Prevent Before It Happens Quotes

I love you so much, sweetheart. So, so much. And it's in part because of things like that. You're an idealist and a romantic, and you have a beautiful soul. And I wish the world was ready to be the way you see it. I wish that the rest of the people on earth with us were capable of living up to your expectations. But they aren't. The world is ugly, and no one wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt about anything. When we lose our work and our reputations, when we lose our friends and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I've lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever I can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right- we had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, as well as the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it. So my true family was not just my mom, lost or found; my dad, gone from the start; and Cora, the only one who had really been there all along. It was Jamie, who took me in without question and gave me a future I once couldn't even imagine; Oliva, who did question, but also gave me answers; Harriet, who, like me, believed she needed no one and discovered otherwise. And then there was Nate. Nate, who was a friend to me before I even knew what a friend was. Who picked me up, literally, over and over again, and never asked for anything in return except for my word and my understanding. I'd given him one but not the other, because at the time I thought I couldn't, and then proved myself right by doing exactly as my mother had, hurting to prevent from being hurt myself. Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete- like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key. ~Ruby (pgs 400-401)

In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. When there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is.

As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major's speech. Instead--she did not know why--they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. There was no thought of rebellion or disobedience in her mind. She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. Whatever happened she would remain faithful, work hard, carry out the orders that were given to her, and accept the leadership of Napoleon. But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled.

Once upon a time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. No, no, wait. Once upon a time there were three bears who lived in a wee house in the woods. Once upon a time there were three soldiers, tramping together down the road after the war. Once upon a time there were three little pigs. Once upon a time there were three brothers. No, this is it. This is the variation I want. Once upon a time there were three Beautiful children, two boys and a girl. When each baby was born, the parents rejoiced, the heavens rejoiced, even the fairies rejoiced. The fairies came to christening parties and gave the babies magical gifts. Bounce, effort, and snark. Contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. Sugar, curiosity, and rain. And yet, there was a witch. There's always a witch. This which was the same age as the beautiful children, and as she and they grew, she was jealous of the girl, and jealous of the boys, too. They were blessed with all these fairy gifts, gifts the witch had been denied at her own christening. The eldest boy was strong and fast, capable and handsome. Though it's true, he was exceptionally short. The next boy was studious and open hearted. Though it's true, he was an outsider. And the girl was witty, Generous, and ethical. Though it's true, she felt powerless. The witch, she was none of these things, for her parents had angered the fairies. No gifts were ever bestowed upon her. She was lonely. Her only strength was her dark and ugly magic. She confuse being spartan with being charitable, and gave away her possessions without truly doing good with them. She confuse being sick with being brave, and suffered agonies while imagining she merited praise for it. She confused wit with intelligence, and made people laugh rather than lightening their hearts are making them think. Hey magic was all she had, and she used it to destroy what she most admired. She visited each young person in turn in their tenth birthday, but did not harm them out right. The protection of some kind fairy - the lilac fairy, perhaps - prevented her from doing so. What she did instead was cursed them. "When you are sixteen," proclaimed the witch in a rage of jealousy, "you shall prick your finger on a spindle - no, you shall strike a match - yes, you will strike a match and did in its flame." The parents of the beautiful children were frightened of the curse, and tried, as people will do, to avoid it. They moved themselves and the children far away, to a castle on a windswept Island. A castle where there were no matches. There, surely, they would be safe. There, Surely, the witch would never find them. But find them she did. And when they were fifteen, these beautiful children, just before their sixteenth birthdays and when they're nervous parents not yet expecting it, the jealous which toxic, hateful self into their lives in the shape of a blonde meeting. The maiden befriended the beautiful children. She kissed him and took them on the boat rides and brought them fudge and told them stories. Then she gave them a box of matches. The children were entranced, for nearly sixteen they have never seen fire. Go on, strike, said the witch, smiling. Fire is beautiful. Nothing bad will happen. Go on, she said, the flames will cleanse your souls. Go on, she said, for you are independent thinkers. Go on, she said. What is this life we lead, if you did not take action? And they listened. They took the matches from her and they struck them. The witch watched their beauty burn, Their bounce, Their intelligence, Their wit, Their open hearts, Their charm, Their dreams for the future. She watched it all disappear in smoke.

The temperature jumped another ninety degrees. Why couldn't anyone see in my life how awesome Noah was? I shoved up my sleeves, welcoming the cold air on my skin. "Echo, stop!" Ashley propelled her self out of the gliter. I froze and then remembered Ashley was damaged. I was going on a date, not to Vegas to elope. Noah's strong hand slipped over my wrist before he entwined his fingers with mine. The sensation of warm flesh against an area I allowed no one to see, much less touch, caused me to shiver. My eyes widened, realizing my mistake. This is what had freaked Ashley out. What had come over me? I never pulled up my sleeves. I spent all my time pulling them down. When had I become...comfortable? He rubbed his thumb over my hand. "I planned on taking her to my house to meet some of my friends." Noah could have told them he was getting me to the ghetto to buy us crack and they wouldn't have heard him. Ashley stood in place, staring at my exposed scars as my father stared at our combined hands. I reached over to pull down my sleeve, but Noah casually placed his hand over my forearm, preventing me fron doing it. My lungs squeezed out all the oxygen in my body. Noah Hutchins, in fact, a human being, was overtly, on purpose, touching my scars. I'd stopped breathing moments ago, as had Ashley. Noah continued as nothing earth-shattering had happened. "What time does Echo need to be home?" Blinking my self back to life, i answered for them, "My curfew is eleven." "Twelve." My father stood and extended his hand. "I didn't have a chance to properly introduce myself earlier. I'm Owen Emerson.

And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

Cary's going to give them the rundown on everything we've managed to piece together about what happened before Baxter got in and the possibility that he's lying and then we'll all be suspicious. I stayed behind because I feel sick and tired and Cary said it's good if one of us stays because it will prevent Baxter from getting suspicious of his suspicion of him. Rhys said it might make him more suspicious. And then suspicious stopped seeming like a real word.

But we’d have each other. And that’s enough for me.” She was crying now, the tears streaking down her face and carrying her mascara with them. I put my arms around her and wiped her cheek with my thumb. “I love you so much, sweetheart. So, so much. And it’s in part because of things like that. You’re an idealist and a romantic, and you have a beautiful soul. And I wish the world was ready to be the way you see it. I wish that the rest of the people on earth with us were capable of living up to your expectations. But they aren’t. The world is ugly, and no one wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt about anything. When we lose our work and our reputations, when we lose our friends and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I’ve lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever I can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.” She heaved into my body, her tears growing inside her. For a moment, I thought she might flood the backyard. “I love you,” she said. “I love you, too,” I whispered into her ear. “I love you more than anything else in the entire world.” “It’s not wrong,” Celia said. “It shouldn’t be wrong, to love you. How can it be wrong?” “It’s not wrong, sweetheart. It’s not,” I said. “They’re wrong.

This isn’t about money. It’s about justice and prevention, justice for my boys and those who came before them, and prevention for those who may come after. Your crap settlement does not alert the public and allows this animal to continue to violate children,” Jennifer raged. “I will not stand idly by for a few bucks and permit this to happen to another innocent child.

The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that, by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen. These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under the burden of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey's end.

But I had heeded the warning, and as is said of juries who have heard inadmissible evidence before it is stricken from the record, suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more. […] I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda’s superstitious world, anticipating the worst was as sure a way of preventing it from happening. When we went on a walk one night and he told me that he’d soon be heading back home, I realized how futile my alleged foresight had been. Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway.

There are some who are still weak in faith, who ought to be instructed, and who would gladly believe as we do. But their ignorance prevents them...we must bear patiently with these people and not use our liberty; since it brings to peril or harm to body or soul...but if we use our liberty unnecessarily, and deliberately cause offense to our neighbor, we drive away the very one who in time would come to our faith. Thus St. Paul circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3) because simple minded Jews had taken offense; he thought: what harm can it do, since they are offended because of ignorance? But when, in Antioch, they insisted that he out and must circumcise Titus (Gal. 2:3) Paul withstood them all and to spite them refused to have Titus circumcised... He did the same when St. Peter...it happened in this way: when Peter was with the Gentiles he ate pork and sausages with them, but when the Jews came in, he abstained from this food and did not eat as he did before. Then the Gentiles who had become Christians though: Alas! we, too, must be like the Jews, eat no pork, and live according to the law of Moses. But when Paul learned that they were acting to the injury of evangelical freedom, he reproved Peter publicly and read him an apostolic lecture, saying: "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (Gal. 2:14). Thus we, too, should order our lives and use our liberty at the proper time, so that Christian liberty may suffer no injury, and no offense be given to our weak brothers and sisters who are still without the knowledge of this liberty.

God is passionate about good happening in this world, not evil. I’m convinced of that. God hates what happened here, Rae, the same way He hates divorce, and He hates injustice. But He won’t destroy people to proactively prevent them from doing evil things, nor will He destroy them today after they have done evil things. Not until His great patience has extended to them every chance and opportunity there is to change and become good again.

As we have seen, prayer, celebration of the religious offices, alms, consoling the afflicted, the cultivation of a little piece of ground, fraternity, frugality, hospitality, self-sacrifice, confidence, study, and work, filled up each day of his life. Filled up is exactly the phrase; and in fact, the Bishop's day was full to the brim with good thoughts, good words, and good actions. Yet it was not complete if cold or rainy weather prevented him from passing an hour or two in the evening, when the two women had retired, in his garden before going to sleep. It seemed as though it were a sort of rite with him, to prepare himself for sleep by meditating in the presence of the great spectacle of the starry firmament. Sometimes late at night, if the two women were awake, they would hear him slowly walking the paths. He was out there alone with himself, composed, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night emit their perfume, lit like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of creation’s universal radiance, perhaps he could not have told what was happening in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him; mysterious exchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe. He contemplated the grandeur, and the presence of God; the eternity of the future, that strange mystery; the eternity of the past, a stranger mystery; all the infinities hidden deep in every direction; and, without trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, he saw it. He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him. He reflected upon the magnificent union of atoms, which give visible forms to Nature, revealing forces by recognizing them, creating individualities in unity, proportions in extension, the innumerable in the infinite, and through light producing beauty. These unions are forming and dissolving continually; from which come life and death. He would sit on a wooden bench leaning against a decrepit trellis and look at the stars through the irregular outlines of his fruit trees. This quarter of an acre of ground, so sparingly planted, so cluttered with shed and ruins, was dear to him and satisfied him. What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the day time, and contemplation at night? Was this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background not space enough for him to adore God in his most beautiful, most sublime works? Indeed, is that not everything? What more do you need? A little garden to walk in, and immensity to reflect on. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate on; a few flowers on earth and all the stars in the sky.

