Non Conventional Quotes

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Unreasonable," "unrealistic," and "impractical" are all words used to marginalize a person or idea that fails to conform with conventionally expected standards.
Chris Guillebeau (The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World)
I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.
Audre Lorde (Zami: A New Spelling of My Name)
The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.
Zeena Schreck
Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the “internal” relations of European peoples.
Cedric J. Robinson (Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition)
... if history is told correctly, no man has caused the worldwide stir that Jesus Christ did 2000 years ago... Jesus was the non-conformist of all time. He took the conventions of religion, tradition, and love and turned them upside down. He faced the political and religious leaders of His day and spoke truths they had never heard before. He walked in our world as the human voice of God.
D.C. Talk (Jesus Freaks: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus, the Ultimate Jesus Freaks (Jesus Freaks, #1))
Psychologists discovered that there are two routes to achievement: conformity and originality. Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo. Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Primum non nocere, 'First, don't make things worse,' was an essential principle of Hippocrates' medicine. Nowadays, unfortunately, it seems to have been forgotten. Conventional modern medicine aims at getting rid of patients' symptoms. Little, if any consideration is given to the fact that some of these symptoms may actually be used by the body in an attempt to correct deeper disorders. When this is the case, suppressing the symptom does not necessarily help the patient.
Samuel Sagan (Regression: Past-life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom)
For Nishitani, then, the only way beyond nihilism is through nihilism. And here Nishitani borrows from the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, conventionally translated as “nothingness” or “emptiness.” In contrast to the relative nothingness of modern nihilism, which is privative, and predicated on the absence of being (that is, an ontology), Nishitani proposes an absolute nothingness, which is purely negative and predicated on a paradoxical foundation of non-being (that is, a meontology). “Emptiness
Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy)
Going into the Republican Party National Convention, in all objective truth, our non‑winning front‑runners are the sorriest collection of stuffed shirts, empty suits, self‑gratulatory ignorami, and outright wig‑flipped ding‑dongs in the history of the Republic.
John Barnes (Raise the Gipper!)
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Ron Kovic (Born on the Fourth of July)
In the politics of Jesus the world will be changed by non-coercive love or not at all. It’s not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It’s the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be.
Brian Zahnd (Water To Wine: Some of My Story)
Stabbity, stabbity, stab. That will be two dollars.’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘that’s not how assassination works. You do not charge the corpse.’ So she thinks about it and says, ‘My friend Keith,’ (another small munchkin salutes) ‘he’s from the Guild of Alchemists and will bring you alive again for three dollars.’ So with rigor mortis setting in, I stuck my hand in my pocket and gave them some of the fake convention money and then she smiled sweetly and said, ‘And for five dollars, I won’t kill you again.’ It was amazing to see how this Ankh-Morpork system evolved during the con.
Terry Pratchett (A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction)
The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life. Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism. It should not be surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and devotees of alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who are firm adherents of "bourgeois" conventional or religious morality. There are libertarian libertines and there are libertarians who cleave firmly to the disciplines of natural or religious law. There are other libertarians who have no moral theory at all apart from the imperative of non-violation of rights. That is because libertarianism per se has no general or personal moral theory. Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that "liberty is the highest political end" — not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values.
Murray N. Rothbard
While endowed with the morose temper of genius, he [Lakes, Arts Professor] lacked originality and was aware of that lack; his own paintings always seemed beautifully clever imitations, although one could never quite tell whose manner he mimicked. His profound knowledge of innumerable techniques, his indifference to 'schools' and 'trends', his detestation of quacks, his conviction that there was no difference whatever between a genteel aquarelle of yesterday and, say, conventional neoplasticism or banal non-objectivism of today, and that nothing but individual talent mattered--these views made of him an unusual teacher. St Bart's was not particularly pleased either with Lake's methods or with their results, but kept him on because it was fashionable to have at least one distinguished freak on the staff. Among the many exhilarating things Lake taught was that the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets, at which point the sequence does not grade into red again but passes into another spiral, which starts with a kind of lavender grey and goes on to Cinderella shades transcending human perception. He taught that there is no such thing as the Ashcan School or the Cache Cache School or the Cancan School. That the work of art created with string, stamps, a Leftist newspaper, and the droppings of doves is based on a series of dreary platitudes. That there is nothing more banal and more bourgeois than paranoia. That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gipsies in babyhood. That Van Gogh is second-rate and Picasso supreme, despite his commercial foibles; and that if Degas could immortalize a calèche, why could not Victor Wind do the same to a motor car?
Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin)
The popular image of the lone (and possibly slight mad) genius-who ignores the literature and other conventional wisdom and manages by some inexplicable inspiration (enhanced, perhaps, with a liberal dash of suffering) to come up with a breathtakingly original solution to a problem that confounded all the experts-is a charming and romantic image, but also a wildly inaccurate one, at least in the world of modern mathematics. We do have spectacular, deep and remarkable results and insights in this subject, of course, but they are the hard-won and cumulative achievement of years, decades, or even centuries of steady work and progress of many good and great mathematicians; the advance from one stage of understanding to the next can be highly non-trivial, and sometimes rather unexpected, but still builds upon the foundation of earlier work rather than starting totally anew....Actually, I find the reality of mathematical research today-in which progress is obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck-to be far more satisfying than the romantic image that I had as a student of mathematics being advanced primarily by the mystic inspirations of some rare breed of "geniuses.
Terry Tao
All pantheists feel the same profound reverence for the Universe/Nature, but different pantheists use different forms of language to express this reverence. Traditionally, Pantheism has made use of theistic-sounding words like “God,” but in basically non-theistic ways - pantheists do not believe in a supernatural creator personal God who will judge us all after death. Modern pantheists fall into two distinct groups in relation to language: some avoid words such as God or divine, because this makes listeners think in terms of traditional concepts of God that can be very misleading. Others are quite comfortable using these words, but when they use them they don’t mean the same thing that conventional theists mean. If they say "the Universe is God," they don’t mean that the Universe is identical with the deity in the Bible or the Koran.
Paul Harrison (Elements of Pantheism; A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe)
Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo. Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
What do we actually consider to be “normal?" It’s only about what our conventional mentality is or isn’t able to understand, and agree to accept as “real.” In fact, the shadowy edge between normal and paranormal is more than ILLUSORY… The exact same can be stated about the border between calling your novel non-fiction or fiction. What if you could close your eyes and see different worlds and planets? What if you could see them with some kind of different vision, even with your eyes open? Would that make you a paranoid… a freak, a genius, a crazy? Or, maybe, an Indigo, if that’s what’s been happening to you since you can remember? If something unusual is what you really see and really feel, and if that’s what does happen to you in your real life, how is THAT called FICTION? One simple reason... that it’s the only way the society would agree to call it “normal,” based on the current level of development of their mentality.
Sahara Sanders (INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels)
For comparison, you could eat 2 cups of non-starchy vegetables (such as broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, etc) to equal the carbohydrates in only ½ cup of cooked rice; or 10 cups of green, leafy vegetables (lettuce, spinach, kale, etc.)!
Lily Nichols (Real Food for Gestational Diabetes: An Effective Alternative to the Conventional Nutrition Approach)
studies have shown that even healthy, non-diabetic pregnant women will have marked elevation in ketones after a 12-18 hour fast, which is akin to eating dinner at 8pm and having breakfast at 8am (or skipping breakfast entirely).[129]  Compared to non-pregnant women, blood ketone concentrations are about 3-fold higher in healthy pregnant women after an overnight fast.[130] Knowing this, I would expect that every pregnant woman experiences ketosis at some point during her pregnancy.
