“
The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures."
"That's an oversimplification of the issue."
"The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world don't you? I'm terrified of that world and I don't want to live in a that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Korea Town Los Angeles and as any mixed race person will tell you-- to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
What did she say?” asked Matthias.
Nina coughed and took his arm, leading him away. “She said you’re a very nice fellow, and a credit to the Fjerdan race. Ooh, look, blini! I haven’t had proper blini in forever.”
“That word she used: babink,” he said. “You’ve called me that before. What does it mean?”
Nina directed her attention to a stack of paper-thin buttered pancakes. “It means sweetie pie.”
“Nina—”
“Barbarian.”
“I was just asking, there’s no need to name-call.”
“No, babink means barbarian.” Matthias’ gaze snapped back to the old woman, his glower returning to full force. Nina grabbed his arm. It was like trying to hold on to a boulder. “She wasn’t insulting you! I swear!”
“Barbarian isn’t an insult?” he asked, voice rising.
“No. Well, yes. But not in this context. She wanted to know if you’d like to play Princess and Barbarian.”
“It’s a game?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what is it?”
Nina couldn’t believe she was actually going to attempt to explain this. As they continued up the street, she said, “In Ravka, there’s a popular series of stories about, um, a brave Fjerdan warrior—”
“Really?” Matthias asked. “He’s the hero?”
“In a manner of speaking. He kidnaps a Ravkan princess—”
“That would never happen.”
“In the story it does, and”—she cleared her throat—“they spend a long time getting to know each other. In his cave.”
“He lives in a cave?”
“It’s a very nice cave. Furs. Jeweled cups. Mead.”
“Ah,” he said approvingly. “A treasure hoard like Ansgar the Mighty. They become allies, then?”
Nina picked up a pair of embroidered gloves from another stand. “Do you like these? Maybe we could get Kaz to wear something with flowers. Liven up his look.”
“How does the story end? Do they fight battles?”
Nina tossed the gloves back on the pile in defeat. “They get to know each other intimately.”
Matthias’ jaw dropped. “In the cave?”
“You see, he’s very brooding, very manly,” Nina hurried on. “But he falls in love with the Ravkan princess and that allows her to civilize him—”
“To civilize him?”
“Yes, but that’s not until the third book.”
“There are three?”
“Matthias, do you need to sit down?”
“This culture is disgusting. The idea that a Ravkan could civilize a Fjerdan—”
“Calm down, Matthias.”
“Perhaps I’ll write a story about insatiable Ravkans who like to get drunk and take their clothes off and make unseemly advances toward hapless Fjerdans.”
“Now that sounds like a party.” Matthias shook his head, but she could see a smile tugging at his lips. She decided to push the advantage. “We could play,” she murmured, quietly enough so that no one around them could hear.
“We most certainly could not.”
“At one point he bathes her.”
Matthias’ steps faltered. “Why would he—”
“She’s tied up, so he has to.”
“Be silent.”
“Already giving orders. That’s very barbarian of you. Or we could mix it up. I’ll be the barbarian and you can be the princess. But you’ll have to do a lot more sighing and trembling and biting your lip.”
“How about I bite your lip?”
“Now you’re getting the hang of it, Helvar.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2))
“
We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of culture others have deemed “high” and the “low.”
When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them.
”
”
Austin Kleon (Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered)
“
Everyone loves New York City for all these different reasons. The culture. The mix of people. The pace. The food. But for me, it's like one epic Easter egg hunt. You're always finding these little surprises around every corner.
”
”
Gayle Forman (Where She Went (If I Stay, #2))
“
More than Iran's enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption... a senior official in an important American political center said: 'Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts.' He is right. If they arouse sexual desires in any given country, if they spread unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.
”
”
Ali Khamenei
“
When the nettle is young, the leaves make excellent greens; when it grows old it has filaments and fibers like hemp and flax. Cloth made from the nettle is as good as that made from hemp. Chopped up, the nettle is good for poultry; pounded, it is good for horned cattle. The seed of the nettle mixed with the fodder of animals gives a luster to their skin; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow dye. It makes, however, excellent hay, as it can be cut twice in a season. And what does the nettle need? very little soil, no care, no culture; except that the seeds fall as fast as they ripen, and it is difficult to gather them; that is all. If we would take a little pains, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. How much men are like the nettle! My friends, remember this, that there are no weeds, and no worthless men, there are only bad farmers.
”
”
Victor Hugo
“
Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from — and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.
”
”
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
“
The Apocalypse and the war scrambled all the races and cultures. The prosperous cities are all now a diverse mix.
”
”
Misba (The High Auction (Wisdom Revolution, #1))
“
I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.
”
”
Jasmine Ann Cooray
“
Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality.” Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
The commercial media … help citizens feel as if they are successful and have met these aspirations, even if they have not. They tend to neglect reality (they don't run stories about how life is hard, fame and fortune elusive, hopes disappointed) and instead celebrate idealized identities – those that, in a commodity culture, revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of these things. The media, in other words, assist the commercial culture in “need creation”, prompting consumers to want things they don't need or have never really considered wanting. And catering to these needs, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, is a very profitable business. A major part of the commercial media revolves around selling consumers images and techniques to “actualize” themselves, or offering seductive forms of escape through entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but actual news is not the predominant concern of the commercial media.
”
”
Chris Hedges (The Death of the Liberal Class)
“
It was just a temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.
”
”
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
“
The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
As a business owner you should never mix business income with personal income and never mix business expenses with personal expenses. Your business is a separate entity with a life of its own. Your job is to lead and manage that separate entity, not to entangle with it. Entangling with your business will result in chaos. But keeping business and personal separate will facilitate efficiency and reduce stress.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.
”
”
Brad Parks
“
The systems we will be exploring in order are:
● Breeding Targets: Arousal patterns tied to systems meant to get our ancestors to have sex with things that might bear offspring (e.g., arousal from things like penises, the female form, etc.).
● Inverse Systems: Arousal patterns that arise from a neural mix-up, causing something that disgusts the majority of the population to arouse a small portion of it (e.g., arousal from things like being farted on, dead bodies, having insects poured on one’s face, etc.).
● Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission: Arousal patterns that stem from either emotional concepts (such as betrayal, transformation, being eaten, etc.) or dominance and submission pathways.
● Emotional Connections to People: While emotional connections do not cause arousal in and of themselves, they do lower the threshold for arousal (i.e., you may become more aroused by a moderately attractive person you love than a very attractive stranger).
● Trope Attraction: Arousal patterns that are enhanced through a target’s adherence to a specific trope (a nurse, a goth person, a cheerleader, etc.).