I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future... And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don't, we cannot understand our own times.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

the most effective problem-finders become adept at searching for and identifying patterns.

distinguish between excusable and inexcusable mistakes,

I lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever i can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.

But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …" "My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is.

When the NSSF fights against legislation designed to prevent mass shootings because it “won’t work and is a violation of rights,” we understand that many people agree with that argument. But that’s not, at all, even a little bit why the organization lobbies so hard. It works hand in hand with the NRA and certain senators, and spends millions of dollars per year for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. And every time a shooting happens, it makes even more money. Yes. For real. When a mass shooting makes national headlines, the gun lobby purposefully stokes up fear and paranoia over proposed new gun laws so that scared citizens get out their checkbooks and buy a new AR-15 (or sporting rifle). So why would the NSSF have any interest in stopping mass shootings? Why would it engage politically and invest in compromise, a reform plan that attempts to make all Americans safer, or any sort of reckoning of the role guns play in gun violence? It won’t. However you feel about guns and their place in America—whether we’re talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between—it’s undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be “the last chance before the government bans” whatever gun manufacturers are peddling is much more valuable. A customer base absolutely convinced that the just-about-anyone-can-buy culture we have is politically necessary without seeing that it serves those companies is what they’re after. They have achieved it.

the case method typically presents the problem to the student. It describes the situation facing a firm and then frames the decision that must be made. In real life, according to McNamara, the leader first must discover the problem.

And the man who learns most from the levelling and himself becomes greatest does not become an outstanding man or hero--that would only impede the levelling process, which is rigidly consistent to the end--he himself prevents that from happening because he has understood the meaning of levelling; he becomes a man and nothing else, in the complete equalitarian sense. That is the idea of religion. But, under those conditions, the equalitarian order is severe and the profit is seemingly very small; seemingly, for unless the individual learns in the reality of religion and before God to be content with himself, and learns, instead of dominating others, to dominate himself, content as priest to be his own audience, and as author his own reader, if he will not learn to be satisfied with that as the highest, because it is the expression of the equality of all men before God and of our likeness to others, then he will not escape from reflection.

Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian's congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it's a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an intense hatred and desire to kill—and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred—and he happens to be an Algerian.

Take the Holocaust for example: Why did God allow Hitler to kill millions of innocent Jews? Because God didn't want to step on Hitler's toes and interfere with his free will? That's a pretty lame excuse. What about the free will of all those Jews who died? I'm pretty sure that getting gassed to death was obviously not their choice. So, was the Holocaust part of God's great plan? Is that why he allowed it to happen? Is that why God didn't answer the prayers of all those Jews who begged him to make Hitler drop dead? Why didn't God just make Hitler have a heart attack before he could start World War 2? Why didn't he simply prevent Hitler from being born? How could a God who is supposed to be all good all the time allow something like the Holocaust? Or did God not just LET it happen? Maybe God MADE the Holocaust happen, because everything that happens, happens for a good reason? Are our minds simply too tiny, too inferior, to understand God's divine plan? Are we just too stupid to see the greater good that came out of the Holocaust? If that were true, and everything that happens, including the Holocaust, is part of God's perfect plan, then that means that Hitler really wasn't a bad man at all. He was actually doing God's work. And if Hitler did exactly what he was supposed to do in God's great plan, then Hitler obviously didn't have free will, but was just God's puppet. So that means Hitler was a good guy. A man of God. Sorry, but there is no religion in the world that could sell me on believing THAT bullshit.

Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue. Essentially ahead of itself, it has projected itself upon its potentiality-for-Being before going on to any mere consideration of itself. In its projection it reveals itself as something which has been thrown. It has been thrownly abandoned to the ‘world’, and falls into it concernfully.(1) As care—that is, as existing in the unity of the projection which has been fallingly thrown—this entity has been disclosed as a “there”. As being with Others, it maintains itself in an average way of interpreting—a way which has been Articulated in discourse and expressed in language. Being-in-the-world has always expressed itself, and as Being alongside entities encountered within-the-world, it constantly expresses itself in addressing itself to the very object of its concern and discussing it. The concern of circumspective common sense is grounded in temporality—indeed in the mode of a making-present which retains and awaits. Such concern, as concernfully reckoning up, planning, preventing, or taking precautions, always says (whether audibly or not) that something is to happen ‘then’, that something else is to be attended to ‘beforehand’, that what has failed or eluded us ‘on that former occasion’ is something that we must ‘now’ make up for.(2)

human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it.

When one is born into a religion that is not too unsuitable for pronouncing the name of the Lord, when one loves that native religion, well-oriented and pure, it is difficult to conceive of a legitimate motive to abandon it before direct contact with God offers the soul to the divine will itself. Beyond this threshold, the change is only legitimate as an act of obedience. In fact history shows how this rarely happens. More often— perhaps always— the soul that reaches the highest spiritual regions is confirmed in the love of the tradition that served as its ladder. If the imperfection of the native religion is too great, or if it appears in a native environment under a form that is too corrupt, or if circumstances prevent that religion from being born or even kills it, the adoption of a strange religion is legitimate. Legitimate and necessary for certain people; not, without a doubt, for all. It is the same for those who have been raised without any religious practice. In all other cases, to change religions is an extremely grave (serious) decision and it is even more serious to push someone else to do so. It is still an infinitely more serious exercise, in this sense, to officially apply such pressure upon conquered lands.

When we lose our work and reputations, when we lose our friends and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I've lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you, I will do whatever I can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.

This day could be our last and if it’s in the cards then so be it. I’ll prevent any bad thing I can. That’s my life’s mission. I also know how to accept finality, to give myself up to what I can’t begin to change. I don’t want to die. But I refuse to fear it. I wait for it without dread because there’s no logic in living a tragedy before it’s happened.

I AM WRITING IN A time of great anxiety in my country. I understand the anxiety, but also believe America is going to be fine. I choose to see opportunity as well as danger. Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty. We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it. I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while deemphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and morally wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I’ve said this earlier but it’s worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, “I hope you will let it go,” about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to almost be darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay.

Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. 75. Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

We have many dead of our own to pray for, and we join our sorrow to yours. Let our common grief be our bond. Let those prayers be the balm for your sorrow, not an innocent man's continued imprisonment. I state to you absolutely that, if I could possibly have prevented what happened that day, your menfolk would not have died. I would have died myself before knowingly permitting what happened to happen. And I certainly never pulled the trigger that did it. May the Creator strike me dead this moment if I lie. I cannot see how my being here, torn from my own grandchildren, can possibly mend your loss. I swear to you, I am guilty only of being an Indian. That's why I am here. Being who I am, being you you are — that's Aboriginal Sin.

There is one notable exception to Jablonski and Chaplin’s equation—and it’s the exception that proves the rule. The Inuit—the indigenous people of the subarctic—are dark-skinned, despite the limited sunlight of their home. If you think something fishy’s going on here, you’re right. But the reason they don’t need to evolve the lighter skin necessary to ensure sufficient vitamin D production is refreshingly simple. Their diet is full of fatty fish—which just happens to be one of the only foods in nature that is chock-full of vitamin D. They eat vitamin D for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so they don’t need to make it. If you ever had a grandmother from the Old World try to force cod liver oil down your throat, she was onto something for the same reason—since it’s full of vitamin D, cod liver oil was one of the best ways to prevent rickets, especially before milk was routinely fortified with it.   IF YOU’RE WONDERING how people who have dark skin make enough vitamin D despite the fact that their skin blocks all those ultraviolet rays, you’re asking the right questions. Remember, ultraviolet rays that penetrate the skin destroy folate—and ultraviolet rays that penetrate the skin are necessary to create vitamin D. Dark skin evolved to protect folate, but it didn’t evolve

On an air-cooled engine like this, extreme overheating can cause a “seizure”. This machine has had one...in fact, three of them. I took this machine into a shop because I thought it wasn’t important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details. The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. The radio was a clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds. On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

I feel excitingly...free. Things were going to happen to me last night that I did not like - and I stopped them. I have never prevented my own doom before. I have never stood in the path of certain unhappiness and told myself - lovingly, like a mother to myself - "No! This unhappiness will not suit you! Turn around and go another way!" I have previously been resigned to any and all fates ahead - mute and compliant, worried about seeming weird or unfuckable, or about making a fuss. But now things have changed: it seems I am now the kind of girl who can instigate a threesome - then cancel a threesome, then order a cab. I am in charge of me. I can change fates! I can reorder evenings! I can say "Yes" - and then "No!" This is new information to me. I like this information. I like all information about me. I am compiling a dossier. I am my own specialist subject.

You may find yourself hampered by someone who sows tares of despondency. He tries to prevent you from climbing to such heights of holiness by discouraging you with various thoughts. For instance, he will tell you that it is impossible for you to be saved and to keep every single one of God's commandments while you live in this world. When this happens you should sit down in a solitary place by yourself, collect yourself, concentrate your thoughts and give good counsel to your soul, saying: "Why, my soul, are you dejected, and why do you trouble me? Put your hope in God, for I will give thanks to Him; for my salvation lies not in my actions but in God (cf. Ps. 42:5). Who will be vindicated by actions done according to the law (cf. Gal 2:16)? No living person will be vindicated before God (cf. Ps. 143:2). Yet by virtue of my faith in God I hope that in His ineffable mercy He will give me salvation. Get behind me, Satan (cf. Matt. 16:23). I worship the Lord my God (cf. Matt. 4:10) and serve Him from my youth; for He is able to save me simply through His mercy. Go away from me. The God who created me in His image and likeness will reduce you to impotence.

We don’t want our lives to be a struggle. I want a life of freedom, where I get to wake up and do what I want, when I want, with whomever I want. I want to get out of bed every day and truly love my life. I want to love my work, and I want to love the people I get to share my life and work with. That’s my definition of success. That kind of life doesn’t just happen. It must be designed. If you want to live an extraordinary life as defined and designed by you, then you must identify the fundamental causes of mediocrity so you can prevent them from robbing you of the life you want.