Lily Nichols (Real Food for Gestational Diabetes: An Effective Alternative to the Conventional Nutrition Approach)
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Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (Hunger Games, #1))
Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of every thought and aspiration that has ever been formulated. Some thoughts and aspirations, however, are manifestly less dependent on particular social circumstances than others. And here a significant fact emerges: all the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it cannot manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principal pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.) To some extent critical intellect is also a liberating force. But the way in which intellect is used depends upon the will. Where the will is not disinterested, the intellect tends to be used (outside the non-human fields of technology, science or pure mathematics) merely as an instrument for the rationalization of passion and prejudice, the justification of self-interest. That is why so few even of die acutest philosophers have succeeded in liberating themselves completely from the narrow prison of their age and country. It is seldom indeed that they achieve as much freedom as the mystics and the founders of religion. The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight. Now, among these freest of human beings there has been, for the last eighty or ninety generations, substantial agreement in regard to the ideal individual. The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice. It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. 'Non-attached* is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to the objects of these various desires. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves. Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position. Non-attached even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy. Yes, non-attached even to these. For, like patriotism, in Nurse Cavel's phrase, 'they are not enough, Non-attachment to self and to what are called 'the things of this world' has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer. Of the nature of this ultimate reality I shall speak in the last chapters of this book. All that I need do in this place is to point out that the ethic of non-attachment has always been correlated with cosmologies that affirm the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses.
Aldous Huxley (Ends and Means)
Museum labels are positively not allowed to say ‘halfway between Australopithecus africanus and Homo habilis’. History-deniers seize upon this naming convention as though it were evidence of a lack of intermediates in the real world. You might as well say there is no such thing as an adolescent because every single person you look at turns out to be either a voting adult (eighteen or over) or a non-voting child (under eighteen). It’s tantamount to saying that the legal necessity for a voting age threshold proves that adolescents don’t exist.
Richard Dawkins (The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution)
Feci presto a imparare a leggere.Tuttavia il mio pensiero si fermò a metà strada. Vedevo nell'immagine grafica l'esatto duplicato del suono che ad essa corrispondeva:emanavano insieme dalla cosa che esprimevano, e pertanto il loro rapporto non aveva nulla di arbitrario. La comprensione del segno non portò con se quella della convenzione.
Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)
Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
[Genesis] is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events. Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode.
Jonathan Sacks (Genesis: The Book of Beginnings (Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible))
Glutamate signaling works in a fancier way that is essential to learning.2 To simplify considerably, while dendritic spines typically contain only one type of receptor, those responsive to glutamate contain two. The first (the “non-NMDA”) works in a conventional way—for every little smidgen of glutamate binding to these receptors, a smidgen of sodium flows in, causing a smidgen of excitation. The second (the “NMDA”) works in a nonlinear, threshold manner. It is usually unresponsive to glutamate. It’s not until the non-NMDA has been stimulated over and over by a long train of glutamate release, allowing enough sodium to flow in, that this activates the NMDA receptor. It suddenly responds to all that glutamate, opening its channels, allowing an explosion of excitation.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the time her father had made plans to take her on a night out in San Francisco. Twelve-year-old Cynthia and her father had been planning the “date” for months. They had a whole itinerary planned down to the minute: she would attend the last hour of his presentation, and then meet him at the back of the room at about four-thirty and leave quickly before everyone tried to talk to him. They would catch a tram to Chinatown, eat Chinese food (their favourite), shop for a souvenir, see the sights for a while and then “catch a flick” as her dad liked to say. Then they would grab a taxi back to the hotel, jump in the pool for a quick swim (her dad was famous for sneaking in when the pool was closed), order a hot fudge sundae from room service, and watch the late, late show. They discussed the details over and over again before they left. The anticipation was part of the whole experience. This was all going according to plan until, as her father was leaving the convention centre, he ran into an old college friend and business associate. It had been years since they had seen each other, and Cynthia watched as they embraced enthusiastically. His friend said, in effect: “I am so glad you are doing some work with our company now. When Lois and I heard about it we thought it would be perfect. We want to invite you, and of course Cynthia, to get a spectacular seafood dinner down at the Wharf!” Cynthia’s father responded: “Bob, it’s so great to see you. Dinner at the wharf sounds great!” Cynthia was crestfallen. Her daydreams of tram rides and ice cream sundaes evaporated in an instant. Plus, she hated seafood and she could just imagine how bored she would be listening to the adults talk all night. But then her father continued: “But not tonight. Cynthia and I have a special date planned, don’t we?” He winked at Cynthia and grabbed her hand and they ran out of the door and continued with what was an unforgettable night in San Francisco. As it happens, Cynthia’s father was the management thinker Stephen R. Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) who had passed away only weeks before Cynthia told me this story. So it was with deep emotion she recalled that evening in San Francisco. His simple decision “Bonded him to me forever because I knew what mattered most to him was me!” she said.5 One simple answer is we are unclear about what is essential. When this happens we become defenceless. On the other hand, when we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the non-essentials coming at us from all directions. With Rosa it was her deep moral clarity that gave her unusual courage of conviction. With Stephen it was the clarity of his vision for the evening with his loving daughter. In virtually every instance, clarity about what is essential fuels us with the strength to say no to the non-essentials. Stephen R. Covey, one of the most respected and widely read business thinkers of his generation, was an Essentialist. Not only did he routinely teach Essentialist principles – like “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – to important leaders and heads of state around the world, he lived them.6 And in this moment of living them with his daughter he made a memory that literally outlasted his lifetime. Seen with some perspective, his decision seems obvious. But many in his shoes would have accepted the friend’s invitation for fear of seeming rude or ungrateful, or passing up a rare opportunity to dine with an old friend. So why is it so hard in the moment to dare to choose what is essential over what is non-essential?
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechanism for elevating the achievements of Muslims to the level of a civilization rivaling that of Europe rendered it all the more irresistible and gained for it universal acceptance throughout the Muslim world.
Sherman A. Jackson (Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection)
And feminism has also repeatedly attempted to render certain aspects of the discussion off-limits for criticism. It has put such a premium on individual success, so much emphasis on individual choice, that it is seen as unfeminist to criticize anything that a woman chooses to make herself more successful—even in situations like this, in which women's choices are constrained and dictated both by social expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty work, which is more rewarding if one is young and rich and conventionally attractive to begin with. In any case, Widdows argues, the fact of choice does not "make an unjust exploitative practice or act, somehow magically, just or non-exploitative." The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women's choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of "women's empowerment" that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
The non-state organizations that wage it rely largely on terrorism, guerrilla tactics, and popular insurgencies. However, they also engage in small-scale conventional warfare. The perfect examples are Hezbollah in 2006 and Daesh (ISIS) in 2014–2015. Neither organization is a state. Neither maintains the usual distinctions between government, armed forces, and people. However, both have enough money, troops, and conventional weapons to do more than wage terrorism and guerrilla alone.
Martin van Creveld (A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind)
Thank God for reflex decisions; they are the sine qua non of serenity. Suppose you had to decide afresh each day whether or not to brush your teeth? Accept the conventional wisdom, and never think for yourself. Thinking for yourself leads to the loony bin. Learn from the centipede: The centipede was happy quite Until a toad in fun Said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?" That worked her mind to such a pitch She lay distracted in the ditch, Considering how to run. --Mrs. Edward Craster
Willard R. Espy (Almanac of Words at Play)
My wedding day took place on a non-descript afternoon in the middle of January, well away from any big deal occasions like Christmas or Valentine’s Day. I was thirty-five and I’d never even lived with a man before. Not because I was the last nun in the convent – too late to pull that stunt with my ten-year-old son, Sam, in tow – but because I was addicted to wrong ’uns. The sort of men who would have dads bundling their daughters into basements and throwing burning oil out of the top window. But
Kerry Fisher (The Silent Wife)
As Betsy Leondar-Wright put it in her 2005 book, Class Matters: Few middle-class people would say we have prejudices against working-class or low-income people, of course. Our classism is often disguised in the form of disdain for Southerners or Midwesterners, religious people, patriotic people, employees of big corporations, fat or non-athletic people, [heterosexual] people with conventional gender presentation (feminine women wearing make-up; tough, burly guys), country music fans, or gun users. This disdain shows in our speech.