● Novelty: Arousal patterns tied to the novelty of a particular stimulus.
● Pain and Asphyxiation: Arousal patterns associated with or enhanced by pain and oxygen deprivation.
● Basic Instincts: Remnants of our pre-cognitive mating instincts running off of a “deeper” autopilot-like neurological system (dry humping, etc.) that compel mating behavior without necessarily generating a traditional feeling of arousal.
● Physical Stimuli: Arousal patterns derived from physical interaction (kissing, touching an erogenous zone, etc.).
● Conditioned Responses: Arousal patterns resulting from conditioning (arousal from shoes, doorknobs, etc.).
”
”
Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality)
“
People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.
”
”
Kazuo Ishiguro
“
Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman
“
A little-known fact is that most American of icons, the open-range cattle industry, originated in El Norte and was based on Spanish precedents. A mix of arid plains, high deserts, and Mediterranean coastline, Spain bears a physical resemblance to El Norte.
”
”
Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
“
Just seems more complicated than other people. This complex human being may be at once "more naive and more knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and rigorous logic. He or she is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier, and yet adamantly saner than the average person.
”
”
Marylou Kelly Streznewski (Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential)
“
(I eventually came to define my marriage counseling, no matter what the cultural mix, as trying to help people separate so that they would not have to “separate.”)
”
”
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
“
And as any mixed-race person will tell you, to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
“
A great many contemporary artists from hugely diverse backgrounds are currently approaching the prospect of cultural mixing...
”
”
Lucy R. Lippard
“
Cultures reflect the interactions of mixed populations.
”
”
Peter Heather (The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians)
“
That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately—ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors—coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sue generous explorations.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness)
“
Lagos was established by mainly Black Afrofuturists. Space is the Place. With considerable effort, all their fiscal and human resources and a rich, funky cultural history mixed with African myth and mythmaking, they willed the space station into being. More than a few white supremacists liked the idea of a large proportion of Black people leaving Earth. They were disappointed when Lagos flourished.
”
”
Tade Thompson (Far from the Light of Heaven)
“
The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth.
”
”
Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present)
“
To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long.
With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc.
That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.
”
”
Noam Chomsky
“
the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. From Pliny’s Bithynia to Perpetua’s Carthage, Christianity spread from its small-scale origins in Judaea largely because of the channels of communication across the Mediterranean world that the Roman Empire had opened up and because of the movement through those channels of people, goods, books and ideas. The irony is that the only religion that the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world.
”
”
Mary Beard (SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome)
“
A smart city is an intelligent town that provides enormous possibilities for human growth through art, culture, social, architectural, economic, political, environmental, and scientific flowering with the optimal mix of nature, technology, humanity, and arts.
”
”
Amit Ray (Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity)
“
We insist that “diversity” is a great strength, but for most Americans this is mere lip service. They rarely seek diversity in their personal lives, living instead in homogeneous islands that look nothing like the racial and cultural mix this country has become.
”
”
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
“
Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.
”
”
Malcolm Gladwell
“
A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you? I'm terrified of that world , and I don't want to live in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed race person will tell you--to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
The world of technology has made it easier for people to get in touch with their modern muses regardless of the genres that they are trying to utilize and even if they create a new genre based on a mixing of others. The potential for modern-day muses is as vast as individual creativity.
”
”
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek (CELLOGIRLS: Identity and Transformation in 2CELLOS Fan Culture (The Original 2CELLOS Fan Anthology Book 1))
“
Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of this past; all that is dead and has served its purpose has to go. But that does not mean a break with, or a forgetting of, the vital and life-giving in that past. We can never forget the ideals that have moved our race, the dreams of the Indian people through the ages, the wisdom of the ancients, the buoyant energy and love of life and nature of our forefathers, their spirit of curiosity and mental adventure, the daring of their thought, their splendid achievements in literature, art and culture, their love of truth and beauty and freedom, the basic values that they set up, their understanding of life's mysterious ways, their toleration of other ways than theirs, their capacity to absorb other peoples and their cultural accomplishments, to synthesize them and develop a varied and mixed culture; nor can we forget the myriad experiences which have built up our ancient race and lie embedded in our sub-conscious minds. We will never forget them or cease to take pride in that noble heritage of ours. If India forgets them she will no longer remain India and much that has made her our joy and pride will cease to be.
”
”
Jawaharlal Nehru (The Discovery of India)
“
In the culture to be born there will no doubt be old and new elements. How these elements will be mixed is not a question to which any individual can respond. The response must be given by the community. But we can say this: that the response will be given, and not verbally, but in tangible facts, and by action.
”
”
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
“
The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you? I'm terrified of that worls, and I don't want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don't exist in it.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
“
The head/heart duality is a well-known cultural phenomenon. In everyday speech we use "heart" as a shorthand to refer to our emotional state or our faith and "head" to refer to cognition or reason. Should I follow my head or my heart? Both "head" and "heart," while they are literally the names of body parts, are commonly used to stand for nonbodily phenonmena, for mental processes. But what body part do we use when we want to refer explicitly to our coporeal self? Whe, the humble "ass," of course! Consider the seminal gangsta rappers Niggaz with Attitude, who in thier classic track "Straight Outta Compton" rhyme: "Niggaz start to mumble / They wanna rumble / Mix 'em and cook 'em in a pot like gumbo / Goin' off on a motherfucker like that / With a gat that's pointed at yo ass." Do the guys in NWA mean to say that a gun is literally pointed downward, at your tuchas? Of course not. We understand that in this context "ass" means "corporeal self.
”
”
David J. Linden (The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good)
“
The narratives open to us are the ones based on our identities as it is these stories that are market and social media approved. They have a numbing familiarity to them. We second generation immigrants have the privilege of self-actualisation. We make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels, memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home, of how we all feel ugly, of the mixed relationships we enter into with white people, losing our language from a culture we had a tenuous hold of in the first place, we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim. For an algorithm not
”
”
Sheena Patel (I'm a Fan)
“
When I like a black person, they dislike me.
When I like a white person, they despise me.
When I like a mixed person, they harass me.
When I like an illiterate person, they revile me.
When I like an educated person, they attack me.
When I like a weak person, they berate me.
When I like a strong person, they condemn me.
When I like a lowly person, they denounce me.
When I like an eminent person, they renounce me.
When I like a famous person, they disparage me.
When I like a rich person, they trouble me.
When I like a poor person, they hassle me.
When I like an obscure person, they pester me.
When I like a young person, they deride me.
When I like an old person, they hate me.
When I like myself, they slander me.
Age doesn't separate us, maturity does.
Ethnicity doesn't separate us, prejudice does.