You’re an idealist and a romantic, and you have a beautiful soul. And I wish the world was ready to be the way you see it. I wish that the rest of the people on earth with us were capable of living up to your expectations. But they aren’t. The world is ugly, and no one wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt about anything. When we lose our work and our reputations, when we lose our friends, and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I’ve lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever I can to prevent you from leaving that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me. - Evelyn Hugo

(Corinthians:) There was a time before the Persian invasion when you were in want of ships for the Aeginetan war, and we Corinthians lent you twenty:the service which we then rendered to you gave you the victory over the Aeginetans, as the other, which prevented the Peloponnesians from aiding the Samians, enabled you to punish Samos. Both benefits were conferred on one of those critical occasions when men in the act of attacking their enemies are utterly regardless of everything but victory, and deem him who assists them a friend though he may have previously been a foe, him who opposes them a foe, even though he may happen to be a friend; nay, they will often neglect their own interests in the excitement of the struggle. (Book 1 Chapter 41.2-3)

On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the kidneys, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit. Two fellows die of tetanus. Their skin turns pale, their limbs stiffen, at last only their eyes live—stubbornly. Many of the wounded have their shattered limbs hanging free in the air from a gallows; underneath the wound a basin is placed into which drips the pus. Every two or three hours the vessel is emptied. Other men lie in stretching bandages with heavy weights hanging from the end of the bed. I see intestine wounds that are constantly full of excreta. The surgeon’s clerk shows me X-ray photographs of completely smashed hipbones, knees and shoulders. A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

The stars of the Milky Way galaxy trace a big, flat circle. With a diameter-to-thickness ratio of one thousand to one, our galaxy is flatter than the flattest flapjacks ever made. In fact, its proportions are better represented by a crépe or a tortilla. No, the Milky Way’s disk is not a sphere, but it probably began as one. We can understand the flatness by assuming the galaxy was once a big, spherical, slowly rotating ball of collapsing gas. During the collapse, the ball spun faster and faster, just as spinning figure skaters do when they draw their arms inward to increase their rotation rate. The galaxy naturally flattened pole-to-pole while the increasing centrifugal forces in the middle prevented collapse at midplane. Yes, if the Pillsbury Doughboy were a figure skater, then fast spins would be a high-risk activity. Any stars that happened to be formed within the Milky Way cloud before the collapse maintained large, plunging orbits. The remaining gas, which easily sticks to itself, like a mid-air collision of two hot marshmallows, got pinned at the mid-plane and is responsible for all subsequent generations of stars, including the Sun. The current Milky Way, which is neither collapsing nor expanding, is a gravitationally mature system where one can think of the orbiting stars above and below the disk as the skeletal remains of the original spherical gas cloud. This general flattening of objects that rotate is why Earth’s pole-to-pole diameter is smaller than its diameter at the equator. Not by much: three-tenths of one percent—about twenty-six miles. But Earth is small, mostly solid, and doesn’t rotate all that fast. At twenty-four hours per day, Earth carries anything on its equator at a mere 1,000 miles per hour. Consider the jumbo, fast-rotating, gaseous planet Saturn. Completing a day in just ten and a half hours, its equator revolves at 22,000 miles per hour and its pole-to-pole dimension is a full ten percent flatter than its middle, a difference noticeable even through a small amateur telescope. Flattened spheres are more generally called oblate spheroids, while spheres that are elongated pole-to-pole are called prolate. In everyday life, hamburgers and hot dogs make excellent (although somewhat extreme) examples of each shape. I don’t know about you, but the planet Saturn pops into my mind with every bite of a hamburger I take.

When fat is heated to frying temperatures, whether it be animal fat, such as lard, or plant fat, such as vegetable oil, toxic volatile chemicals with mutagenic properties (those able to cause genetic mutations) are released into the air.22 This happens even before the “smoke point” temperature is reached.23 If you do fry at home, good ventilation in the kitchen may reduce lung cancer risk.24 Cancer risk may also depend on what’s being fried. A study of women in China found that smokers who stir-fried meat every day had nearly three times the odds of lung cancer compared to smokers who stir-fried foods other than meat on a daily basis.25 This is thought to be because of a group of carcinogens called heterocyclic amines that are formed when muscle tissue is subjected to high temperatures.

Too often in the previous months, he told the silent controllers, potential problems had been dismissed with a casual “that can’t happen” wave. Maybe the ship had a balky breaker, but it would never cause a fuel cell to fail in flight. Maybe those new pyrotechnics were a little temperamental, but they could never make a parachute fail to deploy. And as for pumping pure oxygen into the cockpit, it had never caused any problems before, had it? But what if it did? What would you do then? That was the critical question no one had been raising. It was not good enough to ask what you would accept. Instead, you had to ask what action you would take today to prevent the failure from ever happening. The answer you gave should always satisfy one final question: What is the very best thing to do in this situation?

You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.

Nevertheless, as Oppie predicted, the Truman Administration rejected the Soviet response out of hand. Negotiations continued in a desultory fashion for many months, but without result. An early opportunity for a good-faith effort to prevent an uncontrolled nuclear arms race between the two major powers had been lost. It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then tens of thousands of nuclear warheads had been built. Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues always blamed Baruch for this missed opportunity. Acheson angrily observed later, “It was his [Baruch’s] ball and he balled it up. . . . He pretty well ruined the thing.” Rabi was equally blunt: “It’s simply real madness what has happened.

An enigmatic lack of curiosity about the future that prevented him from enjoying the present. But what someone else feels always belongs to the world of the imagination. You never know for certain, What we begin with reluctance or even with a sense of repulsion, can end up drawing us in by sheer force of habit or an unexpected taste for repetition. You would need to have lost an awful lot before you’d be willing to renounce what you have, especially if what you have is part of a long-term plan, part of a decision that contained a large dose of obstinacy. The desire to know is a curse and the greatest source of misfortune; The Buenos Aires accent, at least to Spanish ears, does always tend to sound like a caricature of itself. There’s nothing like curiosity and comedy to distract us—if only for an instant—from our sorrows and anxieties. What at first repels can end up attracting, after a swift moment of adjustment or approval, once you’ve made up your mind. The greater your grief or shock, the greater your state of desolation and numbness and abandonment, the lower your defenses and the fewer your qualms; professional seducers know this well and are always on the lookout for misfortunes. Even when things are happening and are present, they, too, require the imagination, because it’s the only thing that highlights certain events and teaches us to distinguish, while they are happening, the memorable from the unmemorable. Going back is the very worst infidelity. When something comes to an end, even the something you most want to end, you suddenly regret that ending and begin to miss it. You never stop feeling intimidated by someone who intimidated you from the outset. Not being able to choose isn’t an affront, it’s standard practice. It is in most countries, as it is in ours, despite the collective illusion.

Remarkably, the man so often condemned for his cutthroat striving didn’t leap at the offer. He asked for a week to think it over—not because of any doubts he may have had about himself but because of his doubts about Nixon. Kissinger dwelt in the hothouse bubble of Cambridge, where a contemptuous attitude toward all things Nixonian was the ticket of entry to polite Harvard society. Kissinger’s friends, among them such Democratic stalwarts as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, were almost all dedicated liberals and, “to a man,” Kissinger said, had voted against Nixon. Kissinger himself shared their view. During the campaign, he had called Nixon “unfit to be president” and “a disaster” waiting to happen. Just before the Republican convention he had declared that “Richard Nixon is the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president.” (Such opinions didn’t prevent him from providing help to the Republicans during the campaign, but then nobody ever claimed that Henry Kissinger was straightforward.)

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

It often happens that the pleasure that everyone takes in recalling his store of remembered scenes is more intense, for example, in those who on the one hand are prevented by the tyranny of physical illness and the hope of a cure from seeking in nature pictures which resemble their memories, but on the other can still hope that they will soon be able to do so, so that their attitude toward these scenes remains one of desire, of appetite, and they do not consider them simply as scenes, as pictures. But even if they could have remained mere pictures for me; if, recalling them, I could simply have gazed upon them, they still immediately recreated in me, in my whole being, by the power of an identical sensation, the child, the adolescent who had first seen them. It was not just the weather outside that had changed, or the smells in my room, but inside me there was a change of age, the replacement of one person by another. The smell of the twigs in the icy air was like a piece of the past, an invisible ice-floe broken off from a distant winter and floating into my room, striated here and there with a perfume or a light as if by different years into which I found myself plunged once again, swept away even before I had recognized them by the light-heartedness of hopes long since abandoned.

Ö  Lack of Urgency Arguably the single most significant cause of mediocrity and unfulfilled potential, which prevents 95% of our society from creating and living the life they truly want, is that most people have no sense of urgency to improve themselves so they can improve their lives. Human nature is to live with a “someday” mindset and think life will work itself out. How’s that working out for everybody?   This someday mindset is perpetual, and it leads to a life of procrastination, unfulfilled potential and regret. You wake up one day and wonder what the heck happened; how did your life end up like this? How did you end up like this?   One of the saddest things in life is to live with regret, knowing that you could have, be, and do so much more.   Remember this truth:  now matters more than any other time in your life, because it’s what you are doing today that is determining who you’re becoming, and who you’re becoming will always determine the quality and direction of your life.   If you don’t make the commitment today to start becoming the person you need to be to create the extraordinary life you really want, what makes you think tomorrow—or next week, or next month, or next year—are going to be any different?  They won’t. And that’s why you must draw your line in the sand.

Knocking on a massive carved door minutes later, the sigils on it shouting to those literate enough to ‘Stay away or else!’ he received a nice surprise when the door swung open. Well, hello there. Reaching only his shoulder, with a wild mop of black hair, bright brown eyes and a rounded body made for worship – by his tongue – Remy wondered if he could convince the servant girl to come around the corner with him for a quickie before he met with this Ysabel person. Then she opened her luscious mouth. “If you’re done gawking, you might want to step back before I smash your nose with the door when I shut it.” Someone got up without sex today. He could fix that. “Hello beautiful, I actually have business with the occupant of this suite. I’m here to meet with Ysabel, the witch.” “Really.” Her tone said what she thought of his claim and her brown gaze looked him up and down, then dismissed him. “I don’t think so.” The door slammed shut in his face. What. The. Fuck. Remy pounded on the door. It immediately opened. The ebony haired vixen, her arms crossed under her bountiful tits, smirked. “Back already. What’s wrong? Did I hurt your feelings?” “Listen woman, I don’t know what crawled up your ass and turned you into an uptight bitch, but I’m here to see Ysabel, so get the fuck out of my way before I put you over my knee and –” “And what? Spank me?” Her eyes actually sparked with challenge, the minx. “I’d like to see you try. But, before you do, just so you know, my name is Ysabel. The witch.” Aaaaah, shit. Never one to admit defeat, he let a slow simmering smile spread across his face. It worked on demonesses, damned souls, human women, and even gay men, but apparently, it had no effect on scowling witches. Too bad. “It’s your lucky day. Lucifer has informed me that you’re my next assignment.” “Not by choice. And what are you supposed to do exactly? I need a tracker, not a gigolo. What happened? Did your gig as a pole dancer not work out? Equipment too small?” She dropped her gaze to his groin and sneered. A sudden, irrational urge possessed him to drop his pants, flip her over and show her there was nothing wrong with the size of his cock. He abstained, but couldn’t prevent himself from taunting her, eyeing her up and down in the same dismissive manner. “Anytime you want to measure my dick, you let me know. Naked.” “Pig.” “No, demon. Really, get your terminology straight, would you? After Lucifer’s warning, I expected someone older and badder.” To his credit he didn’t drop to the ground, but the pain in his balls did require he bend over to cup them gently which in turn meant he got the door in the face. Again. -Ysabel & Remy

