all, seeing things as they are now, it’s okay. If you’d asked me six months ago I would have said no. Q.: What has improved? A.: Nothing. Six months ago I would have thought to wait longer would have been better—which now I do not think. Q.: Would you expect the fact of the Emergency to be the principal issue in the campaign? A.: What do you mean by that? Q.: Well, recently the Janata party has been talking about the Emergency itself as a campaign issue. A.: I don’t think that would be much of a poll issue. Because most of it has happened. It would be a poll issue if it was going to happen. Q.: What about family planning? Do you think that will be a major issue? A.: I don’t think so. Q.: What would you expect would be the major issue? A.: I am not quite sure. BY THE TIME SANJAY arrived in Amethi, he seemed to have shed his earlier fuzziness. He had by then perceived the issues. In speeches he would stress the ‘package’ of progress made during the previous nineteen months, the transformation awaiting Amethi on his election (275 km of hard roads, 1200 km of kutcha roads, a multi-crore textile mill), the disparate nature of the opposition (which usually included an attack on Charan Singh). And then he would come to the programme closest to his heart: family planning via nasbandi. ‘As soon as Sanjay mentioned the words "parivar niyojan" and "nasbandi" the audience would get incensed. We could see the anger seething in their faces. Many of those listening had suffered personally and many more had heard the experiences of friends and neighbours. Congress workers would hang their heads down when Sanjay spoke about those things. They did not dare look the people in the face. By his speeches, Sanjay, instead of making people happy, was making them more and more angry,’ a Block Development Officer from Jagdishpur told me.

The most important thing for you to do,” he’d said, “is to make your aura as benign as possible.” “My aura? You mean, what, like my chi or something? Give off warm vibes before I blow them all away?” “You laugh, but it's true. The best close-in killers are able to mask that predatory vibration they send out, the thing that tickles your animal hindbrain when you're on the receiving end and causes all the hairs on your neck to stand up, the old ancestral genetic early-warning radar that told you something had you zeroed in and was moving to make the kill.” “Are you saying they'll be able to sense I'm going to kill them?” I had asked. “If they are good at their jobs, yes. A good bodyguard, really anyone with true combat instincts, can tune in on that aggressive mental energy when it's pointed their way. For most people, it only works at a subconscious level - like instinctively moving out of the way of someone because they make you uneasy and you can't quite put your finger on why, or turning around for no reason and seeing that someone across the room is glaring at you. We all do it from time to time, but it's not conscious. But the real survivors, the operators who dodge those shots that should have taken them down, but they somehow avoid at the last millisecond, those people can use their inner threat radar actively, and can pick up on the predatory vibe coming their way.” “So you're saying I need to act casual, and not give them the stink-eye to keep from tipping them off.” “It’s more than that. You need to learn how to control that aggressive aura, make it work for you. A good killer can put themselves into stealth mode right up to when they pull the trigger, and then when all the innocent bystanders are getting in the way and slowing you down, milling about in a panic, you dial it up all the way and blast it out like the bow-wave on a ship running at flank speed. You can clear a path through the crowd; they'll get out of your way without even knowing why. I've made it work for me, and I’ve seen others do it as well. It's just another weapon in your arsenal.” And so, I did

The short-timers, who’d gone through hell without even a small pee in their pants, were all jittery that something was going to happen before they boarded the freedom bird home. I mean, after you’ve cheated death for so long, you become paranoid, sure that death had just remembered you were leaving.