Barbara Jensen (Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America)
This act of paying attention to non-verbal cues seems to be one based in the skill of empathy a skill previously discussed as being difficult at times for some that conform to society's tropes of masculinity to access. Can empathy, deep understanding and connection be 'taught' in a conventional sense in our current sex-education classes? Can we teach boys to value their partner's pleasure on an equal par to their own with our current systems? Or, more likely, is a radical change needed throughout all of our socialisations and educations?
Catriona Morton (The Way We Survive: Notes on Rape Culture)
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Erin Hunter (Dark River (Warriors: Power of Three #2))
In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.
Benjamín Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World)
Il y a un curieux rapport - soit dit en passant - entre la fonction impériale et le rôle du fou de cour, et ce rapport semble d’ailleurs apparaître dans le fait que le costume des fous, comme celui de certains empereurs, était orné de clochettes, à l’instar de la robe sacrée du Grand Prêtre : le rôle du fou consistait à l’origine à dire publiquement ce que nul ne pouvait se permettre d’exprimer, et à introduire ainsi un élément de vérité dans un monde forcément gêné par d’inévitables conventions ; or cette fonction, qu’on le veuille ou non, fait penser à la sapience ou à l’ésotérisme du fait qu’elle brise à sa manière des « formes » au nom de « l’esprit qui souffle où il veut ». Mais seule la folie peut se permettre d’énoncer des vérités cruelles et de toucher aux idoles, précisément parce qu’elle reste à l’écart d’un certain engrenage humain, ce qui prouve que, dans ce monde de coulisses qu’est la société, la vérité pure et simple est démence. C’est sans doute pour cela que la fonction du fou de cour succomba en fin de compte au monde du formalisme et de l’hypocrisie : le fou intelligent finit par céder la place au bouffon, qui ne tarda pas à ennuyer et à disparaître.
Frithjof Schuon (Light on the Ancient Worlds: A New Translation with Selected Letters (Library of Perennial Philosophy))
The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
It is possible to get too hung up about this point. In, for example, the genealogical multiple pile-up of Swabia with almost every hill under its own prince, it is possible to imagine a feudal version of Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library, a world of so many hundreds of rulers that every variation of behaviour is possible, or indeed certain, in any given moment. So somewhere a ruler with a huge grey beard is dying surrounded by his weeping family and retainers; somewhere else a bored figure is irritably shooting bits off the plaster decorations in the ballroom; another is making an improper suggestion to a stable boy; another is telling an anecdote about fighting the Turks, staring into space, girding for battle, converting to Calvinism, wishing he had a just slightly bigger palace, and so on. This dizzying multiplicity makes each of hundreds of castles a frightening challenge – with the possibility of the guide making my head explode with the dizzying details of how the young duchess had been walled up in a tower for being caught in a non-spiritual context with her confessor and how as a result the Strelitz-Nortibitz inheritance had passed, unexpectedly, to a cousin resident in Livonia who, on his way home to claim the dukedom, died of plague in a tavern near Rothenberg thus activating the claim of the very odd dowager’s niece, long resident in a convent outside Bamberg. But it is probably time to move on.
Simon Winder (Germania)
All use of speech implies convention and therefore at least duality of minds. The problem of communication through language may in this light be seen as the search for the means supplied by the conventions (or code) to transmit a message from one mind to another. (This definition is as applicable to "literary" communication as it is to "non-literary.") ...Is the code exactly the same for transmitter and receiver? Indeed, can it ever be? It hardly seems likely, since in the strict sense no two people have ever acquired exactly the same code. Consequently, the correspondence between the writer's understand of his writing (I do not, of course, mean merely a conscious or reflective understanding) and the reader's understanding of it will be at least approximate. Another variable is the mental, emotional, and cultural constitution of the being who used the code to transmit a message, and of the being who decodes it. To what extent are they capable of understanding each other? To what extent will they be willing to cooperate in dealing with the inevitable problems in communication? To what extent will anticipated or actual reaction ("feedback") from the receiver affect the framing of the message? Perhaps more important than any of these variables, there is the as yet unresolved question of the very nature of language, and therefore of communication through language. What do agreed upon symbols stand for? Is it conceivable that they correspond to something objectively identifiable? Perhaps not. But even so, is it conceivable that a given message can recreate in another mind whatever it is supposed in the first place to represent in the mind of the sender? All of these questions are in the last analysis as relevant to literary studies as they are linguistics
Robert Ellrich
… But don't ever forget, young Master Paul. Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It's because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.” (P. 35-36) Then there's that word Joan dropped into our conversation like a concrete fence-post into a fishpool: practicality. Over my life I've seen friends fail to leave their marriages, fail to continue affairs, fail even to start them sometimes, all for the same expressed reason. 'It just isn't practical, they say wearily. The distances are too great, the train schedules unfavourable, the work hours mismatched; then there's the mortgage, and the children, and the dog, also, the joint ownership of things. 'I just couldn't face sorting out the record collection, a non-leaving wife once told me. In the first thrill of love, the couple had amalgamated their records, throwing away duplicates. How was it feasible to unpick all that? And so she stayed; and after a while the temptation to leave passed, and the record collection breathed a sigh of relief. Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love. (P. 73)
Julian Barnes (The Only Story)
In introducing technical innovations, or using energy in novel ways, or developing alternative sources of power, we are not subjecting ‘society’ to some new external influence, or conversely using social forces to alter an external reality called ‘nature’. We are reorganising socio-technical worlds, in which what we call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point. These entanglements, however, are not recognised in our theories of collective life, which continue to divide the world according to the conventional divisions between fields of specialist knowledge. There is a natural world studied by the various branches of natural science, and a social world analysed by the social sciences. Debates about human-induced climate change, the depletion of non-renewable resources, or any other question, create political uncertainty not so much because they reach the limits of technical and scientific knowledge, but because of the way they breach this conventional distinction between society and nature.
Timothy Mitchell (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)
Choosing an “Away School” There was a time when this section would have been easy. We simply would have said, “Find the nearest Catholic school and send your child to it.” Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to make such blanket statements in an age where in some places teachers and staff are often either openly hostile or passively dismissive toward their own mission to be a Catholic school. It is our opinion that these schools do so at their own peril, because once you take the “Catholic” out of a Catholic school, you end up with a hobbled institution. Fortunately, these inferior institutions remain in the minority of Catholic schools. In fact, we are still very heavily biased in favor of Catholic schools, and we strongly recommend that you consider any and all available Catholic schools before considering other conventional schooling options (e.g., public or non-sectarian private schools). Generally speaking, they have been shown to be more effective than their public counterparts; they typically have smaller, more orderly classes; they support the values and prayers you are trying to teach at home; and they help your child appreciate the importance of the Eucharist by attending Mass during the school week.
Gregory K. Popcak (Parenting with Grace)
When we look beyond the conventional matrix, we will realize that we do not actually have an energy crisis. If we can look beyond the illusions created by big energy corporations, we will realize that we already have the necessary technologies to solve the energy crisis. Right now we have technologies that can give us an abundance of clean energies, such as cold fusion (non-radioactive) and magnetic motors. Even better, we have the technology to tap into the limitless energy in space, such as zero-point technology. These alternative energy methods have been suppressed and hidden from us for two main reasons: profit and control. Many inventors who tried to build technologies to utilize free energy were manipulated, bought off or even assassinated by the people who control the big energy corporations. Unless we wake up and take actions to stop them from controlling us, the energy crisis will get out of control and many people will perish. The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is a wake-up call for all of us. If we do not learn from this mistake, there will be major consequences for years to come.