A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

She looked thoughtful. “Who knows? Perhaps now is the time to see through the habit. Accidents, illness, healing, they’re all more mysterious than any of us ever imagined. I believe that we have an undiscovered ability to influence what happens to us in the future, including whether we are healthy—although, again, the power has to remain with the individual patient. “There was a reason that I didn’t offer an opinion concerning how badly you were hurt. We in the medical establishment have learned that medical opinions have to be offered very carefully. Over the years the public has developed almost a worship of doctors, and when a physician says something, patients have tended to take these opinions totally to heart. The country doctors of a hundred years ago knew this, and would use this principle to actually paint an overly optimistic picture of any health situation. If the doctor said that the patient would get better, very often the patient would internalize this idea in his or her mind and actually defy all odds to recover. In later years, however, ethical considerations have prevented such distortions, and the establishment has felt that the patient is entitled to a cold scientific assessment of his or her situation. “Unfortunately when this was given, sometimes patients dropped dead right before our eyes, just because they were told their condition was terminal. We know now that we have to be very careful with these assessments, because of the power of our minds. We want to focus this power in a positive direction. The body is capable of miraculous regeneration. Body parts thought of in the past as solid forms are actually energy systems that can transform overnight. Have you read the latest research on prayer? The simple fact that this kind of spiritual visualization is being scientifically proven to work totally undermines our old physical model of healing. We’re having to work out a new model.” She paused and poured more water on the towel around my ankle, then continued, “I believe the first step in the process is to identify the fear with which the medical problem seems to be connected; this opens up the energy block in your body to conscious healing. The next step is to pull in as much energy as possible and focus it at the exact location of the block.” I was about to ask how this was done, but she stopped me. “Go ahead and raise your energy level as much as you can.” Accepting her guidance, I began to observe the beauty around me and to concentrate on a spiritual connection within, evoking a heightened sensation of love. Gradually the colors became more vivid and everything in my awareness increased in presence. I could tell that she was raising her own energy at the same time. When I felt as though my vibration had increased as much as possible, I looked at her. She smiled back at me. “Okay, now you can focus the energy on the block.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “You use the pain. That’s why it’s there, to help you focus.

I brought her food, but it stayed untouched on the plate no matter how I tried to cajole her into eating. When I caught her taking twenty minutes to eat a single almond, I began wondering if there was some kind of Watsonian guide for the care and keeping of Holmeses. When I sent my father an email to that effect (subject line I Need Your Help, postscript Still haven't forgiven you and won't). he responded that, yes, over the years he'd written down an informal series of suggestions in his journal; he'd do his best to adapt and type them up for me. When the list arrived the next day, it was twelve pages long, single-spaced. The suggestions ran from the obvious (8. On the whole, coaxing works rather better than straightforward demands) to the irrelevant (39. Under all circumstances, do not allow Holmes to cook your dinner unless you have a taste for cold unseasoned broth) to the absurd (87. Hide all firearms before throwing Holes a surprise birthday party) to, finally, the useful (1. Search often for opiates and dispose of as needed; retaliation will not come often, though is swift and exacting when it does - do not grow attached to one's mirrors or drinking glasses; 2. During your search, always begin with the hollowed-out heels of Holmes's boots; 102. Have no compunctions about drugging Holmes's tea if he hasn't slept; 41. Be prepared to receive compliments once every two to three years; 74.) (underlined twice) (Whatever happens, remember it is not your fault and likely could not have been prevented, no matter your efforts).

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either. Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still. Nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting. If anything happens it is right: if anything is prevented it was wrong. Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything. Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs. Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.

Finding a small grouping of chairs, the three friends sat together. Lillian’s shoulders slumped as she said glumly, “I think they’ve done it.” “Who’s done what?” Evie asked. “Daisy and Mr. Swift,” Annabelle murmured with a touch of amusement. “We’re speculating that they’ve had, er…carnal knowledge of each other.” Evie looked perplexed. “Why do we think that?” “Well, you were sitting at the other table, dear, so you couldn’t see, but at dinner there were…” Annabelle raised her brows significantly. “…undercurrents.” “Oh.” Evie shrugged. “It’s just as well I wasn’t at your table, then. I’m never any good at reading undercurrents.” “These were obvious undercurrents,” Lillian said darkly. “It couldn’t have been any clearer if Mr. Swift had leapt onto the table and made an announcement.” “Mr. Swift would never be so vulgar,” Evie said decisively. “Even if he is an American.” Lillian’s face scrunched in a ferocious scowl. “Whatever happened to ‘I could never be happy with a soulless industrialist’? What happened to ‘I want the four of us to be together always’? Curse it all, I can’t believe Daisy’s done this! Everything was going so well with Lord Llandrindon. What could have possessed her to sleep with Matthew Swift?” “I doubt there was much sleeping involved,” Annabelle replied, her eyes twinkling. Lillian gave her a slitted glare. “If you have the bad taste to be amused by this, Annabelle—” “Daisy was never interested in Lord Llandrindon,” Evie volunteered hastily, trying to prevent a quarrel. “She was only using him to provoke Mr. Swift.” “How do you know?” the other two asked at the same time. “Well, I-I…” Evie made a helpless gesture with her hands. “Last week I m-more or less inadvertently suggested that she try to make him jealous. And it worked.” Lillian’s throat worked violently before she could manage to speak. “Of all the asinine, sheep-headed, moronic—

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

And spend they did. Money circulated faster and spread wider through its communities of use than at any other time in economic history.8 Workers labored fewer days and at higher wages than before or since; people ate four meals a day; women were taller in Europe than at any time until the 1970s; and the highest percentage on record of business profits went to preventative maintenance on equipment. It was a period of tremendous growth and wealth. Meanwhile, with no way of storing or growing value with this form of money over the long term, people made massive investments in architecture, particularly cathedrals, which they knew would attract pilgrims and tourists for years to come. This was their way of investing in the future, and the pre-Renaissance era of affluence became known as the Age of Cathedrals. The beauty of a flow-based economy is that it favors those who actively create value. The problem is that it disfavors those who are used to reaping passive rewards. Aristocratic landowning families had stayed rich for centuries simply by being rich in the first place. Peasants all worked the land in return for enough of their own harvest on which to subsist. Feudal lords did not participate in the peer-to-peer economy facilitated by local currencies, and by 1100 or so, most or the aristocracy’s wealth and power was receding. They were threatened by the rise of the merchant middle class and the growing bourgeois population, and had little way of participating in all the sideways trade. The wealthy needed a way to make money simply by having money. So, one by one, each of the early monarchies of Europe outlawed the kingdom’s local currencies and replaced them with a single central currency. Instead of growing their money in the fields, people would have to borrow money from the king’s treasury—at interest. If they wanted a medium through which to transact at the local marketplace, it meant becoming indebted to the aristocracy.

What possibilities are there for preventing actions with negative consequences, actions that we may later regret? One possibility is dhyāna, which in this context means “reflection.”3 Reflection can take many forms. For example, when faced with an important decision, you could imagine what would happen if you did the exact opposite of what your instincts suggest.4 Try to make the consequence of your decision as real as possible in your imagination. No matter what it is or what you feel, before you make an important decision and take action you should give yourself the opportunity to consider the matter with an open mind and a certain degree of objectivity. Dhyāna in this respect is a quiet, alert consideration, a meditation. The aim is to free yourself of preconceptions and avoid actions that you may later regret and that may create new troubles (duḥkha) for you. Dhyāna strengthens self-sufficiency. Yoga makes us independent. We all want to be free, although many of us are dependent on psychologists, gurus, teachers, drugs, or whatever. Even if advice and guidance are helpful, in the end we ourselves are the best judge of our own actions. No one is more interested in me than me. With the help of dhyāna we find our own methods and systems for making decisions and better understand our behavior. There are other ways of distancing ourselves from our actions than reflecting on how it would be if we were to act differently from what we intend. We might go to a concert or go for a walk or do something else that calms the thoughts. All the while the mind goes on working unconsciously, without any external pressure. In the pursuit of other activities we gain a certain distance. However short it may be, time becomes available to cast the mind over everything surrounding the decision that has to be made. Perhaps with ease and distance we will make a better decision. Stepping out of a situation in order to get a better look at it from another standpoint is called pratipakṣa. The same word describes the process of considering other possible courses of action.5 The time spent in dhyāna is extremely important. Through self-reflection our actions gain in quality.

And what’s the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of ‘em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have the Fascists, and the rigid American Constitutionalists—who call themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the word ought to mean; and the Monarchists—who are certain that if we could just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would be loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on small business men at 2 per cent. And all the preachers—they tell you that they alone have the inspired Solution. “Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! “There never will be a time when there won’t be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.” Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly the rate decided upon two years before by the National Technocratic Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian the principles of the commissioners. His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue and senility. It seemed to him unidealistically probable, for all the “contemporary furniture” of the 1930’s, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books—no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930, in 1630.

Wormtail was speaking. His voice shook; he seemed frightened beyond his wits. He raised his wand, closed his eyes, and spoke to the night. “Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son!” The surface of the grave at Harry’s feet cracked. Horrified, Harry watched as a fine trickle of dust rose into the air at Wormtail’s command and fell softly into the cauldron. The diamond surface of the water broke and hissed; it sent sparks in all directions and turned a vivid, poisonous-looking blue. And now Wormtail was whimpering. He pulled a long, thin, shining silver dagger from inside his cloak. His voice broke into petrified sobs. “Flesh — of the servant — w-willingly given — you will — revive — your master.” He stretched his right hand out in front of him — the hand with the missing finger. He gripped the dagger very tightly in his left hand and swung it upward. Harry realized what Wormtail was about to do a second before it happened — he closed his eyes as tightly as he could, but he could not block the scream that pierced the night, that went through Harry as though he had been stabbed with the dagger too. He heard something fall to the ground, heard Wormtail’s anguished panting, then a sickening splash, as something was dropped into the cauldron. Harry couldn’t stand to look . . . but the potion had turned a burning red; the light of it shone through Harry’s closed eyelids. . . . Wormtail was gasping and moaning with agony. Not until Harry felt Wormtail’s anguished breath on his face did he realize that Wormtail was right in front of him. “B-blood of the enemy . . . forcibly taken . . . you will . . . resurrect your foe.” Harry could do nothing to prevent it, he was tied too tightly. . . . Squinting down, struggling hopelessly at the ropes binding him, he saw the shining silver dagger shaking in Wormtail’s remaining hand. He felt its point penetrate the crook of his right arm and blood seeping down the sleeve of his torn robes. Wormtail, still panting with pain, fumbled in his pocket for a glass vial and held it to Harry’s cut, so that a dribble of blood fell into it. He staggered back to the cauldron with Harry’s blood. He poured it inside. The liquid within turned, instantly, a blinding white. Wormtail, his job done, dropped to his knees beside the cauldron, then slumped sideways and lay on the ground, cradling the bleeding stump of his arm, gasping and sobbing.