Americans, they’ll have a legal means to recover

Instead, the thing that had captured my attention was this big metal column topped by…absolutely nothing. It was doing this in the parking lot of what I had to figure was the main supplier of off-campus food: a retro-fifties fast-food joint. Maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of art, I thought as I stared at the column. I was living in the big city now, after all. Public art happened. Not only that, it didn’t have to make sense. In fact, having it not make sense was probably a requirement. “They took it down for repairs,” a voice beside my suddenly said. I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but the truth is, I jumped about a mile. I’d been so mesmerized by the sight of that column extending upward into space, supporting empty air, that I’d totally lost track of all my soon-to-be-fellow students rushing by me. To this day, I can’t quite explain the fascination. But I’ve promised to tell you the 100 percent truth, which means I’ve got to include even the parts which make me appear less than impressive. “Huh?” Yes, all right, I know. Nowhere even near the list of incredibly clever replies. “They took it down for repairs,” the voice said again. “Took it down,” I echoed. By this time, I knew I was well on my way to breaking my own blending-in rule, big time. Sounding like a total idiot can generally be considered a foolproof method of getting yourself noticed. “The car that’s usually up there.” The guy--it was a guy; I’d calmed down enough to realize that--said. I snuck a quick glance at him out of the corner of my eye. First fleeting impression: tall and blond. The kind of muscular-yet-lanky build I’ve always been a sucker for. Faded jeans. Letterman jacket with just about every sport there was represented on it. Gotcha! I thought. BMOC. Big Man on Campus. This made me feel a little better for a couple of reasons. The first was that it showed my skills hadn’t abandoned me completely after all. I could still identify the players pretty much on sight. The second was that in my vast, though admittedly from-a-distance, experience of them, BMOCs have short attention spans for anyone less BOC than they are. Disconcerting and intense as it was at the moment, I could nevertheless take comfort in the fact that this guy’s unexpected and unnatural interest in me was also unlikely to last very long. “An old Chevy, I think,” he was going on now. “It’s supposed to be back soon, though. Not really the same without it, is it?” He actually sounded genuinely mournful. I was surprised to find myself battling back a quick, involuntary smile. He did seem to be more interesting than your average, run-of-the-mill BMOC. I had to give him that. Get a grip, O’Connor, I chastised myself. “Absolutely not,” I said, giving my head a semi-vigorous nod. That ought to move him along, I thought. You may not be aware of this fact, but agreeing with people is often an excellent way of getting them to forget all about you. After basking in the glow of agreement, most people are then perfectly content to go about their business, remembering only the fact that someone agreed and allowing the identity of the person who did the actual agreeing to fade into the background. This technique almost always works. In fact, I’d never known it not to. There was a moment of silence. A silence in which I could feel the BMOC’s eyes upon me. I kept my own eyes fixed on the top of the carless column. But the longer the silence went on, the more strained it became. At least it did on my side. This guy was simply not abiding by the rules. He was supposed to have basked and moved on by now.

You’re a wonder, Kerry McCrae,” he said, dipping his head, kissing each warm cheek, her nose, then her mouth. The first kisses were sweet, the last one utterly carnal. He did that to her. Made her feel cherished one moment and utterly desirable the next. She might have been breathing just a bit unevenly when he lifted his head, a gleam of an entirely different sort in his eyes now. “I’d ask when I could see you again, but I suppose I need to let Fergus have at least a bit of your time. And I don’t want to press.” She barked out a short laugh at that. “You? Press? No,” she said in mock surprise. He chuckled, too, his grin not remotely sheepish, then leaned down to scoop up hamper and cooler, leaving the lighter laundry bundle for her to grab. They stopped at his car first, stowing his load in the trunk. “I’m happy to take the laundry,” he said. “I’m sure I can find somewhere to--” “No, I’ll take care of it,” she said, maybe too quickly, just imagining Delia and Grace’s faces when he asked them where he could find a good Laundromat. The gossip mill would get all this juicy new grist soon enough but no need to willingly feed it. “Well, I’ll be happy to return them to Thomas, spare you the trip.” “The walk of shame, you mean?” she said, then laughed as they paused by the passenger’s side of her truck so she could stow the laundry bundle on the front seat. “Actually, I plan to get them washed and back on the boat before he comes to move it tomorrow.” Cooper considered that, then nodded. “Sound plan.” He smiled. “Need a ride? Maybe a sunrise breakfast?” Smiling, she nudged him as they walked around to the driver’s side. “Look at you, making it a whole five minutes before pressing.” She wiped a pretend tear from the corner of her eye. “I’m so proud.” Chuckling, he snatched her up close to him and kissed her senseless before she knew what was happening, turning her squeal of surprise into a soft moan of need in a matter of seconds. “You forget,” he said moments later, his voice a bit gruff, too, “I know how to handle that saucy lip of yours now.” “I should be so affronted by your smug machismo,” she scolded, then let him pull her in for a nice, tight hug as she rested her cheek on his shoulder. “And yet…” She sighed, smiled, and slid her arms around his waist. “And yet indeed,” he said quietly, rubbing her back. “We’re a pair, we are, Starfish.