Tradition doesn't separate us, bigotry does.
Ancestry doesn't separate us, character does.
Religion doesn't separate us, ignorance does.
Tribe doesn't separate us, intolerance does.
Culture doesn't separate us, misunderstanding does.
Sex doesn't separate us, bias does.
Race doesn't separate us, injustice does.
Class doesn't separate us, poverty does.
Politics doesn't separate us, corruption does.
Gender doesn't separate us, mentality does.
Wealth doesn't separate us, greed does.
Appearance doesn't separate us, attitude does.
Power doesn't separate us, ambition does.
Fame doesn't separate us, ego does.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
You can't mix your religion and culture together. You have to divorce one in order to find inner peace.
”
”
Mwanandeke Kindembo
“
Tradition divides, tradition unites;
Choose carefully the tradition you live.
Not all traditions imposed on you are good,
You gotta use conscience to pick and mix.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets)
“
There is a dream, a grand idealism, that mixed-race people are the hope for change, the peacekeepers, we are the people with an other understanding, with an invested interest in everyone being treated equally as we have a foot and a loyalty in many camps, with all shades. We are like love bombs planted in the minefield of black and white. It is as if our parents intended to make us, with courage, and on purpose, as vessels of empathy, bridges for the cultural divide and diplomats for diversity and equality." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)
”
”
Nikesh Shukla (The Good Immigrant)
“
The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known as Untouchables. They had to live apart from all other people and scrape together a living in humiliating and disgusting ways, such as sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material. Even members of the lowest caste avoided mingling with them, eating with them, touching them and certainly marrying them. In modern India, matters of marriage and work are still heavily influenced by the caste system, despite all attempts by the democratic government of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing polluting in caste mixing.3 Purity
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion—atavistic in my opinion, but some people want them back. Sadat is the great example of that: he threw out the Russians, as well as everything else that represented Abdel Nasser, ascendant nationalism, and so forth—and said, “Let the Americans come.” Then you have a new period of what in Arabic is called an infitah—in other words, an opening of the country to a new imperialism: technocratic management, not production but services—tourism, hotels, banking, etc. That’s where we are right now.
”
”
Edward W. Said (Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews With Edward W. Said)
“
We no longer live in a world of classic and formal divisions between man-made technology and the natural world, but rather in a world of increasing synthesis of technology and nature, a techno-natural world. An example of such blurring and blending exists if we plant crops in flood prone areas that are flood tolerant (or that thrive on flooding) but which also mitigate soil erosion and flash flooding. To effectively combat global warming and climate change, this blurring of technology and nature will be essential. To this mix we should, most often without any engineering compromise, also add in ethical and cultural value considerations.
”
”
K. Lee Lerner (Climate Change: In Context, 2 Volume set)
“
… one of the great advances in modern cultural theory is the realization, almost universally acknowledged, that cultures are hybrid and heterogenous and, as I argued in Culture and Imperialism, that cultures and civilizations are so interrelated and interdependent as to beggar any unitary or simply delineated description of their individuality. How can one today speak of "Western civilization" except as in large measure an ideological fiction, implying a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas, none of which has much meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel, and the mingling of peoples that gave the Western nations their present mixed identities?
”
”
Edward W. Said (Orientalism)
“
Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog sought to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he said. “He got the notion of tools for human use.” Brand’s
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
To all my friends who constantly talk disparagingly about the supposed 'homosexual lifestyle' and stereotype gay people and the community, I'd like to get this straight.
There are essentially two worlds – the 'gay scene' and the gay (or LGBTIQ) community. The 'scene' is like the tip of the iceberg; what is seen by others because it is visible on a street, suburb or pride parade. Like the ninety percent of the submerged iceberg, the community is larger and less visible. It consists of organisations, groups, support networks and also gay and lesbian singles and couples living 'normal' lives in the suburbs. Occasionally there is an overlap but not often. Some live, socialise and work in both. Many never enter each others worlds. The values, lifestyles and culture of these two worlds are as different as Asian culture is to western is to African is to Middle Eastern.
Dig down even deeper below the surface and you find it is not a single community but diverse communities and subcultures that are separate but not necessarily divided. The common thing that binds them together is their experience of inequality, discrimination and their desire to make a better world for themselves, others and future generations.
If you believe that all gays and lesbians are shallow and obsessed with sex, body image, partying, nightclubs and bars then you are obviously an observer from the outside or mixing in the wrong circles.
”
”
Anthony Venn-Brown OAM (A Life of Unlearning - a journey to find the truth)
“
The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.
”
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Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
The man who has lost his instincts and does not recognize the obligation Nature has given him cannot hope for any corrective action on Nature’s part until he restores his lost instincts by clear intellectual awareness. Once he understands, then he must face the task of making the necessary amends by bringing back what was lost. There is a great danger that once a man no longer sees his duty clearly, he will continue to tear down the racial barriers until the last remaining shred of his best part is finally lost. Then there would be nothing left but a uniform racial mush, which appears to be the ideal sought by our “wonderful world-reformers” today. However this puree mix would soon drive all ideals from the world. True, a group of great size might be formed in that way because a herd animal can be unnaturally combined, but no such mixture can ever produce a man who can carry a culture or a man who can be a cultural founder and creator. The mission of mankind could then be considered at an end.
Anyone who does not want the earth to approach that condition must accept that it is the task, especially of the German State, to be sure, above everything, that all further bastardization is stopped.
”
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Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
One often hears that today’s cultural war is fought between traditionalists who believe in a firm set of values and postmodern relativists who consider ethical rules, sexual identities, and so on as a result of contingent power games. But is this really the case? The ultimate postmodernists today are conservatives themselves. Once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it—all such returns today are a postmodern fake. Does Trump enact traditional values? No, his conservativism is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. Playing with “traditional values,” mixing references to tradition with open obscenities, Trump is the ultimate postmodern president, while Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist.
”
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Slavoj Žižek (Heaven in Disorder)
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column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them. When
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Sit down and ask yourself, ‘What is the most important thing to me?’ What grosses me out the most? What makes me the most upset—is it healthcare? Is it so many people being hungry in our culture? Is it sexual abuse? Mix that with doing something you love, something you could keep doing forever and ever. For me, it was ending violence against women, and I mixed it with music. And I’ve had a 25-year career. So that’s my advice: Find something you really care about and mix that with something you love doing.