A word of explanation about how the information in this book was obtained, evaluated and used. This book is designed to present, as best my reporting could determine, what really happened. The core of this book comes from the written record—National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, reports, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries and maps. Information in the book was supplied by more than 100 people involved in the Afghanistan War and national security during the first 18 months of President Barack Obama’s administration. Interviews were conducted on “background,” meaning the information could be used but the sources would not be identified by name. Many sources were interviewed five or more times. Most allowed me to record the interviews, which were then transcribed. For several sources, the combined interview transcripts run more than 300 pages. I have attempted to preserve the language of the main characters and sources as much as possible, using their words even when they are not directly quoted, reflecting the flavor of their speech and attitudes. Many key White House aides were interviewed in-depth. They shared meeting notes, important documents, recollections of what happened before, during and after meetings, and assisted extensively with their interpretations. Senior and well-placed military, intelligence and diplomatic officials also provided detailed recollections, read from notes or assisted with documents. Since the reporting was done over 18 months, many interviews were conducted within days or even hours after critical discussions. This often provided a fresher and less-calculated account. Dialogue comes mostly from the written record, but also from participants, usually more than one. Any attribution of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person was obtained directly from that person, from notes or from a colleague whom the person told. Occasionally, a source said mid-conversation that something was “off-the-record,” meaning it could not be used unless the information was obtained elsewhere. In many cases, I was able to get the information elsewhere so that it could be included in this book. Some people think they can lock up and prevent publication of information by declaring it “off-the-record” or that they don’t want to see it in the book. But inside any White House, nearly everyone’s business and attitudes become known to others. And in the course of multiple, extensive interviews with firsthand sources about key decision points in the war, the role of the players became clear. Given the diversity of sources, stakes and the lives involved, there is no way I could write a sterilized or laundered version of this story. I interviewed President Obama on-the-record in the Oval Office for one hour and 15 minutes on Saturday, July 10, 2

Lily understood this feeling too; she knew it all too well, it is just one more thing that just keeps things building up and building up, until the end. I never realized at the time how bad the situation would become until I went through it myself. There is no meaning behind it, which is what gets me. Am I the only one or are there more girls in this hellhole like me, which I do not know about, maybe there is? The bullies harass, it is like they smell their victims or maybe they can smell and taste the blood dripping down from the gash, which they have caused from before, and then it is like you are a wounded animal on Serengeti they come in packs. Until you have nothing- nothing left… they lick up what is left of your body time and time over, afterward you have to get up and go on with the day, knowing that you have a decision to make. What decision would you make? I know what decision I will make! Like most people my age, I do not drink and drug my brain cells away. I am not senseless or slutty, ‘I feel that being romantic is not dead, and it does exist. You just need to be with the right people, which can show you what real expressions of love are!’ So, are you like me by believing that nothing will ever destroy hope or dreams? On the other hand, are you someone like the clan? Are you going to be praised in the eyes of the fire, or the eyes of the clouds? Just like fallen angels, the ones that have fear of not standing up for what is righteous. Why, because it is more fashionable to live a life of turpitude. If someone has the light of hope, someone is going to want to dampen the affection. Just like me- when you are single for too long people start thinking, that you are either committed to yourself or that you are a little bit crazy or gay etcetera. I know this… I am not crazy or gay or whatever is said; I just have someone that blocks me out constantly while destroying my reputation. Just think about it. All of you have grown up with the roomers, your parents believed those parents, I do not have parents to fight for me, and the rest is history. So, what she and her clan said becomes known, and that is what was implied to my image. Is it true? Hell no, start thinking for yourself people. Just because someone says, something about someone else does not mean that it is factual. Oh, I have tried to fix it… However, it is out of my control, little do you all know that the tower is what prevents everything from happening. It is not my choice; she knew that I was going to be the empress; instead, she made me out to be the fool. She knew that I was one of the brightest stars in the land, and she had to bring that to an end, that was the beginning of the end of holding anyone's hands anymore within the land. The friends and romances were in the retrograde I was dubbed unreachable, she made me a forbidden selection. I had no choice but to become the hermit in the dwelling of lost and lonely dreams. To look on the bright side, all this has made me a stronger, better, more creative productive person. You cannot stop me now; I will forever shine, and guide others so that they can shine as well. Remember you are the ones listening to slandering voices. My question is why do you listen? Get to know me, and then make your judgments. Yes, it is hard for me to even get things going because the eyes are always watching, and no I am not being paranoid this is part of my true reality. Sure, the opportunity might come knocking down my door, but can you trust them, is it a setup?

To-day I want those who heard the last paper to consider the question as to whether they can agree that their acquired and unchallenged attitudes receive their secret force from this intractable and violent basis of what orthodox religion calls "unregenerate Man" —that is, Man not yet re-born in himself. I believe, from my own observation, that this is the case. Now when a man observes himself, he observes a lot of things that have their own importance, but he does not observe his attitudes. To speak with exaggeration, I may believe myself God—as so many lunatics do, which shews you how close this idea is to people. Since I believe myself God, I will never think of observing this in myself. Why? Because I take this attitude for granted. To believe oneself God is an attitude. So of course I will never think of observing that. Well, it is just the same with all attitudes. One simply accepts them—or, rather, one simply does not know that one has them, so one does not think of observing them. In fact, one simply cannot observe them and cannot hear anyone who is such a fool as to try to call attention to them. You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.

FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.” —G. K. Chesterton

taking place in the spiritual realm trying to prevent the success of our planning. It is my spirit detecting what is happening in the invisible world and, as a result, I bow down on my knees and seek the Lord for an answer or directive. Sometimes we know the results of an interview before it

done. Why did he stick around? Why would he force that encounter with you on the road, and that night at the diner . . .” He looked at Chris as though willing him to fill in the blanks, but Chris’s implacable eyes gave away nothing. “Wait,” Beck said, “I just remembered something. When Watkins came into the diner, I remember him looking surprised to see us there. But it was only me he was surprised to see, wasn’t it? He said he was there for a business . . . Ah,” he said with sudden enlightenment. “The payoff. He was meeting you there to get his money. “That was the night of Billy’s accident. I’d just come from the hospital. Our unscheduled meeting in the diner prevented you from conducting your transaction with Watkins. No wonder he was so angry that night on the road. He still hadn’t been paid. He was getting antsy. The heat was shifting from you onto him. In desperation, he went to Sayre and got Scott focused on the fratricide angle. That brought things to a head, so you arranged for a meeting with Watkins at the camp this morning.” Chris grinned. “I bet you aced law school, didn’t you? You’re actually very sharp. But, Beck, the only thing I would swear to under oath is that Slap Watkins came crashing through the door of the cabin, waving a knife and telling me he was going to kill his second Hoyle and how giddy he was at the prospect.” “I have no doubt that’s what happened, Chris. He just arrived earlier than you expected. He wanted to get the jump on you because he didn’t trust you. Justifiably. Even Watkins was smart enough to realize that you weren’t about to hand over money and let him walk away from that last meeting. He signed his own death warrant the minute he agreed to kill Danny.” “Please, Beck. Let’s not get sentimental over Slap. A double cross was his plan from the very beginning. Why do you think he left that matchbook in the cabin?” Beck mentally stepped back from himself and considered his options. He could leave now. Simply turn around and walk out. Go to Sayre. Live out the rest of his days loving her, and to hell with Chris and Huff, their treachery and corruption, to hell with their stinking, maiming, life-taking foundry. He was so damn weary of the struggle and the pretense. He longed to throw off this mantle of responsibility, to forget he ever knew the Hoyles and let the devil take them—if he would have them. That was what he wanted to do. Or he could stay and do what he had committed to do. As appealing as the former option was, the latter was preordained. “Slap Watkins didn’t plant the matchbook in the cabin, Chris.” He held Chris’s stare for several seconds, before adding, “I did.” • • • George

I stood before the group. “Whose fault was this?” I asked to the roomful of teammates. After a few moments of silence, the SEAL who had mistakenly engaged the Iraqi solider spoke up: “It was my fault. I should have positively identified my target.” “No,” I responded, “It wasn’t your fault. Whose fault was it?” I asked the group again. “It was my fault,” said the radioman from the sniper element. “I should have passed our position sooner.” “Wrong,” I responded. “It wasn’t your fault. Whose fault was it?” I asked again. “It was my fault,” said another SEAL, who was a combat advisor with the Iraqi Army clearance team. “I should have controlled the Iraqis and made sure they stayed in their sector.” “Negative,” I said. “You are not to blame.” More of my SEALs were ready to explain what they had done wrong and how it had contributed to the failure. But I had heard enough. “You know whose fault this is? You know who gets all the blame for this?” The entire group sat there in silence, including the CO, the CMC, and the investigating officer. No doubt they were wondering whom I would hold responsible. Finally, I took a deep breath and said, “There is only one person to blame for this: me. I am the commander. I am responsible for the entire operation. As the senior man, I am responsible for every action that takes place on the battlefield. There is no one to blame but me. And I will tell you this right now: I will make sure that nothing like this ever happens to us again.” It was a heavy burden to bear. But it was absolutely true. I was the leader. I was in charge and I was responsible. Thus, I had to take ownership of everything that went wrong. Despite the tremendous blow to my reputation and to my ego, it was the right thing to do—the only thing to do. I apologized to the wounded SEAL, explaining that it was my fault he was wounded and that we were all lucky he wasn’t dead. We then proceeded to go through the entire operation, piece by piece, identifying everything that happened and what we could do going forward to prevent it from happening again.

