Recreation Related Quotes

The Beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.

So I devised a way for you to create anew, and Know, Who You Are in your experience. I did this by providing you with: 1. Relativity—a system wherein you could exist as a thing in relationship to something else. 2. Forgetfulness—a process by which you willingly submit to total amnesia, so that you can not know that relativity is merely a trick, and that you are All of It. 3. Consciousness—a state of Being in which you grow until you reach full awareness, then becoming a True and Living God, creating and experiencing your own reality, expanding and exploring that reality, changing and re-creating that reality as you stretch your consciousness to new limits—or shall we say, to no limit.

Be careful! Your inner child will always hope that your parents will finally change and offer what you’ve always longed for. But your job is to keep your adult outlook and continue relating to them as a separate, independent adult. At this point, you’re looking for an adult relationship with them, not a re-creation of parent-child dynamics, right?

Whereas penetration most often means that industry demand will level off, for durable goods, achieving penetration can lead to an abrupt drop in industry demand. After most potential customers have purchased the product, its durability implies that few will buy replacements for a number of years. If industry penetration has been rapid, this situation may translate into several very lean years for industry demand. For example, industry sales of snowmobiles, which underwent very rapid penetration, fell from 425,000 units per year in the peak year (1970-1971) to 125,000 to 200,000 units per year in 1976-1977.6 Recreational vehicles underwent a similar though not quite so dramatic decline. The relation between the growth rate after penetration and growth before penetration will be a function of how fast penetration has been reached and the average time before replacement, and this figure can be calculated.

When we recognize that, just like the glass, our body is already broken, that indeed we are already dead, then life becomes precious, and we open to it just as it is, in the moment it is occurring. When we understand that all our loved ones are already dead — our children, our mates, our friends — how precious they become. How little fear can interpose; how little doubt can estrange us. When you live your life as though you're already dead, life takes on new meaning. Each moment becomes a whole lifetime, a universe unto itself. When we realize we are already dead, our priorities change, our heart opens, and our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretendings. We watch all life in transit, and what matters becomes instantly apparent: the transmission of love; the letting go of obstacles to understanding; the relinquishment of our grasping, of our hiding from ourselves. Seeing the mercilessness of our self-strangulation, we begin to come gently into the light we share with all beings. If we take each teaching, each loss, each gain, each fear, each joy as it arises and experience it fully, life becomes workable. We are no longer a "victim of life." And then every experience, even the loss of our dearest one, becomes another opportunity for awakening. If our only spiritual practice were to live as though we were already dead, relating to all we meet, to all we do, as though it were our final moments in the world, what time would there be for old games or falsehoods or posturing? If we lived our life as though we were already dead, as though our children were already dead, how much time would there be for self-protection and the re-creation of ancient mirages? Only love would be appropriate, only the truth.

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time

Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale. This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything the fulfillment of that prophecy recreated from the Bible in a song by a slave is upon us. God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.

My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli’s Principe are most closely related to myself by the unconditional will not to gull oneself and to see reason in reality–not in “reason,” still less in “morality.” For the wretched embellishment of the Greeks into an ideal, which the “classically educated” youth carries into life as a prize for his classroom drill, there is no more complete cure than Thucydides. One must follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines. With him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression–this inestimable movement amid the moralistic and idealistic swindle set loose on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy: the decadence of the Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive with the older Hellenes. In the end, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things.

This reorienting is not an attempt to avoid or discount clients' pain and ongoing suffering. Rather, it is a means to help them observe, firsthand, how their chronic orienting tendencies toward reminders of the past recreate the trauma-related experience of danger and powerlessness, whereas choosing to orient to a good feeling can result in an experience of safety and mastery. As clients become able to do so the new objects of orientation often become more defined and & Goodman 1951). Rather than attention being drawn repeatedly to physical pain or traumatic activation, the good feeling becomes more prominent in the client's awareness. This exercise of reorienting toward a positive stimulus can surprise and reassure clients that they are not imprisoned indefinitely in an inner world of chronic traumatic reexperiencing, and that they have more possibilities and control than they had imagined. These orienting exercises need to be practiced again and again for mastery.