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Kathleen Hanna
“
It seems to me the simplest explanation,” he told the audience, “is that they are all HeLa cell contaminants.” Scientists knew they had to keep their cultures free from bacterial and viral contamination, and they knew it was possible for cells to contaminate one another if they got mixed up in culture. But when it came to HeLa, they had no idea what they were up against. It turned out Henrietta’s cells could float through the air on dust particles. They could travel from one culture to the next on unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers’ coats and shoes, or through ventilation systems. And they were strong: if just one HeLa cell landed in a culture dish, it took over, consuming all the media and filling all the space.
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Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
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Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality.” Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building. Kagan’s work helped link certain infant temperaments with adolescent personality styles like those of Tom and Ralph.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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The inevitability of mixing has not been corroborated by the facts. We are not witnessing a ‘mixing of cultures’ in France, but quite frankly the destruction, eradication and ethnocide of European culture in favour of Americanisation and now Afro-Maghrebisation and Islamicisation.
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Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
“
[H]e asked Renee, “What does rock and roll have today that it didn’t have in the sixties?” Renee said, “Tits,” which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl -- that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way -- hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do.
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Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
“
There are no lower orders. There are no lesbians or transgender people or fill in the blank. There is only people, a wild mix of energy, different abilities, colours ranging from ebony to bleached white. We’re everything and everybody. I don’t even believe in male and female, it’s a sliding scale and we are hag-ridden by a binary culture: male-female, black-white, straight-gay, rich-poor and so it goes. The gradations are infinite and the silliest mistake of all is to define people by their material possessions. It’s even worse if people define themselves by money.
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Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle)
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The problem of our time has never been with technology as such. There is no inner working of technology that inevitably leads to human subjection. The tendency exists merely because, by allowing an overwhelming increase in the numbers of the superfluous, it gives them and those who cater to them power when it is mixed with democracy. The left environmentalist, among many others, is misguided because he wants more power given to such people. He attacks precisely those elements of the modern West, of modern technology, even of modern culture, that can mitigate somewhat the rule of the superfluous and their destruction of nature, including human nature
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Bronze Age Pervert (Bronze Age Mindset)
“
Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no
black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and
shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you
think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can
imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as
‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever
been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war,
the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of
murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite
hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European
history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite
the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost
entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.
Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a
rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused
black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but
simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too
much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black
crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of
humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical,
economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because
of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow
crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound
like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly
about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.
”
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Akala (Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire)
“
The seed of the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter. Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle!” He added, after a pause: “Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
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Victor Hugo (Les Miserables)
“
Once when I was in graduate school, I got a terrible case of the flu and dropped a good deal of weight in a short amount of time. When I returned to campus, a professor said, “You look good! Did you lose weight?” When I responded that I had lost weight because I’d been seriously ill, she just shrugged and said, “Well, however it happened, looks good!” I remember that moment as such a clear example that much of what we claim to be health-based concern about other women’s weight is not at all. It’s nothing more than an ill-disguised bit of buy-in to a culture that says our worth is determined by our body size and that less is always more, no matter how we get there.
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Renee Engeln (Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women)
“
And what is the alternative to appropriation? kotaku: I don’t know. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures. kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.
”
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Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
From then on he would make two or three trips a week to similar premises – bookstores, crystal shops, candle parlours, short-let niche operations selling a mix of pop-cultural memorabilia and truther merchandise from two or three generations ago – which had flourished along the abandoned high streets of the post-2007 austerity, run by a network of shabby voters hoping to take advantage of tumbling rents. Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental theology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing. The internet was killing them. The speed of things was killing them. They were like old-fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 – denizens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies.
”
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M. John Harrison (The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again)
“
What happens when you attempt to mix half-baked Freudianism with an older, incompatible philosophy is that you wind up with a potentially explosive chemical reaction. The demiurge of superego gets its “liberation,” but the devil of the id is denied its due. And when the id starts to rumble and grumble, there's a corresponding clampdown from the superego. As the darker impulses take over, over time, sexual abuse becomes part of the unofficial curriculum. And since sexual abuse leads to trauma, is it any real surprise if trauma is reframed—whether by early Fabian “evolutionary socialists” or by today's spiritual spokes-people (such as Esalen-biographer Jeffrey Kripal or LSE-student Whitley Strieber2)—as a means to access the divine and accelerate evolution?
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Jasun Horsley (The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse)
“
Bring Cecily home,” he said curtly. “I won’t have her at risk, even in the slightest way.”
“I’ll take care of Cecily,” came the terse reply. “She’s better off without you in her life.”
Tate’s eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, affronted.
“You know what I mean,” Holden said. “Let her heal. She’s too young to consign herself to spinsterhood over a man who doesn’t even see her.”
“Infatuation dies,” Tate said.
Holden nodded. “Yes, it does. Goodbye.”
“So does hero worship,” he continued, laboring the point.
“And that’s why after eight years, Cecily has had one raging affair after the other,” he said facetiously.
The words had power. They wounded.
“You fool,” Holden said in a soft tone. “Do you really think she’d let any man touch her except you?” He went to his office door and gestured toward the desk. “Don’t forget your gadget,” he added quietly.
“Wait!”
Holden paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned. “What?”
Tate held the device in his hands, watching the lights flicker on it. “Mixing two cultures when one of them is all but extinct is a selfish thing,” he said after a minute. “It has nothing to do with personal feelings. It’s a matter of necessity.”
Holden let go of the doorknob and moved to stand directly in front of Tate. “If I had a son,” he said, almost choking on the word, “I’d tell him that there are things even more important than lofty principles. I’d tell him…that love is a rare and precious thing, and that substitutes are notoriously unfulfilling.”
Tate searched the older man’s eyes. “You’re a fine one to talk.”
Holden’s face fell. “Yes, that’s true.” He turned away.
Why should he feel guilty? But he did. “I didn’t mean to say that,” Tate said, irritated by his remorse and the other man’s defeated posture. “I can’t help the way I feel about my culture.”
“If it weren’t for the cultural difference, how would you feel about Cecily?”
Tate hesitated. “It wouldn’t change anything. She’s been my responsibility. I’ve taken care of her. It would be gratitude on her part, even a little hero worship, nothing more. I couldn’t take advantage of that. Besides, she’s involved with Colby.”
“And you couldn’t live with being the second man.”
Tate’s face hardened. His eyes flashed.
Holden shook his head. “You’re just brimming over with excuses, aren’t you? It isn’t the race thing, it isn’t the culture thing, it isn’t even the guardian-ward thing. You’re afraid.”
Tate’s mouth made a thin line. He didn’t reply.