If the wall of an artery gets injured—a common occurrence when arteries are stretched because of stress and high blood pressure, or scratched by toxic and irritating molecules such as nicotine, trans fats, chlorine, additives, and oxidants—your body patches up fissures with cholesterol plaque, a kind of plaster, in an attempt to prevent the artery from further damage and bleeding. The cholesterol plaque also buys time for the cells in the arterial wall to divide and repair the injured area, covering it with new cells under the plaque. Eventually, once the irritating conditions subside, as happens in nature, the cholesterol plaque will be reabsorbed and the artery will look like new again. This is similar to what happens to an injury in your skin under a scab. New cells are growing and covering the area, so when the scab falls, your skin is as intact as it was before the injury.

Individuals, cities, states, nations, and the world have a predictable quality: they do not value health until they lose it. The job of public health is to try and rewrite history before it happens. And that is not easy. Prevention is such a sensible approach that one thinks it should be in great demand.

Are we never to educate ourselves to foresee such dangers and to prevent them before they happen? All the evidence of history shows that laws unknown and unsuspected are being discovered day by day: as this knowledge accumulates for the use of man, is it not certain that the ability to see and destroy beforehand the threat of danger will be one of the privileges the whole world will utilise?

When it comes to conflict, it’s not always about who did what to whom, or how to compromise, or even how to express yourself more effectively. Sometimes, understanding the basic biology of attachment helps you prevent conflict before it even happens.

What do citizens expect of government agencies entrusted with crime control, risk control, or other harm reduction duties? The public does not expect that governments will be able to prevent all crimes or contain all harms. But they do expect government agencies to provide the best protection possible, and at a reasonable price, by being:           Vigilant, so they can spot emerging threats early, pick up on precursors and warning signs, use their imaginations to work out what could happen, use their intelligence systems to discover what others are planning, and do all this before much harm is done.           Nimble, flexible enough to organize themselves quickly and appropriately around each emerging crime pattern rather than being locked into routines and processes designed for traditional issues.           Skillful, masters of the entire intervention tool kit, experienced (as craftsmen) in picking the best tools for each task, and adept at inventing new approaches when existing methods turn out to be irrelevant or insufficient to suppress an emerging threat.8 Real success in crime control—spotting emerging crime problems early and suppressing them before they do much harm—would not produce substantial year-to-year reductions in crime figures, because genuine and substantial reductions are available only when crime problems have first grown out of control. Neither would best practices produce enormous numbers of arrests, coercive interventions, or any other specific activity, because skill demands economy in the use of force and financial resources and rests on artful and well-tailored responses rather than extensive and costly campaigns. Ironically, therefore, the two classes of metrics that still seem to wield the most influence in many departments—crime reduction and enforcement productivity—would utterly fail to reflect the very best performance in crime control. Further, we must take seriously the fact that other important duties of the police will never be captured through crime statistics or in measures of enforcement output. As NYPD Assistant Commissioner Ronald J. Wilhelmy wrote in a November 2013 internal NYPD strategy document:

I wanted to punch someone. But I had to work. That’s why the first part of this workbook deals with emergency situations. You don’t have to sit around thinking about the absolute worst thing that could happen in detail. Just think what your business would need if something truly awful happened. Who would you call? Who could help? That way, if something ever happens, you don’t have to think about planning. You just have to follow the plan. The second part deals with standard business stress: the kind of stuff that is completely preventable. You’re always running late to meetings because you can’t get your kids out the door on time. What could you change (get up earlier, make their lunch the night before, etc.) that would prevent that from happening every single day? If you’re like me, you feel 100% better once you have a plan in place. Once you’ve created your contingency plan, print it out and keep it in a binder. Share it with all the impacted parties (spouse, partners, clients, etc.). And trust me – you can reduce the amount of stress in your life and business. You just have to brainstorm and make the plan! Emergency

Jillian had charged into the bathroom on seven, but she just shot straight to ten. Her nature may be reserved, but she didn’t take shit off anybody. “Don’t patronize me. And don’t you dare come down here and judge us!” She pointed her finger directly at AJ. “We’re the ones doing the heavy lifting, so people like you can come along at the very end and ride along on our coattails. You can act tough all you want, but it’s just an act, AJ. You, with your expensive suits and shiny shoes,” she sneered. “You wouldn’t survive one minute out there on those streets. You’re weak.” Before she realized what was about to happen, AJ seized her by the shoulders and threw her against the wall. Pinning her with her own body, she pressed her index finger over Jillian’s lips. “That’s enough.” Those glittering green eyes warned Jillian not to say another word. The impact had completely knocked the breath out of her. AJ pressed her body tighter into hers, preventing Jillian from taking a replenishing breath, so she breathed short shallow breaths through her nose. Her heart pounded. What was happening? She wasn’t in control of the situation, and oddly enough, for once she didn’t want to be. She had just been manhandled, yet she had no desire to fight back. Instead, she wanted to hook her leg around AJ’s waist and draw her closer to where AJ’s heat seared her core.

What’sa matter? You afraid I’ll get too friendly if I find out you’ve been pleasurin’ Comanches?” Struggling to stay calm, she said, “You’re a smart man. I heard you and your men talking. You were hired to rescue captives, not abuse them. Touch one of us, and it’ll be the mistake of your life. We haven’t been pleasuring anyone. And if we end up pleasuring you, I guarantee you’ll hang for it.” He didn’t bluff easily. Running his fingers under the string of rawhide that encircled her neck, he lifted Hunter’s medallion from under her blouse and studied the carved stone. “Appears to me like you hooked up with a chief, honey.” He smiled and returned the medallion to its former resting place, trailing his fingers under her blouse, his eyes holding hers. Her skin crawled where his grimy knuckles touched. “A Comanche don’t wear a wolf sign unless he’s somebody important. The wolf is sacred to ’em, their brother. No woman would have a medallion like that unless her man marked her with it.” “No filthy Injun has put his hands on me,” Loretta retorted. The words ached in her throat, making her feel disloyal to Hunter. What if he was out there, hiding, listening? “One of the warriors put the medallion on me before he left on a hunting trip. Since it seemed to prevent the others from touching me or my little cousin, I continued to wear it.” He grinned and rocked back on his heels. “Where you from?” “A farm along the Brazos.” “Fort Belknap anyplace close?” “Within a few hours’ ride.” Loretta sat up and glanced over her shoulder, praying Amy was all right. “Is that where you’ll take us?” “I reckon so. Unless somethin’ happens to you along the trail. That’d be a shame, wouldn’t it? But then, dead women, they don’t tell stories.” “Neither do they bring reward money.

Droplets, being on the larger side, typically contain more virus than an aerosol, which makes them a better mechanism for transmission. On the other hand, because they’re relatively heavy, they don’t make it more than a few feet from your mouth or nose before falling to the ground. The surface that a droplet lands on becomes what’s called a fomite, and how long the fomite is able to transmit the virus depends on several factors, including the type of pathogen and whether you sneezed or coughed it out (in which case it’s more protected because it’s covered in your mucus). Studies show that even though the COVID virus may be able to survive for a few hours, or even days, it’s quite rare for people to get sick from touching a contaminated surface. In fact, even if someone does happen to touch a fomite, the chances that the person will get infected are less than 1 in 10,000.

He suddenly paused in his reflection and stood still. “It shall not be? But what are you going to do to prevent it? You’ll forbid it? And what right have you? What can you promise them on your side to give you such a right? Your whole life, your whole future, you will devote to them when you have finished your studies and obtained a post? Yes, we have heard all that before, and that’s all words, but now? Now something must be done, now, do you understand that? And what are you doing now? You are living upon them. They borrow on their hundred roubles pension. They borrow from the Svidrigaïlovs. How are you going to save them from Svidrigaïlovs, from Afanasy Ivanovitch Vahrushin, oh, future millionaire Zeus who would arrange their lives for them? In another ten years? In another ten years, mother will be blind with knitting shawls, maybe with weeping too. She will be worn to a shadow with fasting; and my sister? Imagine for a moment what may have become of your sister in ten years? What may happen to her during those ten years? Can you fancy?” So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions, and finding a kind of enjoyment in it. And yet all these questions were not new ones suddenly confronting him, they were old familiar aches. It was long since they had first begun to grip and rend his heart. Long, long ago his present anguish had its first beginnings; it had waxed and gathered strength, it had matured and concentrated, until it had taken the form of a fearful, frenzied and fantastic question, which tortured his heart and mind, clamoring insistently for an answer.

Besides bonding, sex is also designed by God as the way we procreate and have children. Again, this is a very good part of God’s design; without it our species would cease to exist. However, kids are healthiest, happiest, safest, and most secure when they are raised by both a mother and a father within a committed, stable, God-honoring marriage. Children raised in any type of family other than with their married parents—in other words, single parents, divorced parents, stepparents, or cohabitating couples—are more likely to be poor, more likely to have behavioral or psychological problems, more likely to be abused, and less likely to graduate from high school.11 Children are a natural outcome of sex, at least part of the time. That’s true even if you try to prevent it using birth control, since no form of contraception is 100 percent effective.12 If you have sex outside of marriage, you are running the risk of having a child outside of marriage, which can be hard for you and for the innocent child. It’s important to note that all of these statistically negative outcomes for children are still far preferable to their death, which is why abortion is not the answer to pregnancy outside of marriage (or inside marriage). But many people decide that abortion is the answer when faced with those circumstances, and the tragedy of having tens of millions of children killed before birth is directly related to the modern prevalence of sex outside of marriage. It’s sick that we’ve twisted something as beautiful and wonderful as pregnancy, where new life is created, and turned it into a negative consequence to be avoided (or “terminated” if we can’t avoid it). But that’s what happens when we go against God’s design. There are consequences, for ourselves and for the people we love. “No strings attached”? There are always strings. So many strings. But let me clearly say this: I’ve been very honest about my own poor choices, and I can say from my own experience that God loves you no matter what choices you’ve made. He is not mad at you. He desires a relationship with you. You do not need to be overwhelmed with shame. You need to receive his grace and forgiveness.

An E. coli outbreak at Chipotle Mexican Grill outlets in October 2015 left fifty-five customers ill and shattered the restaurant chain’s reputation. Sales plummeted, and Chipotle’s share price dropped 42 percent to a three-year low, where it languished through the summer of 2017. At the heart of the Denver-based company’s crisis was the ever-present problem faced by companies that depend on multiple outside suppliers to deliver parts and ingredients: a lack of transparency and accountability across complex supply chains. Many Chipotle patrons probably assumed the outbreak stemmed from poor practices at one of the chain’s restaurants or facilities. But, as painful as that would be for the company’s reputation, the reality was actually worse: Chipotle had no way to pinpoint where the dangerous virus got into its food offerings; it only knew that it came from one of its many third-party beef suppliers. Five months later, the best management could come up with was that it “most likely” came from contaminated Australian beef. At the heart of the problem was the lack of visibility that Chipotle—like any food provider—has over the global supply chain of ingredients that flow into its operations. That lack of knowledge meant that Chipotle could neither prevent the contamination before it happened, nor contain it in a targeted way after it was discovered.