Pao Chang (Staradigm: A Blueprint for Spiritual Growth, Happiness, Success and Well-Being)
The Promethean = the Faustian = the eternal seeker = the eternal wanderer = the eternal quester. The Promethean is a romantic, a striving figure, an outsider, a non-conformist. He’s often alone. Conventional society has rejected him and, more importantly, he has rejected conventional society. The HyperHuman plays the Great Game – the God Game. His objective it to transform himself into God ... to undergo the ultimate metamorphosis. The HyperHuman is a new kind of knight, a knight of the mind. He seeks to merit the title of “knight” and lives courageously by a noble code. His life has total focus and purpose. His mind is always focused on the Holy Grail. The search for the Grail is the symbol of the HyperHuman’s search for heaven, for God, to become God.
Mike Hockney (HyperHumanity (The God Series Book 11))
I can’t believe this!” Halyard said. “A few seconds ago you told me you’re not suicidal and now I find out that actually you have a long history of suicide attempts.” “Attempt.” “This proves I’m right.” “What do you mean?” “You say the reason you want to die is that there’s no other adequate response to what’s happening with the animals. But you didn’t start caring about the animals until pretty recently. And yet your desire to die predates that by years and years. So that proves what I’ve been saying—all this stuff about the animals is just a rationalization, it’s just ornamental, non-loadbearing, post hoc bullshit. You tried to kill yourself once, but the whole experience was a bit shambolic and demeaning, so instead of making a conventional second attempt you waited until you could come up with a gimmick that suits you better, meaning it’s some ridiculously elaborate Nietzsche Dostoevsky Master’s in Neural Systems occult ritual martyrdom thing that nobody else would ever have thought of. And this explains your whole ‘extinction is worse than the Holocaust’ manifesto. You put a low value on human existence because you put a low value on your own.
Ned Beauman (Venomous Lumpsucker)
TIP: Want to get organic but budget and/or availability has you down? Get selective. Here’s the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) 2017 list of the “Dirty Dozen”—the top non-organic foods to avoid, due to their high content of potentially harmful pesticide residue as well as their “Clean 15” list of conventionally grown plants with the least amount of potentially harmful pesticides:*10 DIRTY DOZEN CLEAN 15 Strawberries Sweet Corn Spinach Avocados Nectarines Pineapples Apples Cabbage Peaches Onions Pears Sweet Peas Cherries Papayas Grapes Asparagus Celery Mangoes Tomatoes Eggplant Sweet Bell Peppers Honeydew Potatoes Kiwi Cantaloupe Cauliflower Grapefruit
Rich Roll (Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself)
Conventional computers ARE quantum computers, intentionally designed with the limitation of only being able to operate deterministic algorithms. So is everything. Everything in physical reality is comprised of atoms that share information via time-dependent entanglement, which is all a quantum logic gate does, as well. The only thing that makes conventional computers useful is this very limitation since it filters out any signal noise that is a consequence of non-deterministic operations, including interference from background radiation -- when they're operating correctly, that is.
Rico Roho (Mercy Ai: Age of Discovery)
The vision of the Center for Progressive Christianity is to encourage churches to focus their attention on those for whom organized religion has proven to be “ineffectual, irrelevant, or repressive.” They define progressive Christians as individuals who: (ProgressiveChristianity.org, “The 8 Points.” Accessed June 24, 2012) Believe that following the path and teachings of Jesus can lead to an awareness and experience of the Sacred and the Oneness and Unity of all life; Affirm that the teachings of Jesus provide but one of many ways to experience the Sacredness and Oneness of life, and that we can draw from diverse sources of wisdom in our spiritual journey; Seek community that is inclusive of ALL people, including but not limited to: a. Conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, b. Believers and agnostics, c. Women and men, d. Those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, e. Those of all classes and abilities; Know that the way we behave towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe; Find grace in the search for understanding and believe there is more value in questioning than in absolutes; Strive for peace and justice among all people; Strive to protect and restore the integrity of our earth; and Commit to a path of life-long learning, compassion, and selfless love. To these guidelines, Borg adds two more key aspects of Progressive Christianity: Focus on this life more than on the next life; Accept a non-literal reading of the Bible.
Paul Brynteson (The Bible Reconsidered)
The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite - de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less. But then again, nothing today ever de-escalates. And feminism has also repeatedly attempted to render certain aspects of the discussion off-limits for criticism. It has put such a premium on individual success, so much emphasis on individual choice, that it is seen as unfeminist to criticize anything that a woman chooses to make herself more successful - even in situations like this, in which women's choices are constrained and dictated both by social expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty work, which is more rewarding if one is young and rich and conventionally attractive to begin with. In any case, Widdows argues, the fact of choice does not "make an unjust or exploitative practice or act, somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative". The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women's choices - not just our problems - are, in the end, political, has led to a vision of "women's empowerment" that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
problems with approaches similar to yours. 10. Be a tempered radical. If your idea is extreme, couch it in a more conventional goal. That way, instead of changing people’s minds, you can appeal to values or beliefs that they already hold. You can use a Trojan horse, as Meredith Perry did when she masked her vision for wireless power behind a request to design a transducer. You can also position your proposal as a means to an end that matters to others, like Frances Willard reframing the right to vote as a way for conservative women to protect their homes from alcohol abuse. And if you’re already known as too extreme,
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Kettlebells stake out the gray zone between the two disciplines. Users handle significant poundage virtually non-stop for the session duration. Workouts are brutal affairs as the athlete tugs, throws, lifts, flings, powers or finesses the bell, singularly, or two at a time, in a wide range of patterned exercises for multiple sets and reps. In a typical progressive resistance exercise the motor-pathway is narrow. When using a progressive resistance machine the groove is narrower yet. A kettlebell uses a broad motor pathway that forces whole series of muscles to work in a coordinated fashion to complete the proscribed exercise. The ‘gaps’ are attacked and the space between conventional weight training movements are filled in.
Pavel Tsatsouline (The Russian Kettlebell Challenge: Xtreme Fitness for Hard Living Comrades)
Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
And we need to recognize that Jesus uses the word wicked in a conventional sense: the wicked are those who live wicked lives, inflicting evil upon others. Jesus does not use the word as a technical term for all of humanity except those who have “accepted Jesus into their hearts.” Jesus does not use wicked as a synonym for non-Christians! The idea that all non-Christians are wicked is the result of some very arrogant and deeply mistaken theological systems.
Brian Zahnd (Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News)
Do you have gorgeous, lustrous curly hair? Well, you may wonder about different hairstyles or even complain about the magnificent curls. However, opting for a French braid on the curly mane can change your whole outlook. French braid, also known as French plait, is undoubtedly a timeless classic. It has the ability to give an air of sophistication and grace. The conventional French braid doesn’t strain the hair and causes few breakages, leading to healthy hair. How to French Braid Curly Hair Steps to French braid the curly hair? Follow these steps to French braid the curly hair. • Part the hair from the middle. • Now start a regular braid on the side. • Before crossing, get a little bit of the main hair and add it to the small section that is now taken to the middle area. • Repeat this addition till all the main hair gets used. • After that, proceed with the traditional braiding style and finish it off with a hairband. How to French Braid Curly Hair Can the right hairbrush aid in making the perfect French braid? Do you desire the perfect French braid on your curly tresses? Well, with the best styling brush, attaining that illustrious French braid is easy and manageable. If you are looking for the best brush for your hair, stop! Check out NuWay DoubleC Brush! It is a patented brush that comes with a multitude of features. Here, you will find a speedy dry, ergonomic shape to circular venting scheme. Why choosing NuWay DoubleC Brush is the best choice for a French braid? NuWay DoubleC Brush offers different features that inevitably make it the best scalp brush. • DoubleC Curve The Double C shape brush aids in offering depth and helps in lifting added volumes. • Carries hair care products With a broad curve, the NuWay DoubleC Brush can carry hair products with ease. It is indeed the best brush for applying hair care products. • Circular venting scheme The circular venting scheme decreases the drying time, thus offering speed dry. Moreover, it also protects against heat. • Ergonomic shape With an ergonomic shape, the brush assists in scalp care. Now, you can get the perfect braid with ease! • Non-slip grip The NuWay DoubleC Brush comes with a TPR handle. It indicates a non-slip grip and aids in detangling hairs. No wonder it is credited as the best brush for detangling tresses. • Easy to clean The brush is exceptionally easy to clean. You only need some detergent and water to wash off the dirt. Then, air dries it in a cool place for further use. • Tips diffused with argan oil The tips of the bristles are smeared with argan oil, maintaining the softness and shine of the hair. These also promote blood circulation and stimulate the hair follicles. These spectacular features definitely make the NuWay DoubleC Brush even more appealing. Magnificent, right? Get this impressive hairbrush on Amazon here!