“When you love someone, you give up control of yourself,” he continued quietly. “You have to consider the other person’s needs, wants, fears. What you do affects the other person. There’s a certain loss of freedom as well.” He moved a step closer. “The point I’m making is that Cecily already fills that place in your life. You’re still protecting her, and it doesn’t matter that there’s another man. Because you can’t stop looking out for her. Everything you said in this office proves that.” He searched Tate’s turbulent eyes. “You don’t like Colby Lane, and it isn’t because you think Cecily’s involved with him. It’s because he’s been tied to one woman so tight that he can’t struggle free of his love for her, even after years of divorce. That’s how you feel, isn’t it, Tate? You can’t get free of Cecily, either. But Colby’s always around and she indulges him. She might marry him in an act of desperation. And then what will you do? Will your noble excuses matter a damn then?
”
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Diana Palmer (Paper Rose (Hutton & Co. #2))
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Charm took effect, and even progressed. Markus came out of it elegantly. He was smiling with his least Swedish smile possible, almost a kind of Spanish smile. He strung out some tasty anecdotes, skillfully mixed in cultural and personal references, successfully managed transitions from the intimate to the general. He gracefully unfurled a fine piece of engineering known as “man of the world.
”
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David Foenkinos (Delicacy)
“
Human colour is the colour I'm truly interested in, the colour of your humanity. May the size of your heart and the depth of your soul be your currency. welcome aboard my Good Ship. Let us sail to the colourful island of misex identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboad. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of rum, let's toast to the minorities who are the majority. There's no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now. I drink to our sameness and to our unique differences. This is the twenty-first century and we share this, we live here, in the future. It is a beautiful morning, it is first light on the time of being other, so get out from that shade and feel the warmth of being outside.
You tick: Other.
”
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Salena Godden
“
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.
Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn.
To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.)
There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
Under the cover of the ideology of cultural and ethnic mixing, which has never succeeded anywhere in the world, the intention is to abolish our ancestral culture, which has been judged guilty of existing and being intrinsically perverse. ‘Ethnic identity’ and its defence have been designated as Evil, as the symbol of aggression, according to Laurent Joffrin. In other words, to defend and affirm oneself is racism.
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Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
“
The mixing of cultures and the abolition of ethnic identities are not on the schedule of the Twenty-first century. India, China, Black Africa, the Muslim world, whether Arab or Turkish, and so on, are affirming their identities and do not tolerate either a colonising immigration or cultural mixing on their own soil. Only the European pseudo-elites are defending the dogma of a ‘multicultural world’, which is a chimera.
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Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
“
Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a living. Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and culture, discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation. Wanted, a man of courage who is not a coward in any part of his nature. Wanted, a man who is symmetrical, and not one-sided in his development, who has not sent all the energies of his being into one narrow specialty and allowed all the other branches of his life to wither and die. Wanted, a man who is broad, who does not take half views of things; a man who mixes common sense with his theories, who does not let a college education spoil him for practical, every-day life; a man who prefers substance to show, and one who regards his good name as a priceless treasure.
”
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Brett McKay (The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues)
“
Girls in pop culture are also often represented in ways that feel almost, but not quite, human. They are lifelike rather than alive, and more than anything they resemble the 'idea of woman' in late capitalist culture; the twenty-first-century 'true women.' There isn't a girl in the world who has not, at some point, come across an image or portrayal that made her feel a sense of recognition and alienation at the same time, a me/not-me, real/not real, true/not-true feeling that, once experienced, never quite goes away. Sure, these images and portrayals do not share the same qualities as the objects Mori first mapped - they are not, at least to start with, artificial beings. They aren't cyborgs or replicants or reanimated corpses. But we don't recognize them as human, either, at least not like any humans we know. Some ineffable thing is missing.
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Carina Chocano (You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages)
“
At a higher level of abstraction, the behavioral correlates of life history strategies can be framed within the five-factor model of personality. Among the Big Five, agreeableness and conscientiousness show the most consistent pattern of associations with slow traits such as restricted sociosexuality, long-term mating orientation, couple stability, secure attachment to parents in infancy and romantic partners in adulthood, reduced sex drive, low impulsivity, and risk aversion across domains. Conscientiousness and (to a smaller extent) agreeableness are also the most reliable personality predictors of physical health and longevity; the contribution of neuroticism is mixed and may depend on the specific facets considered. The life history correlates of neuroticism are much less straightforward; for example, high neuroticism tends to predict increased short-term mating in women but reduced short-term mating in men, with much cross-cultural variation. There is also evidence that slow life history–related traits can be associated with social anxiety and insecurity, which is consistent with a general profile of risk aversion and behavioral inhibition. As a first approximation, then, metatrait alpha can be treated as a broadband correlate of slow strategies, with the caveat that neuroticism may be elevated at both ends of the continuum.
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Marco del Giudice (Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach)
“
Medicine was religion. Religion was society. Society was medicine. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere (you had to have or borrow enough money to buy a pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required), and so was music (if you didn't have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn't be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn't be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick). In fact, the Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American one, in which the practice of medicine has fissioned into smaller and smaller subspecialties, with less and less truck between bailiwicks. The Hmong carried holism to its ultima Thule. As my web of cross-references grew more and more thickly interlaced, I concluded that the Hmong preoccupation with medical issues was nothing less than a preocupation with life. (And death. And life after death).
”
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Anne Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures)
“
We preach body confidence, but we live in a culture that doesn’t quite know what to do with a woman who actually likes the way she looks. It’s considered arrogant and even unfeminine. Think of the recent hit One Direction song that made the claim that a woman was beautiful precisely because she didn’t know she was beautiful. We need to question a culture that tells women they must be beautiful to be loved, but that they shouldn’t actually feel beautiful or we’ll find them conceited.
”
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Renee Engeln (Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women)
“
In a student culture promoting the increasingly militant silencing of girls' voices and objections, there is often little to challenge such attitudes as they flourish (and any objection is conveniently deflected by the stereotype of whining, moaning women). Meanwhile this cocktail of prejudice is mixed against the normalizing wider backdrop of yet more gender imbalance and casual sexism, as street harassment and similar displays of chauvinism are routinely witnessed. From seeing disparate pieces of women's bodies co-opted to advertise products, to hearing them referred to as mere numbers on a scale out of ten, these young men have been encouraged at every turn to dehumanize their female peers and classmates and to consider them merely as objects.
In just the same way that it is wrong to blame the victims of sexism, it is important too to acknowledge the extent to which these cultural factors combine to powerfully persuade young men that aggressive sexism is their expected role.