The heart is essentially a muscular pump connected to an elaborate network of branching tubes. Although there are several kinds of cardiovascular disease, almost all arise from something going wrong in either the tubes or the pump. Most problems start with the tubes, primarily the arteries that carry blood from the heart to every nook and cranny of the body. Like the pipes in a building, arteries are vulnerable to getting clogged with unwanted deposits. This hardening of the arteries, termed atherosclerosis, starts with the buildup of plaque—a gloppy mixture of fat, cholesterol, and calcium—within the walls of arteries. Plaques, however, don’t simply accumulate in arteries like crud settling in a pipe. Instead, they are dynamic, changing, growing, shifting, and sometimes breaking. They develop when white blood cells in arteries trigger inflammation by reacting to damage usually caused by a combination of high blood pressure and so-called bad cholesterol that irritates the walls of the artery. In an effort to repair the damage, white blood cells produce a foamy mixture that incorporates cholesterol and other stuff and then hardens. As plaque accumulates, arteries stiffen and narrow, sometimes preventing enough blood from flowing to the tissues and organs that need it and further driving up blood pressure. One potentially lethal scenario is when plaques block an artery completely or detach and obstruct a smaller artery elsewhere. When this happens, tissues are starved of blood (also called ischemia) and die. Plaques can also cause the artery wall to dilate, weaken, and bulge (an aneurysm) or to tear apart (a rupture), which can lead to massive bleeding (a hemorrhage). Blocked and ruptured arteries create trouble anywhere in the body, but the most vulnerable locations are the narrow coronary arteries that supply the heart muscle itself. Heart attacks, caused by blocked coronary arteries, may damage the heart’s muscle, leading to less effective pumping of blood or triggering an electrical disturbance that can stop the heart altogether. Other highly vulnerable arteries are in the brain, which cause strokes when blocked by blood clots or when they rupture and bleed. To this list of more susceptible locations we should also add the retinas, kidneys, stomach, and intestines. The most extreme consequence of coronary artery disease is a heart attack, which, if one survives, leaves behind a weakened heart unable to pump blood as effectively as before, leading to heart failure.

The CEO had long been interested in pandemics. He and his wife, Priscilla, had launched the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in 2016, with a mission to “support the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century.” Zuckerberg was particularly interested in immunization, as it involved technology and, above all, scale. To run the Biohub, Zuckerberg hired Joseph DeRisi, a biochemist at the University of California San Francisco, who had invented the technology that first identified severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which happened to be a coronavirus. Just months before the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg had livestreamed a discussion with DeRisi that touched on advances in virology and addressed “the erosion of a sense of truth and trust in experts.

what often prevents people from protesting is not a lack of motivation to protest, but rather their feeling that they lack the legitimacy to do so.

Absence Blindness is a cognitive bias that prevents us from identifying what we can’t observe. Our perceptual faculties evolved to detect objects that are present in the Environment. It’s far more difficult for people to notice or identify what’s missing. Examples of Absence Blindness are everywhere. Here’s a common example: great Management is boring—and often unrewarding. The hallmark of an effective manager is anticipating likely issues and resolving them in advance, before they become a problem. Some of the best managers in the world exhibit a quiet sort of competence: there’s little drama, and everything gets done on time and under budget. The problem is, no one sees all of the bad things that the great manager prevents. Less skilled managers are more likely to be rewarded, since everyone can see them “making things happen” and “moving heaven and earth” to resolve issues—issues they may have created themselves via poor Management.

Sygaldry, simply put, is a set of tools for channeling forces. Like sympathy made solid. For example, if you engraved one brick with the rune ule and another with the rune doch, the two runes would cause the bricks to cling to each other, as if mortared in place. But it’s not as simple as that. What really happens is the two runes tear the bricks apart with the strength of their attraction. To prevent this you have to add the rune aru to each of the bricks. Aru is the rune for clay, and it makes the two pieces of clay cling to each other, solving your problem. Except that aru and doch don’t fit together. They’re the wrong shape. To get them to fit you have to add a few linking runes, gea and teh. Then, for balance, you have to add gea and teh to the other brick, too. Then the bricks cling to each other without breaking. But only if the bricks are made out of clay. Most bricks aren’t. So, generally, it is a better idea to mix iron into the ceramic of the brick before it is fired. Of course, that means you have to use fehr instead of aru. Then you have to switch teh and gea so the ends come together properly. . . . As you can see, mortar is a simpler and more reliable route for holding bricks together.

Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son!” The surface of the grave at Harry’s feet cracked. Horrified, Harry watched as a fine trickle of dust rose into the air at Wormtail’s command and fell softly into the cauldron. The diamond surface of the water broke and hissed; it sent sparks in all directions and turned a vivid, poisonous-looking blue. And now Wormtail was whimpering. He pulled a long, thin, shining silver dagger from inside his cloak. His voice broke into petrified sobs. “Flesh — of the servant — w-willingly given — you will — revive — your master.” He stretched his right hand out in front of him — the hand with the missing finger. He gripped the dagger very tightly in his left hand and swung it upward. Harry realized what Wormtail was about to do a second before it happened — he closed his eyes as tightly as he could, but he could not block the scream that pierced the night, that went through Harry as though he had been stabbed with the dagger too. He heard something fall to the ground, heard Wormtail’s anguished panting, then a sickening splash, as something was dropped into the cauldron. Harry couldn’t stand to look . . . but the potion had turned a burning red; the light of it shone through Harry’s closed eyelids. . . . Wormtail was gasping and moaning with agony. Not until Harry felt Wormtail’s anguished breath on his face did he realize that Wormtail was right in front of him. “B-blood of the enemy . . . forcibly taken . . . you will . . . resurrect your foe.” Harry could do nothing to prevent it, he was tied too tightly. . . . Squinting down, struggling hopelessly at the ropes binding him, he saw the shining silver dagger shaking in Wormtail’s remaining hand. He felt its point penetrate the crook of his right arm and blood seeping down the sleeve of his torn robes. Wormtail, still panting with pain, fumbled in his pocket for a glass vial and held it to Harry’s cut, so that a dribble of blood fell into it.

Can you picture the fly alighting on the plant as the teenager sampling their first shandy? Can you visualize the lager lout just about to throw up as the bloated fly before it tries to take off? And when the alcoholic can no longer close his eyes to the fact that his life is being dominated and ruined by drink, doesn’t he try to cut down and control his intake, rather like someone who is grossly overweight attempts to cut down on food. But does dieting make food appear less precious? Quite the contrary. The more you cut down, the more hungry you get, the hungrier you get the more deprived you feel, the more deprived you feel the more precious each morsel becomes. Exactly the same happens when you try to cut down on your drinking. At the times when you won’t allow yourself to drink, you feel miserable because you can’t drink, and when you do allow yourself to drink, you still feel miserable because you can’t drink enough. Aren’t the struggles of the fly similar to the abortive struggles of the alcoholic who is trying to control his intake? Drinking hasn’t become less precious to him. On the contrary, it now dominates his whole life. The more both the fly and the alcoholic struggle to escape, the more imprisoned they become. Are the semi-digested insects not comparable to the down-and-out meths drinkers of skid row, whose entire existence is now confined to begging or stealing the next fix, and trying to find somewhere warm to sleep off the effects? Does the fact that the fly can see the partially digested bodies prevent it from joining them? Who knows?

[We] have a tendency during meetings to let our minds run wild and cycle through a plethora of thoughts about the past and the future, destroying any aspirations for Zen-like calm and preventing us from being in the here and now: Did I turn off the stove? What will I do for lunch? When do I need to leave here in order to get to where I need to be next? What if you could rely on others in your life to handle these things and you could narrow your attentional filter to that which is right before you, happening right now?...A professional musician friend... describes this state as "happily lost." He doesn't need to look at his calendar more than a day in advance, allowing each day to be filled with wonder and possibility.

Come unto Me.” When you hear those words you will know that something must happen in you before you can come. The Holy Spirit will show you what you have to do, anything at all that will put the axe at the root of the thing which is preventing you from getting through. You will never get further until you are willing to do that one thing. The Holy Spirit will locate the one impregnable thing in you, but He cannot budge it unless you are willing to let Him.

He snapped back to the present, once again utterly distracted by the woman before him. “We should head back. I’ve got things to do.” “Things? Ooh. That sounds utterly decadent. What kind of things are you planning? I’m very partial to nipple play just so you know.” The bag with its leftover treats provided a shield to hide the tenting of his trousers, but nothing could quell the heat in his blood. Why did she do things on purpose to tease him? Why are we not taking her up on her offer? Why wouldn’t his liger go take a fucking nap like other bloody felines? A glower didn’t deter her from linking her arm through his as they left. A tight-lipped countenance didn’t stem her adorable chattering as they walked. A firm leash on his emotions didn’t prevent the spurt of pleasure at her touch. A denial of their involvement didn’t stop his growl of jealousy when some yuppies they passed on the sidewalk swiveled to give her a second look. Were the teeth he bared necessary? Yes. Was the sigh as he entered the lobby and a dozen lionesses went “ooh” avoidable? No. Nor could he avoid the snickers that followed Luna singing, “Bow-chica-wow-wow,” especially since Meena joined in and began the impromptu dance that involved a lot of hip shaking and breast jiggling. Throw her over our shoulder and take her to our room. We must claim her before another does. What happened to his usually staid and laid back inner feline? The right woman happened. But what was right for his wild side wasn’t what the more serious man side wanted. She is chaos. Yes. And wondrous for it. She is physically perfect. And tempting him to take a bite. She’ll never let you have a moment of peace. His life would have purpose. She would love me with the passion and embrace of a hurricane. But could he survive the storm? Or should he try and outrun it? She would catch us. She is strong. A true huntress. Rawr. Possible life-changing inner conversations were best conducted out of sight, especially since it made him less mindful of his surroundings allowing his cousin Luna to sidle alongside and mutter, “I see the look in your eye.” “What look?” “The one that sees something yummy it wants to eat.” Was he truly that obvious? “I’m not hungry. I just had breakfast.” Luna elbowed him as she snickered. “Way to pretend ignorance. I know that you know what I know is happening.” “Say that fast five times.” She did. Luna wasn’t just quick on her feet. “So when are you claiming her?” the nosy woman asked. “Never.” He ignored his feline collapsing in a heap. “Leo. I am shocked at you. Aren’t you the one who advocates honesty?” “Only if it won’t cause irreparable harm. Then even giant white lies are allowed. Anything to hold back the insidious forces of chaos.