How do we get ready? Not by cloistering ourselves in a monastery, for the ready men and women in Matthew 24:40–42 are working in the fields and grinding in the mill. They are participating in life and providing for their families. Their readiness does not require them to withdraw from society. Being ready means being prepared. It’s having a positive answer to the following question: If Jesus came back today, would you be happy to see him? Perhaps

Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, cparnetry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, road mending, playwriting, and al the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything. “Though sometimes,” he said, “they make you go away by yourself for a while.” “But what,” Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, “what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?” “Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository,. As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you mruder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercsion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.” “All right, but how do you et peopled to do the dirty work?” “What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following. “Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said. Sheik added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit. “Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decade the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or ‘dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only.” “But then the whole personal must consist of people just learning the job.” “Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can’t tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?” “He can refuse the order?” “It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab- the Division of Labor office- and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.

Pravda, as you know, means ‘truth,’ and Izvestia means ‘news,’ and I’ve heard it said that there is no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.

Tad and Alison, according to the itinerary, would be giving lectures on Cuban culture, time and place TBA, which I think means To Be Avoided.

Then though , I look around me at the airport hustle, with its irritable cab honkings and clank of baggage carts, the spit and hiss of bus brakes, the lamplit shades hurrying to and fro in a New York night that is black, raining, and cold, with, ahead of us, the inconceivable press and milling of unseen souls, New York, city of dreams, or so it still sells itself, though for most who walk its canyoned street it is where the dream died, leaving them in graffitied apartments with bad heating and dark stairwells, riding the treadmill of two part-time jobs, or even three, the unending, mean struggle for survival…

The Aryan/Hurrian mother-of-all-living goddess Heba is another evidence of the Aryans adopting the ancient Egyptian god Hathor (i.e. Yahweh) as we also witness in Genesis 3:20. This explains the alliance of Abdi-Heba whose name means, the servant of Yahweh, with Egypt; he pitifully appealed to Pharaoh for help after being attacked by the Semites

If your status quo is driving people, your efforts to build trust will be undermined. Trust and driving people cannot coexist. If trust is the end you desire, then driving change must be the means.

Self-publishing is not nearly as easy as people think it is. Sure, you can upload some crappy manuscript online and slap some run-of-the-mill cover on it. But that doesn't mean anyone wants to read it.

I see ye’ve told her what it means for a Keith to claim a woman,” he said to Darcy. Looking at her across the desk, he said, “Dinna be hard on the lad. If he hadna done it, I would have, and me with three daughters for you to become second mother to. I would ha’ been good to ye, lass, but Darcy, he will worship you.” He winked at Darcy, then spread some papers on the desk and reached for the black-feathered quill. “I have the contract ready, Steafan. Begin when ye wish.” Steafan smirked at her. “What’ll it be, lass, the stocks tonight, or a wedding?” “The stocks,” she said without hesitation, relieved she seemed to have some choice in the matter. What was a night of discomfort compared to the stripping away of one’s choice? Darcy surged around the desk and shook her by the shoulders. His eyes blazed with desperation. “Dinna do this,” he said close by her ear, his voice urgent and low, private from all but perhaps Aodhan, who stood near the desk. “A person in the stocks must be stripped to their skin and placed in the courtyard for the entire clan to laugh at and spit on. I’d sooner defy my uncle and be banished from Ackergill than see you dishonored so. Dinna make me do that, I beg you.” Fear kicked her heart into her throat at Darcy’s manhandling. But as his words penetrated, she stopped fighting his hold. He was serious. He’d abandon his home, his mill, Edmund and Fran, everything he had, all to keep her from a night’s humiliation. He might be a manipulative, lying brute, but he seemed to care for her on some level. She looked hard in his eyes and saw vulnerability glowing behind a glaze of very real fear. Fear for her and for what her actions might cause him to suffer. She shoved away the sympathy he didn’t deserve. He projected an air of absolute honor, but honorable men didn’t trick women into marrying them. “You lied to me,” she seethed. “You told me you’d help me get home.” “And I will,” he said. “Do ye nay remember what I told you before Steafan came in?” She remembered the words verbatim. “Whatever happens tonight, Malina, ye need no’ fash that I’ll keep my word to you.” Malina. The mere memory of her name spoken that way softened her, damn her romantic heart. “Trust me,” he urged.