Darkness seems to have prevailed and has taken the forefront. This country as in the 'cooperation' of The United States of America has never been about the true higher-good of the people. Know and remember this. Cling to your faith. Roll your spiritual sleeves up and get to work. Use your energy wisely. Transmute all anger, panic and fear into light and empowerment. Don't use what fuels them; all lower-energy. Mourn as you need to. Console who you need to—and then go get into the spiritual and energetic arena. There's plenty work for us to do; within and without. Let's each focus on becoming 'The President of Our Own Life. Cultivate your mind. Pursue your purpose. Shine your light. Elevate past—and reject—any culture of low vibrational energy and ratchetness. Don't take fear, defeat or anger—on or in. The system is doing what they've been created to do. Are you? Am I? Are we—collectively? Let's get to work. No more drifting through life without your higher-self in complete control of your mind. Awaken—fully. Activate—now. Put your frustrations or concerns into your work. Don't lose sight. There is still—a higher plan. Let's ride this 4 year energetic-wave like the spiritual gangsters that we are. This will all be the past soon. Let's get to work and stay dedicated, consistent and diligent. Again, this will all be the past soon. We have preparing and work to do. Toxic energy is so not a game. Toxic energy and low vibrations are being collectively acted out on the world stage. Covertly operating through the unconscious weak spots and blind spots in the human psyche; making people oblivious to their own madness, causing and influencing them to act against–their–own–best–interests and higher-good, as if under a spell and unconsciously possessed. This means that they are actually nourishing the lower vibrational energy with their lifestyle, choices, energy and habits, which is unconsciously giving the lower-energy the very power and fuel it needs—for repeating and recreating endless drama, suffering and destruction, in more and more amplified forms on a national and world stage. So what do we do? We take away its autonomy and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves. By recognizing how this energetic/spiritual virus or parasite of the mind—operates through our unawareness is the beginning of the cure. Knowledge is power. Applied knowledge is—freedom. Our shared future will be decided primarily by the changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, starting with each of us— vibrationally. In closing and most importantly, the greatest protection against becoming affected or possessed by this lower-energy is to be in touch with our higher vibrational-self. We have to call our energy and power back. Being in touch with our higher-self and true nature acts as a sacred amulet, shielding and protecting us from the attempted effects. We defeat evil not by fighting against it (in which case, by playing its game, we’ve already lost) but by getting in touch with the part of us that is invulnerable to its effects— our higher vibrational-self. Will this defeat and destroy us? Or will it awaken us more and more? Everything depends upon our recognizing what is being revealed to us and our stepping out of the unconscious influence of low vibrational/negative/toxic/evil/distraction energy (or whatever name you relate to it as) that is and has been seeking power over each of our lives energetically and/or spiritually, and step into our wholeness, our personal power, our higher self and vibrate higher and higher daily. Stay woke my friends—let's get to work.

The questions must be, what were the effects on the people as their lands were stolen and desecrated, relationships destroyed, children taken and violated, lore and ceremonies devalued and dishonoured? What long-term impacts have these separate yet inter-related tragedies had on the survivors? Answers to these questions will provide answers to present distressful circumstances.

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re­create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, busi­ness enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand. Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifi­cally accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it.

Chemically speaking, the two drugs were closely related. In some ways, heroin had always been the benchmark for OxyContin. The tremendous potency of Oxy led to its reputation as “heroin in a pill.” When it first became popular as a recreational high in Appalachia, OxyContin acquired the nickname hillbilly heroin. So, it might have been only logical that when they could no longer count on OxyContin, people who already had an opioid use disorder would make the short segue to heroin itself.