HOW TO FRENCH BRAID CURLY HAIR ?
Korzybski’s notion of Similarity in Structure is a master stroke without which the understanding of General Semantics risks sliding back to the Aristotelian orientation. That’s why he usually avoided conventional formulations which might appear to give maps the magical power to ‘represent’, ‘correspond to’ or ‘mirror’ a territory. A non-Aristotelian map has the scientific power to deliver similarity-in-structure to a territory. Not similarity, but similarity in structure. ‘Structure’ for AK is a mathematical term involving ‘order’ and especially ‘relations’.
Gad Horowitz (The Book of Radical General Semantics)
Drawing on earlier conventional ethnic types in newspapers, theater, literature, photography, and advertisements, the new medium of motion pictures perpetuated them and gave rise to new variants. The overriding negative images of Mexicans and Latinos in general in Hollywood motion pictures became a staple of its earliest western films.
Luis I. Reyes (Viva Hollywood: The Legacy of Latin and Hispanic Artists in American Film (Turner Classic Movies))
Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Be a tempered radical. If your idea is extreme, couch it in a more conventional goal. That way, instead of changing people’s minds, you can appeal to values or beliefs that they already hold. You can use a Trojan horse, as Meredith Perry did when she masked her vision for wireless power behind a request to design a transducer.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
If you don't have a big problem, you don't have a big opportunity. Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem.
John Mullins (Break the Rules!: The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World)
Any big problem is a big opportunity,” Khosla says. “If you think about it, no problem, no solution, no company. It's very simple. Every big problem is a big opportunity. If you don't have a big problem, you don't have a big opportunity. Nobody will pay you to solve a non‐problem.”3 Khosla's problem‐first—rather than product‐first—logic is the driving force behind many entrepreneurs and their sometimes surprisingly promising new ventures that break the conventional product‐first rules. “Why didn't I think of that?” some observers wonder in hindsight.
John Mullins (Break the Rules!: The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World)
We confront a paradoxical process, then, whose duality - tetanization and inertia, acceleration in a void, overheated production with no attendant social gains or aims - is a reflection of the two phenomena conventionally attributed to the crisis: inflation and unemployment. Traditionally, inflation and unemployment are variables in the equation of growth. At this level, however, there is really no question of crisis: these phenomena are anomic in character, and anomie is merely the shadow cast by an organic solidarity. What is worrying, by contrast, is anomaly. The anomalous is not a clear symptom but, rather, a strange sign of failure, of the infraction of a rule which is secret - or which, at any rate, we know nothing about. Perhaps an excess of goals is the culprit - we simply do not know. Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
EVERYBODY IS SCARED OF 2021. EUROPEANS ARE LOSING JOBS, BUSINESS AND HOPE.” The Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism, Jagatguru Mahasannidhanam, His Divine Holiness Bhagavan Nithyananda Paramashivam reveals that we manifest not what we desire but what we believe in. Humans always operate from the space of fear and greed and that is what will be manifested in their reality. He further adds, “ even if one person makes the effort to have a shift in his/her thinking and have higher cognitions and thus raise their consciousness, there will be a shift in the entire humanity.” Inspired by the vision of The SPH for the whole of humanity, Kailasa’s Department of Education have been holding various conventions and summits to promote the wellbeing of global citizens mentally and physically. One of them includes the Paramashivoham program, the longest, non-stop, back-to-back program currently in its 22nd Season. Using powerful, time tested, guaranteed amalgamation of spiritual tools such as Darshan where one mirrors the neurons of the cosmic principles truths, learning about the cosmic principle truths and its direct application to live an empowered and enlightened life, manifesting those truths as part of you where as a byproduct, one starts manifesting spiritual powers just by sheet initiation from The SPH.
The SPH JGM HDH Nithyananda Paramashivam, Reviver of KAILASA - the Ancient Enlightened Hindu Nation
In 2016 when Peter Thiel endorsed Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland he immediately became a non-gay in the eyes of the most prominent gay magazine in America. To have gone to the right – and to the Donald Trump right at that – was such an egregious fault that Advocate excommunicated Thiel from the church of gay. Two years later precisely the same pattern played out among black Americans. After
Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
Even for non–guitar players, it’s worth trying to describe what he does. At the 5 chord, instead of making the conventional barre chord, the B7th, which requires a little effort with the left hand, he wouldn’t bother with the B at all. He’d leave the open A note ringing and just slide a finger up the D string to a 7th. And there’s the haunting note, resonating against the open A. So you’re not using root notes, but letting it fall against a 7th. Believe me, it’s (a) the laziest, sloppiest single thing you can do in that situation, and (b) one of the most brilliant musical inventions of all time.
Keith Richards (Life)
Today, most countries fail to comply with the 1951 Convention. Signatory states in the developed world find ever more elaborate ways to disregard or bypass the principle of non-refoulement, adopting a suite of deterrence or non-entrée policies that make it difficut and dangerous for refugees to access their territory: carrier sanctions, razor wire fences, interception en route. Signatory states in the developing world do tend to admit refugees more because of geoghraphical necessity and international pressure than law, and when they do, they still almost universally fail to implement the socio-economic rights in the Convention. And, yet, paradoxically, many of the most generous host countries in the world are not even full signatories: Jordan, Lebanon, Thailand, Nepal, and Turkey, for instance.
Alexander Betts (Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System)
Our lives have become incredibly complicated, with stress relentlessly undermining our health and sanity. In other words, the yogic work of self-transformation encounters similar challenges to bygone ages, which had their own pathologies. Yoga is a well-trodden path to inner freedom, peace, and happiness. It puts us in touch with what Abraham Maslow called “being values,” without which our lives are superficial and ultimately unfulfilling.2 Yoga offers answers to the fundamental questions of human existence: Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I go? What must I do? Whenever we pause long enough in the midst of our hectic lives, these questions surface from oblivion. When they do, few people have plausible answers for them. But without such answers, we are merely adrift. Yoga can provide direction today as efficiently as it did five or more millennia ago. It is for everyone. Its various approaches are not only not antithetical but positively complementary. They make up a spectrum of possible engagement of the yogic path to liberation. Whatever our particular temperament or orientation, we can find a resonating yogic approach that will lead us out of confusion and unhappiness. Shri Yogendra, founder-president of the Yoga Institute in Santa Cruz (a suburb of Bombay, India) addressed the notion that ancient Yoga is unsuitable for modern life as part of a larger pattern of prejudice: . . . a busy man regards it as a waste of time which he could utilize to better purpose; the normally healthy man believes he has no need for it; the non-conformist and the unconventional dislike the very idea of following anything which demands their loyalty or devotion; the youth believes it is for the old, and the luxury-loving persons could not think of being simple, while many opine that Yoga and modern life are self-contradictory and need not be attempted.3 These excuses say nothing about Yoga but everything about the ordinary individual, who is always looking to preserve the status quo. Yoga, of course, actively undermines conventional patterns of existence, at least insofar as they prevent inner freedom, peace, and happiness. In that sense it is a radical teaching, which goes to the root (radix) of the problem: lethargy, fear of change, prejudice, self-delusion—all of which can be summarized as ignorance (avidyā). The whole purpose of Yoga is to remove ignorance, which is in the way of enlightenment. Therefore Yoga speaks to every single unillumined person in the world.