His eyes never leave me. He’s tall enough to see over the heads of most of the other guys in the room, and as we twist and twirl and bob and bow, he never stops watching me. And instead of feeling gawky and clumsy, it gives me the strangest boost of confidence. I am flooded with adrenaline and energy. It runs up and down my arms and legs, and I want to grab his hand, gather my skirts in my free hand, and run away from the crowds so I can be with him. But I know it wouldn’t be proper, and so we simply dance. With every twist and dip, my smile grows. This must have been how Emily felt at the last dance. The reason she was glowing. And yet my brain keeps battling with my emotions, willing me to tell him who I am, to unload the truth. I know the clock is ticking. I know at any moment I can have everything yanked from me--yet another way I’m like Cinderella. Every time we stand closely, every time he’s looking at me, I try to tell him. I try to say I’m not Rebecca, try to say that I need to talk to him in private, but I can’t get the words out of my mouth. The song changes. The dance changes. But we don’t leave the floor. We dance through three songs. It must be at least an hour’s worth of dancing. I give up on the idea of telling him anything tonight. It can wait. It has waited thirty days; it can wait another. I’ll find him in the morning, before Rebecca arrives. I’ll explain it all. It’s not until I’m entirely too short of breath and dizzy--I blame it on the corset--that I have to bow out. Alex tries to follow me, but he is quickly swarmed by girls in fancy dresses and thick gemstones, and I can’t help but smirk at the look on his face. I’m starting to think he doesn’t want to be a duke at all, even if he doesn’t say it out loud. There are whispers as I leave the floor. All eyes are on me. I need fresh air, so I leave the room and find the courtyard, where several ladies are milling about. Emily is one of them. “I was beginning to think you’d simply keep dancing until the guests had all gone home.” I laugh. “I was a bit short of breath.” “I’m sure the young ladies in attendance thank you.” “Was it that obvious?” “His Grace would not have noticed if the ceiling had fallen in.” I know I should be embarrassed, but I just keep grinning. “I’m sure he was just being polite.” “A single dance would have sufficed. Three means he’s taken an interest. Tongues will wag. You, my dear, have just become the belle of the ball.” “Oh, I didn’t mean to steal your--” Emily laughs. “Not at all. I owe my engagement to you. You may take all the attention you want.” I smile at her and try not to notice that what she’s saying is true. People are watching us. She’s so sweet not to care that I’m stealing her limelight. She’s just that kind of person.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the principles we have laid down. A ‘character,’ as J. S. Mill says, ‘is a completely fashioned will’; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use.