”
”
Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism)
“
The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn’t be a problem for you, I guess? — Sam and his mother, Anna Lee, arrived in Los Angeles in July of 1984.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
Exploring all I could find, often with reckless dedication, I devoured the philosophies and theologies of animistic and shamanistic traditions. Hungrily I began learning: how to feel connection with the wind and the waves, how to hear the songs of the land and the stories of the ancestors, how to dissolve into darkness and ride the thermals of light. Slowly I discovered how these traditions are still alive, not just in lands that, with a mix of disquiet and envy, Western cultures call primitive and uncivilized. Returning to the islands of my ancestors, with wonder and relief, I found animistic religions in the rolling hills and flowering gardens of Britain. To my surprise and delight, I found too that here my passion for science was as nurtured as my soul’s artistic creativity. There was nothing in quantum physics or molecular biology, or the theories of the physiology of consciousness that could negate my growing understanding and experience of sanctity. I found the power of reason here, naturally inherent within the language of a religion.
”
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Emma Restall Orr (Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics)
“
And lastly were the single women. They would run the gamut from somewhat pretty to somewhat plain, dreadful, incurable diseases that had relegated them to lives of obscurity and boredom. They were hardly unattractive, each having something special to offer, but their figures and faces were more real than the latest Hollywood celebrity gracing the magazine cover at their local supermarket checkout. Outcasts in a non-substantive culture which worshipped only facade, they were hoping for the romance found in the pages of the Harlequins and Harold Robbins novels they read in their bedrooms, a pint of ice cream at their side. Their bedroom was their sanctuary, a place where they could dream of being taken and loved, worshipped and lusted after. If they were lucky, they would take home from Cozumel a sweet memory they would make last a lifetime. Evidence that they had lived. If they were unlucky, they would cross paths with a swarthy local Lothario or worse, a butch cruising for the vulnerable. The unsafe mix of inexperience and loneliness would lead them to acts so shameful and degrading they would never be able to enjoy the innocence of another Harlequin.
”
”
Bobby Underwood (The Turquoise Shroud (Seth Halliday #1))
“
The idea that America is one great shopping mall, and that all anyone wants to do is, you know, grasp their credit card and run out and buy stuff is a stereotype, and it’s a generalization but, but but as a way to summarize a certain kind of ethos in the U.S., it’s pretty accurate. [...] Language like that, the wounded inner child, the inner pain, is part of the kind of pop psychological movement in the, in the United-States, that is a sort of popular Freudianism, that, that has its own paradox which is that the more we are thought to list and resent the things of which we were deprived as children, the more we live in that anger and frustration and the more we remain children. For young people in America, there are very mixed messages from the culture, that, there is a streak of moralism in American life that extol the virtues of being grown up and having a family and being a responsible citizen, but there is also the sense of… of . Do what you want, Gratify your appetites because of … of when I’m a corporation appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things, right?” ZDF German Television Interview
”
”
David Foster Wallace
“
Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. The 'housewives' of the 1970s gave way to the Martha Stewart 'homemakers' of the 1980s, then the 'soccer moms' of the 1990s, then the stay-at-home moms of the 2000s. Next may come the homeschooling homesteaders of the impending post-apocalypse - who knows? What's significant is that the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and revision gives an appearance of progress, of superficial change, that distracts us from the big picture.
”
”
Carina Chocano (You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages)
“
The ion and dust tails seemed to be pointing away from the crackling fire of the sun. Looking more closely, one tail was gray mixed with yellow and white and the second was blue fading into teal. The color change was softer than melting wax. A bright green coma glowed around the center. I felt as though I was seeing magic for the first time as the warmth from our great star heated up the comet, causing it to spew dust and gasses into a giant glowing head larger than most planets.
The comet’s magnificence and grandeur stirred me, much like a transcendent piece of music that envelops one’s soul. “I’ve never seen a comet before,” I confessed, my voice filled with a mix of wonder and emotion.
I could feel a tear form in my eye. I blinked it away. Bello, pulchram, bela, hermoso, yafah, ómorfi, Meilì. I could express the concept of beauty in numerous languages, but none of them truly captured the essence of my feelings as I gazed at the comet. It was a sight of indescribable beauty, as if musical notes had been sketched across the canvas of the night sky. I would never forget the comet—similar to Xuan, exciting, rare, and stunning.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Xuan whispered.
I looked at Xuan, but instead of looking at the sky, Xuan was staring at me. He stood, his hands jammed into his pockets, as he quickly turned his gaze to wander over the peaceful metropolis.
”
”
Kayla Cunningham (Fated to Love You (Chasing the Comet Book 1))
“
...what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at - if for some reason you wanted to guess at it - it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality. It looks as if, to a believer, things can never be allowed just to be what they are. They always have to be translated, moralised - given an unnecessary and rather sentimental extra meaning. A sunset can't just be part of the mixed magnificence and cruelty and indifference of the world; it has to be a blessing. A meal has to be a present you're grateful for, even if it came from Tesco and the ingredients cost you £7.38. Sex can't be the spectrum of experiences you get used to as an adult, from occasional earthquake through to mild companionable buzz; it has to be, oh dear oh dear, a special thing that happens when mummies and daddies love each other very much...
Our fingers must be in our ears all the time - lalala, I can't hear you - just to keep out the plain sound of the real world.
The funny thing is that to me it's exactly the other way around. In my experience, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. It's belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending. Pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
”
”
Francis Spufford
“
moral of this mathematical digression is that, on flat plains, with warriors using projectile weapons, any numerical superiority that an army can achieve over its enemy is magnified out of all proportion. In other words, Lanchester’s Square Law yields an enormous return to social scale. If the opposing forces use a mix of ranged and shock weapons, numerical superiority will still be amplified, although not as much as with purely projectile weapons. So there is an intense selection pressure for cultural groups living in flat terrain to scale up, and a very high price to pay by those that fail to do so (recall where the first states emerged). In the mountains the selection pressure for larger societies is reduced considerably. Wars
”
”
Peter Turchin (Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth)
“
There is far more to the Islamic way of life than fasting and segregating women, of course. Praying five times a day, avoiding alcohol, the custom of eating with the right hand, leaving the left for ablutions and many health measures associated with Islam, such as ritual washing. Then there is the Qur’an itself and the sonorous power of the Arabic language, with an attractive system of ethics including a focus on alms-giving and the equality of believers. Putting all this together created a powerful religious technology which made its followers more aggressive, confident, united and with a higher birth rate than any competing civilization.
[...]
People in the West see the traditional culture of the Muslim Middle East as primitive and “backward,” and there are constant calls for modernization. In fact, as had been seen, Islamic culture is anything but backward. Civilization first arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. It is no coincidence that these lands, with the longest experience of civilization, are now strongly and fervently Muslim. Long experience of civilization has bred a high-S genotype and culture which perfectly adapt people to survive and expand their numbers in dense agricultural and urban populations.