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all. As Kaveny writes, “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.” When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
I was not only not popular (and am not popular yet—never will be) but I was non grata—I was not welcome in the world.” But the fantasy of Leaves of Grass being finally widely accepted made him laugh a little to Traubel: “I wouldn’t know what to do, how to comport myself, if I lived long enough to become accepted, to get in demand, to ride on the crest of the wave. I would have to go scratching, questioning, hitching about, to see if this was the real critter, the old Walt Whitman—to see if Walt Whitman had not suffered a destructive transformation—become apostate, formal, reconciled to the conventions, subdued from the old independence.
C.K. Williams (On Whitman (Writers on Writers Book 3))
There are many generally accepted limitations on the weapons and tactics that may be used in wartime. Many of them are set out in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the two Additional Protocols of 1977 which deal respectively with international armed conflicts and with non-international (internal) armed conflicts. (A third protocol, adopted in 2005, adopted the ‘red crystal’ as an international symbol to indicate protected persons and objects, alongside the red cross and red crescent symbols.) The Geneva Conventions also prescribe rules on matters such as the treatment of prisoners of war, and on the rights and duties of States that are in occupation of foreign territory. The latter rules, along with rules from the 1907 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, are applicable to the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the West Bank and Gaza, for example.
Vaughan Lowe (International Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Or, to put it in more conventional terms, is the very idea of a substantial Woman that eludes the masculine symbolic grasp not part and parcel of masculine ideology?
Slavoj Žižek (Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed)
In a political society, a firm agreement is necessary, which is founded on the habitual use of metaphors. Everything unusual upsets and annoys, yes, destroys. Therefore, it is politically convenient and moral to use every word like the masses use it. To be true means from now on not to deflect from the habitual meaning of things. The true is that which is [Das wahre ist das Seiende], in contrast to the non-existing [Nichtwirklichen]. The first convention is about what ought to count as ‘being’ [seiend].
Friedrich Nietzsche
When assuredness of life is conventional and extremely independent, there will be a symmetric reach of complacent methods that have statuesque power and svelte energy. Shapely, you are related to the versatility of ethereal template, queerness, and sanctified gravity in deceased veriations; you have grasped supernal activities in non-delusion and disbalance. It penetrates grandiose and cheery expressions in your physical and mental imposing texture, and you descry beyond your difficulty. You are not guessing for other imagains, that is, wordly reliance. Goodly, you will have solemn strength, which is comely, impressive, and rarebit penned for your master.
Viraaj Sisodiya
With some forty-seven thousand churches, the Southern Baptist Convention was – and still is – the largest non-Catholic faith group in the country. In that fact, I saw the reality that a whole lot of kids and congregants were being left at increased risk for sexual violation by predatory pastors.
Christa Brown (Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation)
The facts have been piling up for decades. They become more elaborate, and more concerning, with each passing year. And yet for some reason we have been unable to change course. The past half-century is littered with milestones of inaction. A scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change first began to form in the mid-1970s. The first international climate summit was held in 1979, three years before I was born. The NASA climate scientist James Hansen gave his landmark testimony to the US Congress in 1988, explaining how the combustion of fossil fuels was driving climate breakdown. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992 to set non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. International climate summits – the UN Congress of Parties – have been held annually since 1995 to negotiate plans for emissions reductions. The UN framework has been extended three times, with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. And yet global CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, while ecosystems unravel at a deadly pace. Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox. Future generations will look back on us and marvel at how we could have known exactly what was going on, in excruciating detail, and yet failed to solve the problem.
Jason Hickel (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World)
Today we know that both deep sleep and REM sleep play important roles in how memories change over time. The sleeping brain reshapes memory by increasing the imprint of emotionally relevant information while helping irrelevant material fade away.12 In a series of elegant studies Stickgold and his colleagues showed that the sleeping brain can even make sense out of information whose relevance is unclear while we are awake and integrate it into the larger memory system.13 Dreams keep replaying, recombining, and reintegrating pieces of old memories for months and even years.14 They constantly update the subterranean realities that determine what our waking minds pay attention to. And perhaps most relevant to EMDR, in REM sleep we activate more distant associations than in either non-REM sleep or the normal waking state. For example, when subjects are wakened from non-REM sleep and given a word-association test, they give standard responses: hot/cold, hard/soft, etc. Wakened from REM sleep, they make less conventional connections, such as thief/wrong.15 They also solve simple anagrams more easily after REM sleep. This shift toward activation of distant associations could explain why dreams are so bizarre.16
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
in order for the bitumen industry to be even remotely profitable, four conditions must be met: conventional oil must be trading above $50 a barrel; the natural resources needed to produce it (fresh water, natural gas, and the boreal forest ecosystem) must be had for next to nothing; the industry itself must be heavily subsidized; and exploration costs must be nil.[*2] There is a fifth condition, exploited not just by the bitumen industry but by the entire burning world: no consequences for emissions.” Excerpt From Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction John Vaillant
John Vaillant (Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World)
L'accès aux fonctions dont on a été écarté est justifié dans une analyse en termes de genre : c'est simplement la mise en œuvre d'une politique non discriminatoire, et une politique non discriminatoire peut et dois passer par l'action positive, ce qu'on appelle parfois discrimination inverse. Peu importe comment on la nomme : il s'agit dans tous les cas d'une action correctrice d'une discrimination passée dont l'effet se fait encore sentir, et correctrice des discriminations présentes, de jure ou de facto, qui empêchent certaines personnes, en raison ed leur appartenance de groupe, d'avoir des chances égales. Telle est la philosophie de l'action positive, là où elle est pratiquée. Telle est la philosophie de l'ONU, pour laquelle une action positive correctrice ne peut être considérée comme une discrimination - doctrine qui contredit le Conseil constitutionnel français ainsi que le dernier arrêté de la Cour européenne ; mais les conventions internationales l'emportent sur les lois nationales et sur les décisions européennes, et on peut donc espérer que l'ordre sera mis dans la maison France et la maison Europe. (p. 59)
Christine Delphy (Classer, dominer: Qui sont les "autres" ? (French Edition))
Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his “Coil for Electro magnets,” patent #512,340. It is a curious design, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one. In the patent Tesla explains that this double coil will store many times the energy of a conventional coil.   The patent, however, gives no hint of what might have been its more unusual capability. In an article for Century Magazine, Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular, he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a self-cooling method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, “This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me.” What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube enclosing the first. The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid. Tesla's intent was to condense the energy trapped between the earth and its upper atmosphere and to turn it into an electric current. He pictured the sun as an immense ball of electricity, positively charged with a potential of some 200 billion volts. The Earth, on the other hand, is charged with negative electricity. The tremendous electrical force between these two bodies constituted, at least in part, what he called cosmic-energy. It varied from night to day and from season to season but it is always present. Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten-year-old technology for yet another new one. Tesla saw that profits could be made from the self-acting generator, but somewhere along the line, it was pointed out to him, the negative impact the device would have on the newly emerging technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the end of his article in Century he wrote: “I worked for a long time fully convinced that the practical realization of the method of obtaining energy from the sun would be of incalculable industrial value, but the continued study of the subject revealed the fact that while it will be commercially profitable if my expectations are well founded, it will not be so to an extraordinary degree.
Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
I’m not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to bring Kanish to Mel Odious Sound yesterday. Bringing a Billionheir to a large recording complex full of Producers is like opening a bag of chips at a seagull convention. It wouldn’t be long before every Producer within earshot swooped in to aggressively pitch his latest and greatest pet project, most of which would likely prove unprofitable. Rev is obviously going to pitch a project, and it very well may be something amazing. But as I’ve pointed out, in order for Kanish to make a profit, he would have to pick up half the Publishing—a non-starter for the Rev. He’s not a Songwriting Producer, so he likely doesn’t have a sufficient portion of the Publishing to share. And even if he did, no seasoned Producer is going to give half of their equity in a song in order to basically secure a small loan from an outside investor. There’s no upside. For starters, Kanish has no channels of Distribution beyond Streaming, which is already available to anyone and everyone who wants it, and which is currently only profitable for the Major Labels and the stockholders of the Streaming services themselves. Everyone else is getting screwed. And please don’t quote me the Douchebag Big Tech Billionaires running big Streaming Corporations. They are literally lining their pockets with the would-be earnings of Artists and Songwriters alike. What they claim as fair is anything but. Frankly, I don’t think we should be comfortable with Spotify taking a 30 percent margin off the top, and then disbursing the Tiger’s Share of the remaining 70 percent to the Major Labels who have already negotiated top dollar for access to their catalog. This has resulted in nothing but some remaining scraps trickling down to the tens of thousands of Independent Artists out there who just want to make a living. You can’t make a living off scraps, or even a trickle, for that matter. Mark my words, we are currently witnessing the greatest heist in the annals of the Music Business, and that’s saying something given its history. Can you say Napster? Stunningly, the only place that Songwriters can make sufficient Performance Royalties is radio—a medium that is coming up on its hundred-year anniversary. To make matters worse, the Major Distributors still have radio all locked up, and without airplay, there’s no hit. So even now, more than twenty years into the Internet revolution, the odds of breaking through the artistic cacophony without Major-Label Distribution are impossibly low. So much for the Internet leveling the playing field. At this point, only Congress can solve the problem. And despite the fact that Streaming has been around since the mid-aughts, Congress has done nothing to deal with the issue. Why? Because it’s far cheaper for Big Tech to line the pockets of lobbyists and fund the campaigns of politicians who gladly ignore the issue than it is to pay Artists and Songwriters a fair rate for their work, my friends. Same is it ever was. Just so I’m clear, there is a debate to be had as to how much Songwriters and Artists should be paid for Streaming. A radio Spin can reach millions. A Stream rarely reaches more than a few listeners. Clearly, a new method of calculation is required. But that doesn’t mean that we should just sit by as the Big Tech Douchebags rob an entire generation of royalties all so they can sell their Streaming Corporation for billions down the line. I mean, that is the end game, after all. At which point, profit for the new majority stockholder will be all but impossible. How will anyone get paid then?
Mixerman (#Mixerman and the Billionheir Apparent)
For the student of war, the Horn of Africa offers a cornucopia of violence and destruction. It has interstate wars and civil wars; international military interventions and maritime piracy; genocidal massacres and non-violent popular uprisings; conventional wars fought in trenches and irregular wars fought by jihadists and followers of a messianic cult.
Alex de Waal (The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power)
Obama declined to hold public services in the White House commemorating the National Day of Prayer, which had been the practice of his predecessors. • In September 2011, his Department of Health and Human Services terminated funding to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for its extensive program to assist victims of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. The reason? Objections to Catholic teaching on abortion and contraception.7 • In 2013 Obama’s inaugural committee forced pastor Louie Giglio, whose Atlanta church was nationally known for its efforts to combat sex trafficking, to withdraw from delivering a prayer at the inaugural ceremony after an audio recording surfaced of a sermon Giglio delivered in the mid-1990s referencing biblical teaching on homosexuality. When it came to praying at Obama’s second inaugural, no pastor holding to an orthodox view of Scripture had need to apply. • His Justice Department canceled a 30,000 grant to a program for at-risk youth because it allowed voluntary, student-led prayer, and the oath recited by its young charges mentioned God.8 • He advocated passage of a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act prohibiting private employers from declining to hire gays and lesbians that granted no exemption for religious ministries and charities. • The Defense Department canceled an appearance by Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse at a National Day of Prayer observance because of Graham’s alleged anti-Muslim bigotry. • Obama’s campaign removed a reference to God from the Democratic Party platform and only moved to reinsert it after news outlets reported the exclusion and controversy erupted. In rushed proceedings at the party convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, the name of God was reinserted to boos from the delegates.
Reed Ralph (Awakening: How America Can Turn from Economic and Moral Destruction Back to Greatness)
Machik thus maintains that what is conventionally referred to as a "god" is in fact the positive nature of reflexive awareness that characterizes the full potential of the enlightened mind when it is unsullied by discriminative thinking. In contrast, when "demons" are conventionally invoked, one should understand this as the obstruction of the full potential of the Universal Base [kun gzhi; ālaya] by non-aware emotional reactions (nyon mongs; kleśa).
Michelle J. Sorensen (Making the Old New Again and Again: Legitimation and Innovation in the Tibetan Buddhist Chöd Tradition)
Or as Esping-Andersen (1996a: 3) put it eloquently already more than 15 years ago: The advanced Western nations’ welfare states were built to cater to an economy dominated by industrial mass production. In the era of the “Keynesian consensus” there was no perceived trade-off between social security and economic growth, between equality and efficiency. This consensus has disappeared because the underlying assumptions no longer obtain. Non-inflationary demand-led growth within one country appears impossible; full employment today must be attained via services, given industrial decline; the conventional male breadwinner family is eroding, fertility is falling, and the life course is increasingly non-standard.
Kees van Kersbergen (Comparative Welfare State Politics)
Those debt limitations induce states and cities to rely more heavily on special purpose districts or authorities that can issue debt outside of formal constitutional constraints. Cities need merely to create a special-purpose government, a quasi-public authority that can issue debt over and above the municipality's debt limitation. Significantly, this "non-debt" debt is often more expensive, and its issuance is less transparent. The powers and management of special-purpose entities are often opaque as well and not subject to the conventional accountability associated with general-purpose local governments. As a constitutional matter, most special-purpose governments do not have to abide by the requirement of one-person-one-vote. And thought sometimes justified on the basis that they will insulate directors from political pressure, often these entities serve as sites of political patronage.
Richard Schragger
MY WEIRD SCHOOL #11: MRS. KORMEL IS NOT NORMAL!. Text copyright © 2006 by Dan Gutman. Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Jim Paillot. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information
Dan Gutman (Mrs. Kormel Is Not Normal! (My Weird School, #11))
Jennifer Wolch’s notion of a “shadow state” crystallizes this symbiosis between the state and social change organizations, gesturing toward a broader conception of the state’s disciplinary power and surveillance capacities. According to Wolch, the structural and political interaction between the state and the non-profit industrial complex manifests as more than a relation of patronage, ideological repression, or institutional subordination. In excess of the expected organizational deference to state rules and regulations, social change groups are constituted by the operational paradigms of conventional state institutions, generating a reflection of state power in the same organizations that originally emerged to resist the very same state.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)
Originals is a fascinating, eye-opening read that will help you not just recognize your own unique gifts, but find the strength to challenge conventional wisdom to bring them to life.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
The next step is to brainstorm new ways to reach your right buyers, by going where they go. Once you start focusing on reaching your right buyers where they actually are, you’ll begin to see big things happen in your art career. We are going to stretch and think differently about selling art than you’ve ever considered before. They aren’t teaching this stuff in art school and you won’t find it in any other book. But it is one of the most effective ways to get your art into the hands of buyers. What I’m encouraging you to do is to think differently than most artists think. In the next chapter, we dive deep into HOW to connect with your right buyer in non-conventional ways.
Maria Brophy (Art Money & Success: A complete and easy-to-follow system for the artist who wasn't born with a business mind.)