After securing the horse, he turned to help Millie and Lucetta down from the seat but found them already on the ground. “I could have helped you,” he said, moving up to them and extending Millie, then Lucetta, an arm. “As Lucetta mentioned before, this isn’t exactly the time to be worried about proper manners,” Millie said, taking the offered arm. “Besides, since we are at the docks—even though we’re in Newport—Lucetta and I need to look like we can take care of ourselves, which means we need to look intimidating.” “You couldn’t look intimidating if you were sporting a rifle and held a knife between your teeth.” “I’m sure I would look intimidating under those circumstances.” Everett’s lips twitched. “Well, since I don’t have a rifle or a knife, we’ll just have to hope that all these men milling about the docks find me intimidating.” “I can look intimidating,” Lucetta said as she took his offered arm, right before she drew in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and when she opened her eyes again, she looked . . . different. Gone was the quirky woman with the ready grin and sharp wit, replaced with a lady who was aloof, mysterious, and . . . a little scary. “How do you do that?” he asked. “Don’t ruin the mood” was all Lucetta said before she sent Millie the smallest of winks and started forward, leaving Everett no option but to keep pace with her, since both ladies were holding his arms. An

Do that thing,” Gabe says finally, “where you say something funny and distract us.” “I thought you hated that.” “It’s one of my favorite things about you,” he says, and it’s honest, earnest. I blink. “Well, it’s not funny, exactly, but I read this thing … I read this thing that said maybe fingerprints are formed when a fetus pushes their hands up against the inside of the womb. So if that’s true, it means you’re actually walking around with the blueprints to your mom’s uterus on your hands.

I don’t like Remy,” I blurt. He looks back quickly. “I mean, I like him. But not like that. Just in case … you thought that. I mean, Aubrey thought that. I don’t know who else was under that … misconception…” He nods. “I’m not with Alice,” he says. “I can see that. Unless she’s gone invisible.” That brings a small smile to his lips. “You know what I mean.” A pause. “We weren’t ever … We just hung out, really. She liked having someone to go with her to the Jade Coast parties and stuff. And I liked…” He looks away. “I didn’t know her before my mom passed away. So. I guess I kind of liked hanging out with someone who wouldn’t … look at me the way everyone else does sometimes.” I nod. And I can’t help it, but it just slips out—“Is that why you hang out with me?” “No,” he says, fast enough to dispel any doubts. “God. No.” “So…” So what is it? If it’s not because of Remy, or Alice, if there’s no barrier, no obstacle, no mistaken anything, why is there still distance between us? But maybe that was never the reason. Maybe he just doesn’t … When he looks at me again, it’s with uncertainty. “I thought maybe you just didn’t … you know.” “Lust after you with the heat of a thousand suns?” “Maybe not a thousand,” he says, eyes shining. “Maybe just one. One really big sun. And maybe not just lust, specifically, but like lust and all the other stuff.” “With, like, the brightness of a star and the speeding intensity of a meteorite and the … diffuse energy … of a gas giant?” “Yes.” It’s not a thunderclap. Or a lightning bolt straight to the chest. It’s not a magnetic pull toward my heart’s true north. It’s just … natural, to step off the porch and step up to him, the painting still between us. It’s a little bit like breathing, like what Remy was saying—something you just do without conscious thought. Something that is because it is; it exists because there’s no other way than it existing. The realization is all at once stunning and at the same time, somehow, not a surprise at all. I must’ve loved him all along. I just didn’t realize it. “I gas-giant the shit out of you, Gabe,” I say, and I kiss him. I kiss him very briefly but with great feeling, and then I pull back a little and look at him, his eyes wide, lips parted, and when he gives me the most radiant smile, I can’t help it—I go back twice as hard, pulling him closer and kissing him like I mean it, because God, do I mean it. And as he threads one hand through my hair and kisses back with just as much feeling, I send a silent thanks up to Frank for not letting me kiss him that night on the porch, because he was right—this is so much better. That kiss would’ve been fun, no doubt. But this is one to cherish. “Really?” Gabe says, when we break apart for a moment. I can’t help but snort. “No, you’re right, I changed my mind.” “Wait, really?” he says, and I take his face between my hands. “I like you,” I say. “I lustful-sun like you, I meteorite like you, you are the fucking pink Starburst to me.” He grins. And kisses me again but then eases up, shifts the painting to one side, wraps an arm around me, and just hugs me, and I think I like that just as much. It’s at the very least an incredibly close second.