Such countries tend to be poor (if we leave out the anomalous effects of oil wealth), since their peoples lack the temperament for industrialization. But wealth at that level is of no benefit in the long-term struggle for survival and success. To paraphrase Christian scripture, what does it benefit a civilization if it gains wealth but loses its strength and vigor? The advantages of Islam can be clearly seen in countries with mixed populations. Lebanon once had a Christian majority but is now 54% Muslim. In Communist Yugoslavia the provinces with Muslim populations grew much faster and received tax revenue from the wealthier Christian states. The population of Kosovo, the spiritual homeland of Christian Serbia, grew from 733,000 in 1948 to over two million in 1994, with the Muslim component surging from 68% to 90%, and lately going even higher.
Meanwhile, Muslims are migrating into Europe where Christianity is in decline, the birth rate is far below replacement level, and people no longer have much faith in their own culture. Over the next few decades, as the next chapter will indicate, the native peoples of the West will become feebler and fewer. This means that on current trends Europe will become an Islamic continent in a century or so. The 1,400-year struggle between Islam and the West is coming to end.
pp. 227 & 229-230
”
”
Jim Penman (Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West)
“
Predominantly inattentive type
Perhaps the majority of girls with AD/HD fall into the primarily inattentive type, and are most likely to go undiagnosed. Generally, these girls are more compliant than disruptive and get by rather passively in the academic arena. They may be hypoactive or lethargic. In the extreme, they may even seem narcoleptic. Because they do not appear to stray from cultural norms, they will rarely come to the attention of their teacher.
Early report cards of an inattentive type girl may read, "She is such a sweet little girl. She must try harder to speak up in class." She is often a shy daydreamer who avoids drawing attention to herself. Fearful of expressing herself in class, she is concerned that she will be ridiculed or wrong. She often feels awkward, and may nervously twirl the ends of her hair. Her preferred seating position is in the rear of the classroom. She may appear to be listening to the teacher, even when she has drifted off and her thoughts are far away. These girls avoid challenges, are easily discouraged, and tend to give up quickly. Their lack of confidence in themselves is reflected in their failure excuses, such as, "I can't," "It's too hard," or "I used to know it, but I can't remember it now."
The inattentive girl is likely to be disorganized, forgetful, and often anxious about her school work. Teachers may be frustrated because she does not finish class work on time. She may mistakenly be judged as less bright than she really
is. These girls are reluctant to volunteer for a project orjoin a group of peers at recess. They worry that other children will humiliate them if they make a mistake, which they are sure they will. Indeed, one of their greatest fears is being called on in class; they may stare down at their book to avoid eye contact with the teacher, hoping that the teacher will forget they exist for the moment.
Because interactions with the teacher are often anxiety-ridden, these girls may have trouble expressing themselves, even when they know the answer. Sometimes, it is concluded that they have problems with central auditory processing or expressive language skills. More likely, their anxiety interferes with their concentration, temporarily reducing their capacity to both speak and listen. Generally, these girls don't experience this problem around family or close friends, where they are more relaxed.
Inattentive type girls with a high IQ and no learning disabilities will be diagnosed with AD/HD very late, if ever. These bright girls have the ability and the resources to compensate for their cognitive challenges, but it's a mixed blessing. Their psychological distress is internalized, making it less obvious, but no less damaging. Some of these girls will go unnoticed until college or beyond, and many are never diagnosed they are left to live with chronic stress that may develop into anxiety and depression as their exhausting, hidden efforts to succeed take their toll.
Issues
”
”
Kathleen G. Nadeau (Understanding Girls With AD/HD)
“
It was a quiet revolution. Most downshifters dressed quite a bit like everyone else and lived in ordinary neighborhoods rather than communes or cabins in the woods. Seattle emerged as the nexus of voluntary simplicity as the growing tech industry-Microsoft's headquarters were there-made the city synonymous with the overworked, conspicuously consuming yuppie, while many other residents were still mixed in a lingering recession. The result was perhaps the most deliberate experiment in stopping shopping in modern times: a whole city in which the rejection of consumerism entered the mainstream.
For nearly a decade, few aspects of daily life in Seattle were left unchanged by its shadow culture....For a few rare years, the consumer lifestyle was uncooled. 'We were sure in the '90s that we were the up-and-coming lifestyle choice,' Vicki Robin, coauthor of the downshifting classic 'Your Money or Your Life' told me....Then the global economy came roaring back to life, Seattle became better known for billionaires than plain living, and downshifting faded.
”
”
J.B. MacKinnon (The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves)
“
One of the biggest battles that second-wave feminists of the seventies had with third wave feminists of the nineties was over the place of sex and beauty in feminism. Second wavers critiqued high heels and lipstick as oppressive expectations of the patriarchy. Third-wave white girls brought heels and fly red lips back into the mix. Black feminists gave the side eye to white girls and their feminist waves, because looking fierce and fly has always been a part of the Black-girl credo. (And also because Black feminism didn’t fit neatly within the historical trajectory of waves.) Our embrace of femininity was its own armor in a world where white women said that Black women should never be called ladies. If I have to pick a side, I’d say I’m third wave enough to affirm that beauty and the desire to be wanted still matter. When you go for months or years without a dude (or any love interest) ever noticing you, you can begin to feel invisible. And feminist principles about how the patriarchy has made us beholden to beauty culture do nothing to assuage the desire we all have to be seen and affirmed.
”
”
Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower)
“
The lives of scientists, considered as Lives, almost always make dull reading. For one thing, the careers of the famous and the merely ordinary fall into much the same pattern, give or take an honorary degree or two, or (in European countries) an honorific order. It could be hardly otherwise. Academics can only seldom lead lives that are spacious or exciting in a worldly sense. They need laboratories or libraries and the company of other academics. Their work is in no way made deeper or more cogent by privation, distress or worldly buffetings. Their private lives may be unhappy, strangely mixed up or comic, but not in ways that tell us anything special about the nature or direction of their work. Academics lie outside the devastation area of the literary convention according to which the lives of artists and men of letters are intrinsically interesting, a source of cultural insight in themselves. If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility; if a historian were to fail (as Ruskin did) to consummate his marriage, we should not suppose that our understanding of historical scholarship had somehow been enriched.