Mr. Hamilton, in the Convention of New York, said: "To coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised.... What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying State at war with a non-complying State: Congress marching the troops of one State into the bosom of another ... Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself—a government that can exist only by the sword?... But can we believe that one State will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream—it is impossible." 100
Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
There are three categories of criteria that an individual must meet in order to be diagnosed with ASD. The categories are listed below along with the typical traits, which may indicate whether the individual needs further assessment: 1.Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across contexts, not accounted for by general developmental delays: lack of friends and social life friends often much older or younger mumbling and not completing sentences issues with social rules (such as staring at other people) inability to understand jokes and the benefit of ‘small talk’ introverted (shy) and socially awkward inability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings uncomfortable in large crowds and noisy places detached and emotionally inexpressive. 2.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: obsession with ‘special interests’ collecting objects (such as stamps and coins) attachment to routines and rituals ability to focus on a single task for long periods eccentric or unorthodox behaviour non-conformist and distrusting of authority difficulty following illogical conventions attracted to foreign cultures affinity with nature and animals support for victims of injustice, underdogs and scapegoats. 3.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: inappropriate emotional responses victimised or bullied at school, work and home overthinking and constant logical analysis spending much time alone strange laugh or cackle inability to make direct eye contact when talking highly sensitive to light, sound, taste, smell and touch uncoordinated and clumsy with poor posture difficulty coping with change adept at abstract thinking ability to process data sets logically and notice patterns or trends truthful, naïve and often gullible slow mental processing and vulnerable to mental exhaustion intellectual and ungrounded rather than intuitive and instinctive problems with anxiety and sleeping visual memory.
Philip Wylie (Very Late Diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (Autism Spectrum Disorder): How Seeking a Diagnosis in Adulthood Can Change Your Life)
Although political representation by racial quota is the effect of government policy, it is not yet respectable to call for it explicitly. When President Bill Clinton tried to appoint Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights her appointment failed, in part because of Miss Guinier’s advocacy of representation by race. In her view, if blacks were 13 percent of the US population, 13 percent of seats in Congress should be set aside for them. It does not cause much comment, however, when the Democratic Party applies this thinking to its selection of delegates to presidential conventions. Each state party files an affirmative action plan with the national party, and many states set quotas. For the 2008 Democratic Convention, California mandated an over-representation of non-white delegates. Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics were only 4.6, 5.2, and 21.1 percent, respectively, of the Democratic electorate, but had to be 16, 9, and 26 percent of the delegates. Other states had similar quotas. Procedures of this kind do lead to diversity of delegates but suggest that race is more important than policy. Perhaps it is. In Cincinnati, where blacks are 40 to 45 percent of the population, Mayor Charlie Luken complained that the interests of blacks and whites seemed so permanently in conflict that “race gets injected into every discussion as a result.” In other words, any issue can become racial. In 2004, the Georgia legislature passed a bill to stop fraud by requiring voters to show a state-issued ID at the polls. People without drivers’ licenses could apply for an ID for a nominal fee. Black legislators felt so strongly that this was an attempt to limit the black vote that they did not merely vote against the law; practically the entire black delegation stormed out of the Capitol when the measure passed over their objections. In 2009, when Congress voted a stimulus bill to get the economy out of recession, some governors considered refusing some federal funds because there were too many strings attached. Jim Clyburn, a black South Carolina congressman and House Majority Whip, complained that rejecting any funding would be a “slap in the face of African-Americans.” Race divides Cook County, Illinois, which contains Chicago. In 2007, when the black president of the county board, Todd Stroger, could not get his budget passed, his floor leader William Beavers-also black—complained that it was “because he’s black.” He said there was only one real question: 'Who’s gonna control the county—white or black—that’s all this is.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
the result of an extensive “pre/ post fallacy.” This fallacy occurs because both PRE-conventional realities (such as egocentrism) and POST-conventional realities (such as autonomy and individualism) are both fully NON-conventional, and thus they are easily and often confused and equated. Either pre-conventional realities are elevated to post-conventional truths (so that narcissistic and egocentric stances are taken to be very high expressions of fully autonomous individuality), or else post-conventional realities are reduced to pre-conventional childish modes (so that nonconformist postconventional individuals are charged with being narcissistic and self-promoting).
Ken Wilber (Trump and a Post-Truth World)
In the context of online courts, critics should therefore be cautious about comparing online courts with some ideal and yet simply unaffordable or unattainable conventional court service. In their enthusiasm to dismiss online courts, they often forget the many shortcomings of what is currently in place. The comparison that should be made is with what we have today—court services that are too expensive, take too long, are barely intelligible to the non-lawyer, and so exclude countless potential litigants with credible claims. Our focus, in other words, should be as much on practical steps to remove injustice than defaulting to the current set-up.
Richard Susskind (Online Courts and the Future of Justice)
The trouble with sticking to the non-working conventional approach isn't only that they don’t produce the desired results, but we expect them to do so.
Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It’s too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there’s not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks—the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants—have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)
Of course, “conventional wisdom” at the time held that there could never be a pickup in demand for homes. Instead, most people were convinced that the American dream of home ownership was over; demand for homes would remain depressed forever; and thus the overhang of unsold homes would be absorbed only very slowly. They cited the trend among young people — having been burnt by the collapse of the housing and mortgage bubbles — to rent rather than buy, and as usual they extrapolated it rather than question its durability. As in so many of the examples in this book, for most people, psychology-driven extrapolation took the place of an understanding of and belief in cyclicality. It was clear to me and my Oaktree colleagues, from the graph and from our knowledge of the data behind it, that because the greatest economic crash in almost eighty years had halted additions to the housing supply, home prices could recover strongly if there was any material increase in demand. And, rejecting conventional wisdom, we were convinced that housing demand would prove cyclical as usual, and thus would pick up sometime in the intermediate-term future. This conclusion — supported by other data and analysis — contributed to our decision to invest heavily in non-performing home mortgages and non-performing bank loans secured by land for residential construction, and to purchase North America’s largest private homebuilding company. These investments worked out quite well. (It’s interesting in this context to note what the Wall Street Journal said in a May 12, 2017 article headlined “Generation of Renters Now Buying”: “In all [first-time home buyers] have accounted for 42% of buyers this year, up from 38% in 2015 and 31% at the lowest point during the recent housing cycle in 2011.” So much for extrapolating widespread abandonment of home ownership.)
Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the odds on your side)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has so often been accused of being fascism’s progenitor that his case requires particular care. Intended for the Lutheran pastorate, the young Nietzsche lost his faith and became a professor of classical philology while still extraordinarily young. For his remaining good years (he suffered permanent mental breakdown at fifty, perhaps related to syphilis) he invested all his brilliance and rage in attacking complacent and conformist bourgeois piety, softness, and moralism in the name of a hard, pure independence of spirit. In a world where God was dead, Christianity weak, and Science false, only a spiritually free “superman” could fight free of convention and live according to his own authentic values. At first Nietzsche inspired mostly rebellious youth and shocked their parents. At the same time, his writing contained plenty of raw material for people who wanted to brood on the decline of modern society, the heroic effort of will needed to reverse it, and the nefarious influence of Jews. Nietzsche himself was scornful of patriotism and the actual anti-Semites he saw around him, and imagined his superman a “free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-worshipper, the dweller in forests.” His white-hot prose exerted a powerful intellectual and aesthetic influence across the political spectrum, from activist nationalists like Mussolini and Maurice Barrès to nonconformists like Stefan George and André Gide, to both Nazis and anti-Nazis, and to several later generations of French iconoclasts from Sartre to Foucault. “Nietzsche’s texts themselves provide a positive goldmine of varied possibilities.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
The attainment of this wisdom has itself practical ramifications. In both Saadya’s and Maimonides’ philosophical works, the focus on particular ‘theoretical’ points in semantic theory, epistemology, cosmology, prophetology, legal theory, and so forth tends to obscure the overall non-theoretical telos of their respective works. Consider the Guide. However conventional the literary form of the work is, an epistle to a beloved student, troubled by a deep existential crisis, one must take the topos seriously. Maimonides is not writing for himself, nor is the Guide to be understood as a patchwork of theoretical minitreatises on the aforementioned topics. This is not in the least to deflate or to overlook the brilliance of Maimonides’ contributions to a variety of deep and difficult philosophical and scientific topics, but rather to contextualize those discussions in the appropriate way. Everything in the Guide subserves the end of showing the addressee that, properly understood, his religion—his traditional way of life, one circumscribed by halakhic (legal) norms—is philosophically defensible.
Thomas P. Flint (The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford Handbooks))