What else did her mother tell you?” Ethan asked, looking for any advantage in his task of winning her over. “That she’d call us later and give us pointers on wooing her daughter. Apparently, Naomi has something of a stubborn nature.” A snort escaped him. “I hadn’t noticed.” Javier paced the living room as Ethan stroked Naomi’s silky hair, unable to resist running his fingers through the long brown strands. “What are you thinking?” “That fate is laughing at me.” A chuckle made Ethan’s chest vibrate, causing Naomi’s head to jiggle. He cradled her head in his big palm to prevent her from falling before replying. “She’s certainly not what either of us expected, that’s for sure.” Javier shot him a dark look. “No shit, Sherlock. I mean don’t get me wrong, short and curvy works fine for me, but I always expected, if ever fate was cruel enough to curse me, she’d at least give me a woman who likes me.” “I’m sure she will in time. We took her by surprise, not to mention she’s in pain. Besides, I kind of like that she’s feisty. She’ll need it to keep up with us.” Round eyes and an open mouth met his answer. “You, my friend, are insane. One ball too many to the head I think. I mean, not only does she not want you, shouldn’t you be more pissed that it looks like she’s meant for both of us?” Ethan shrugged. “I’ll admit, I never expected to share, but if fate says that’s my lot, then at least it chose someone I could tolerate. And beat in a wrestling match if I need to. Besides, I’ll only have to share if you bother to stick around to mark her.” “Oh, I’m staying, so you can forget about keeping her for yourself,” Javier replied shooting him a dark look. “What happened to I’m not meant for monogamy?” Ethan pitched his voice mockingly. A sigh emerged from Javier’s mouth before he slumped in the chair across from him. “I haven’t thought that far ahead. It’s hard to think at all with my damned cat yammering for me to bite her. Mayhap if you were to claim her first, the need for me to do so would vanish?” The optimism in his friend’s voice made him laugh again. “Sorry, no such luck I’m afraid. From everything I’ve ever heard, once you find the one, you’re done for. The need to mark her, claim her, just gets stronger and stronger.” Already the urge to take her rode Ethan hard. It didn’t help that he held her cuddled on his lap, her sweet fragrance tickling his nose while her lush body pressed against his turgid cock.

I’ve seen a positive benefit from every negative thing that has happened in my life, including every injury. My career has been filled with injuries, but not derailed by them. Too many people see an injury as something that prevents them from progressing. I’ve used every physical setback to develop in another area I wouldn’t have otherwise addressed. When I broke my right hand, I said, “I’m going to have a badass left hook when this is all said and done.” When I ended up with stitches in my foot days before a fight, I was driven to make sure I ended that fight definitively and fast. Don’t focus on what you can’t do. Focus on what you can.

Rorie, look at me,” he said gently, and lifted my tear-streaked face until he was looking me in the eye. “I can’t let you apologize. I tried to keep you when I knew you weren’t mine.” His voice wavered during the last few words, and his green eyes watered. “I knew during that weekend at the beach. I didn’t know what was going on between the two of you . . . but I knew. I could see it. I was so afraid of what would happen when he moved back that I tried to do everything I could to keep you before that could happen. Tried to do everything I could to keep you from pulling away and going to him. Especially to him. Jentry has girls for a night before he forgets all about them; that’s how he’d always been. I knew he would do the same to you, and I wanted to prevent that and keep you with me.” I watched him in shock as he told me everything, unsure if I was breathing or not as I realized that weeks of heartache and worry could have been avoided. “But that night . . . I’d never expected what you told me. Because even though I didn’t believe him at the time, Jentry had said on the way to the beach that he was hung up on someone he never expected to see again. And it didn’t take a lot to connect what both of you had told me and realize that it had been you all along. And when you told me where you met him—damn it, Rorie, do you realize that I nearly walked in on the two of you that night? I never took you back to the frat house, but I didn’t realize that you’d already been in my room.” I dropped my face into my hands as that night came flooding back when Jentry went to talk to someone at the door, and mortification set in. “And how pissed off I’d already been at the thought of you looking for someone, only to realize that it was my brother. When all of that came pouring from you and settled in, I didn’t know what to do. I was livid and sick and so damn torn up that I didn’t know how to even look at you anymore. But I knew I’d already lost you to him before I’d even met you. I hated him, I hated you, I hated myself . . . and I just had to get away from you. And then . . .” He laughed sadly and shifted on the step. I looked up at him to find him staring at me as if he’d lost everything. “And then I woke up and saw you standing there with him and didn’t understand what was going on or how I’d gotten there. But once things were explained to me, I thought I could try again. I was selfish enough to think I had a second shot at keeping you. So please do not apologize to me.” I

Faced with the Führer, Hácha caved in. He declared that the situation was very clear and that all resistance was madness. But it’s already two a.m., and he has only four hours to prevent the Czech people from defending themselves. According to Hitler, the German military machine is already on the march (true) and nothing can stop it (at least, no one seems very keen to try). Hácha must sign the surrender immediately and inform Prague. The choice Hitler is offering could not be simpler: either peace now, followed by a long collaboration between the two nations, or the total annihilation of Czechoslovakia. President Hácha, terrified, is left in a room with Göring and Ribbentrop. He sits at a table, the document before him. All he has to do now is sign it. The pen is in his hand, but his hand is trembling. The pen keeps stopping before it can touch the paper. In the absence of the Führer, who rarely stays to oversee such formalities, Hácha gets jumpy. “I can’t sign this,” he says. “If I sign the surrender, my people will curse me forever.” This is perfectly true. So Göring and Ribbentrop have to convince Hácha that it’s too late to turn back. This leads to a farcical scene where, according to witnesses, the two Nazi ministers literally chase Hácha around the table, repeatedly putting the pen back in his hand and ordering him to sign the bloody thing. At the same time, Göring yells continuously: if Hácha continues to refuse, half of Prague will be destroyed within two hours by the German air force … and that’s just for starters! Hundreds of bombers are waiting for the order to take off, and they will receive that order at 6:00 a.m. if the surrender is not signed. At this crucial moment, Hácha goes dizzy and faints. Now it’s the two Nazis who are terrified, standing there over his inert body. He absolutely must be revived: if he dies, Hitler will be accused of murdering him in his own office. Thankfully, there is an expert injecter in the house: Dr. Morell, who will later inject Hitler with amphetamines several times a day until his death—a medical regime that probably had some link with the Führer’s growing dementia. So Morell suddenly appears and sticks a syringe into Hácha, who wakes up. A telephone is shoved into his hand. Given the urgency of the situation, the paperwork can wait. Ribbentrop has taken care to install a special direct line to Prague. Gathering what is left of his strength, Hácha informs the Czech cabinet in Prague of what is happening in Berlin, and advises them to surrender. He is given another injection and taken back to see the Führer, who presents him once again with that wretched document. It is nearly four a.m. Hácha signs. “I have sacrificed the state in order to save the nation,” he believes. The imbecile. It’s as if Chamberlain’s stupidity was contagious …

There’s no danger of disease,” he said. “I haven’t been with a woman since before the shooting, and in the hospital every cell in my body was screened. But there is another matter…. Are you taking pills?” She shook her head, but her eyes were clear. “Ah,” he said. “Mel can help with that. There’s something she can give you to prevent a baby.” “What if I didn’t do that?” she asked. “What if I didn’t go to Mel?” That caused him to straighten a bit. “I assume you passed biology 101,” he said. “There’s no telling what would happen.” She shrugged. “Probably nothing.” “If the amount of pleasure we have correlates to conception, there will be a hundred babies by the end of the week.” “If you’d like me to see Mel, I will. This is probably just crazy. I wouldn’t push you, rush you.” “Brie, you can’t rush me. I want to give you everything. If you wanted me to give you a baby, I would die trying, but only if it was our baby. Together. Maybe you should think about it a little longer, until you’re sure.” She

One spring day, I was away on a business trip; Karen was home with the kids. It was a warm afternoon, and she was sitting with our son Matthew at the computer in my office. The kitchen door that leads to the backyard was open. They were reviewing a homework project when they heard what sounded like fingernails scratching on the hardwood floors in the kitchen followed by a thumping gallop from our cat Sox. An instant later, a squirrel raced into the office with the cat at its heels. In a panic, Karen grabbed Matthew and the cat, and ran out of the office slamming the door behind her. Her plan was to leave the squirrel in my office and let me deal with it when I got home in a few days; the homework could wait. However, 30 minutes and two glasses of Merlot later, Karen saw the flaw in her plan. She wasn’t worried so much about sticking me with the task of removing a hungry, pissed-off squirrel from my office as she was the possibility of the squirrel shredding everything in there before I got home. Or worse, she feared the house would permanently smell of dead squirrel. There was a decent chance her scream gave it a heart attack. Luckily, the window in my office was open that afternoon. The only problem, there was a screen in the window. Karen figured if she could remove the screen, the squirrel, if it were still alive, would find its way back to the great outdoors. My office was on the first floor, so she was able to remove the screen easily from the outside. Standing in the backyard at a safe distance, she watched the open window, but no squirrel appeared. Venetian blinds were down covering the window opening. Karen thought, “If I just reach in and pull the cord on the blinds I can raise them enough for the little rodent to see his escape route.” Taking deep breaths while standing on the third rung of our stepladder, Karen thought through exactly what she had to do: raise the blinds with one hand, pull the cord with the other, lock it in place and get the hell out of there. No problem, the squirrel was no doubt cowering in the corner. Not quite. As soon as she raised the blinds, the squirrel – according to Karen who was the only witness – saw daylight and flew through the air, landing on her head. Its toes were caught in Karen’s hair as it made a desperate attempt to free itself. Karen said, “It was running in place on top of my head.” She fell off the ladder and ran screaming through the backyard with the squirrel stuck to her head. (I’m sure it was only a few seconds, but time stands still when there’s a squirrel on your head.) It eventually freed its claws, jumped off her head and ran away. Sue was the first person Karen called after she calmed down enough to speak. They discussed the situation thoroughly and agreed that shampooing several times with Head and Shoulders, rubbing the tiny scratch marks on her scalp with alcohol and drinking the rest of the bottle of Merlot were the proper steps to prevent rabies. I was her second call. Karen gave me a second-by-second recounting of the event, complete with sound effects and a graphic description of how the squirrel’s toes felt as they dug into her scalp. Then she told me the whole thing was my fault because I wasn’t home to protect the family when it happened. Apparently being away earning a living was not an acceptable excuse. She also said she learned a valuable lesson that day. “Not to leave the back door open?” I guessed. No, the lesson was that all squirrels are evil and out to get her. (She also decided that she doesn’t like “any animal related to squirrels,” whatever that means.)