”
”
Peter Medawar
“
The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
As Mollie said to Dailey in the 1890s: "I am told that there are five other Mollie Fanchers, who together, make the whole of the one Mollie Fancher, known to the world; who they are and what they are I cannot tell or explain, I can only conjecture." Dailey described five distinct Mollies, each with a different name, each of whom he met (as did Aunt Susan and a family friend, George Sargent). According to Susan Crosby, the first additional personality appeared some three years after the after the nine-year trance, or around 1878. The dominant Mollie, the one who functioned most of the time and was known to everyone as Mollie Fancher, was designated Sunbeam (the names were devised by Sargent, as he met each of the personalities). The four other personalities came out only at night, after eleven, when Mollie would have her usual spasm and trance. The first to appear was always Idol, who shared Sunbeam's memories of childhood and adolescence but had no memory of the horsecar accident. Idol was very jealous of Sunbeam's accomplishments, and would sometimes unravel her embroidery or hide her work. Idol and Sunbeam wrote with different handwriting, and at times penned letters to each other.
The next personality Sargent named Rosebud: "It was the sweetest little child's face," he described, "the voice and accent that of a little child." Rosebud said she was seven years old, and had Mollie's memories of early childhood: her first teacher's name, the streets on which she had lived, children's songs. She wrote with a child's handwriting, upper- and lowercase letters mixed. When Dailey questioned Rosebud about her mother, she answered that she was sick and had gone away, and that she did not know when she would be coming back. As to where she lived, she answered "Fulton Street," where the Fanchers had lived before moving to Gates Avenue.
Pearl, the fourth personality, was evidently in her late teens. Sargent described her as very spiritual, sweet in expression, cultured and agreeable: "She remembers Professor West [principal of Brooklyn Heights Seminary], and her school days and friends up to about the sixteenth year in the life of Mollie Fancher. She pronounces her words with an accent peculiar to young ladies of about 1865." Ruby, the last Mollie, was vivacious, humorous, bright, witty. "She does everything with a dash," said Sargent. "What mystifies me about 'Ruby,' and distinguishes her from the others, is that she does not, in her conversations with me, go much into the life of Mollie Fancher. She has the air of knowing a good deal more than she tells.
”
”
Michelle Stacey (The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery)
“
The ion and dust tails seemed to be pointing away from the crackling fire of the sun. Looking more closely, one tail was gray mixed with yellow and white and the second was blue fading into teal. The color change was softer than melting wax. A bright green coma glowed around the center. I felt as though I was seeing magic for the first time as the warmth from our great star heated up the comet, causing it to spew dust and gasses into a giant glowing head larger than most planets.
The comet’s magnificence and grandeur stirred me, much like a transcendent piece of music that envelops one’s soul. “I’ve never seen a comet before,” I confessed, my voice filled with a mix of wonder and emotion.
I could feel a tear form in my eye. I blinked it away. Bello, pulchram, bela, hermoso, yafah, ómorfi, Meilì. I could express the concept of beauty in numerous languages, but none of them truly captured the essence of my feelings as I gazed at the comet. It was a sight of indescribable beauty, as if musical notes had been sketched across the canvas of the night sky. I would never forget the comet—similar to Xuan, exciting, rare, and stunning.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Xuan whispered.
I looked at Xuan, but instead of looking at the sky, Xuan was staring at me. He stood, his hands jammed into his pockets, as he quickly turned his gaze to wander over the peaceful metropolis.
”
”
Kayla Cunningham
“
There, I just decided to pick up this pen—are you telling me that was completely out of my control?” I don’t have the data to prove it, but I think I can predict above the chance level which of any given pair of students will be the one who picks up the pen. It’s more likely to be the student who skipped lunch and is hungry. It’s more likely to be the male, if it is a mixed-sex pair. It is especially more likely if it is a heterosexual male and the female is someone he wants to impress. It’s more likely to be the extrovert. It’s more likely to be the student who got way too little sleep last night and it’s now late afternoon. Or whose circulating androgen levels are higher than typical for them (independent of their sex). It’s more likely to be the student who, over the months of the class, has decided that I’m an irritating blowhard, just like their father. Marching further back, it’s more likely to be the one of the pair who is from a wealthy family, rather than on a full scholarship, who is the umpteenth generation of their family to attend a prestigious university, rather than the first member of their immigrant family to finish high school. It’s more likely if they’re not a firstborn son. It’s more likely if their immigrant parents chose to come to the U.S. for economic gain as opposed to having fled their native land as refugees from persecution, more likely if their ancestry is from an individualist culture rather than a collectivist one.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will)
“
Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not of his making. As the power of the Roman empire declined, the Teuton sent down into Italy, Gaul, and Spain the re-vivifying elements which saved those countries from complete destruction. Though now largely lost in the mixed population, the Teutons are the true founders of all the so-called Latin states. Political and social vitality had fled from the old inhabitants; the Teuton only was creative and constructive. After the native elements absorbed the Teutonic invaders, the Latin civilizations declined tremendously, so that the France, Italy, and Spain of today bear every mark of national degeneracy.
In the lands whose population is mainly Teutonic, we behold a striking proof of the qualities of the race. England and Germany are the supreme empires of the world, whilst the virile virtues of the Belgians have lately been demonstrated in a manner which will live forever in song and story. Switzerland and Holland are veritable synonyms for Liberty. The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. United States history is one long panegyric of the Teuton, and will continue to be such if degenerate immigration can be checked in time to preserve the primitive character of the population.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft
“
And, even more important for our purposes, these facts are sturdy enough that we can build a sensible diet upon them. Here they are: FACT 1. Populations that eat a so-called Western diet—generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains—invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Virtually all of the obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet. Four of the top ten killers in America are chronic diseases linked to this diet. The arguments in nutritional science are not about this well-established link; rather, they are all about identifying the culprit nutrient in the Western diet that might be responsible for chronic diseases. Is it the saturated fat or the refined carbohydrates or the lack of fiber or the transfats or omega-6 fatty acids—or what? The point is that, as eaters (if not as scientists), we know all we need to know to act: This diet, for whatever reason, is the problem. FACT 2. Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat, and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick! (While it is true that we generally live longer than people used to, or than people in some traditional cultures do, most of our added years owe to gains in infant mortality and child health, not diet.) There is actually a third, very hopeful fact that flows from these two: People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health. We have good research to suggest that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back, and relatively quickly.
”
”
Michael Pollan (Food Rules: An Eater's Manual)
“
Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic.
His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo?
He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude.
A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not.
The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety.
The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world.
The word is 'thanks'.
'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?'
'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.'
"Any chance you can recover any of it?'
'You sitting near a window, Gerry?'
'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?'
'Can you see the sky?'
'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.'
'See any pigs flying past?'
To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears.
'...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.'
'..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.'
He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day.
..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year.
'...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator.
'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.'
On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...'
Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis.
'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.'
It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time.
'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.'
'Ever heard of knocking on a door?'
'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?'
'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.'
No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.
”
”
Peter James (Dead at First Sight (Roy Grace, #15))