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

The Living Word has various dimensions in relation to power and will to power. The spoken word stands at the very bottom of the involuted scale, being the faint echo of the inaudible Word. All beings, from the Gods to mankind, possess a sound, an essential name, a key note. By discovering what it is, one acquires the power to decompose and recreate it. It is also a mantra of voluntary death and resurrection. In the current parlance: the individual, chromosomic, genetic code has been deciphered. The secret has been penetrated. The name to which we refer corresponds to the supratemporal being and has nothing to do with the intimate, family name, although sometimes a delicate synchronicity is produced within a turn of the wheel, a mysterious lucky occurrence filled with meaning, and this name may also be symbolic. 'You must discover your Beloved's real name if you are to bring her back to life. And yours, too. They are the names of the God and Goddess to whom they will give a face. 'Of the God within you', as the Hindu greeting says: Namaste. 'I greet the God within you'. 'The essential name cannot be chosen, it isn't arbitrary. It is filled with meaning of the root note. It is mantra, an eternal designation. It is inscribed in the Book of the Stars, on the Tree of Life, awaiting its actualisation. The initiate of our order is given his real name when he has successfully undergone the most difficult tests. Then it is inscribed in the genealogical tree of the family, in the immortal circle of the Hyperborean initiation.

Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. But it expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. We are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman.

However marred, the world vessel of clay is not without some of the influence of the Master Molder. God has not left Himself entirely without witness in the global calamity; He discloses Himself in the tragedies as well as the triumphs of history. He works in history as well as above history. There is a universal confrontation of men and women by the divine Spirit, invading all cultures and all individual lives. There is a constructive work of God in history, even where the redemptive Gospel does not do a recreating work. The evangelical missionary message cannot be measured for success by the number of converts only. The Christian message has a salting effect upon the earth. It aims at a re-created society; where it is resisted, it often encourages the displacement of a low ideology by one relatively higher.

There is no communication possible between men any longer, now that the codes have been destroyed, including even the code of exchange in repetition. We are all condemned to silence - unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. That is what composing is. Doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them. Inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language. Playing for one's own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A concept such as this seems natural in the context of music. But it reaches far beyond that; it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure of being instead of having.

It is also a message to Congress and the presidency—slowly the American people may be realizing that after almost four decades of the war on drugs, dependency levels and usage are higher than ever before; that the prices of all major recreational drugs have been declining resolutely over that period; and that the state has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in a criminal justice system that delivers a lot of crime but very little justice. The funds used to sustain bureaucracies such as the DEA that prosecute the war on drugs are a drop in the ocean when compared with the gazillions that organized crime syndicates have earned because Washington is determined to drive the market underground. The social and criminal problems related to drug abuse will never go away until the state can exercise control over the industry as a whole.

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events.

know of nothing that is able, to the same degree as a kiss, to conjure up from what we believed to be something with one definite aspect, the hundred other things it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less valid perspective. In short, just as in Balbec Albertine had often seemed different to me, now—as if, by magically accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective and coloring a person offers us in the course of our various encounters, I had tried to contain them all within the space of a few seconds in order to re-create experimentally the phenomenon that diversifies a person’s individuality and to draw out separately, as from a slipcase, all the possibilities it contains—now what I saw, in the brief trajectory of my lips toward her cheek, was ten Albertines; because this one girl was like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to draw near, gave way to another.

I've defined myself, privately and abstractly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practiced five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn't the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn't the best; I was pretty good. I liked how hard swimming at that level was- that I could do something difficult and unusual. Liked knowing my discipline would be recognized, respected, that I might not be able to say the right things or fit in, but I could do something well. I wanted to believe that I was talented; being fast was proof. Though I loved racing, the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn't motivate me. I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors. I'm drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky. When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races

Choice implies consciousness — a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why Jesus said: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great. Your friend is stuck in a relationship with an abusive partner, and not for the first time. Why? No choice. The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.

I am putting up a signpost, not offering a photograph of what we will find once we get to where the signpost is pointing. I don’t know what musical instruments we shall have to play Bach in God’s new world, though I’m sure Bach’s music will be there. I don’t know how my planting a tree today will relate to the wonderful trees that there will be in God’s recreated world, though I do remember Martin Luther’s words about the proper reaction to knowing the kingdom was coming the next day being to go out and plant a tree. I do not know how the painting an artist paints today in prayer and wisdom will find a place in God’s new world. I don’t know how our work for justice for the poor, for remission of global debts, will reappear in that new world. But I know that God’s new world of justice and joy, of hope for the whole earth, was launched when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, and I know that he calls his followers to live in him and by the power of his Spirit and so to be new-creation people here and now, bringing signs and symbols of the kingdom to birth on earth as in heaven. The resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit mean that we are called to bring real and effective signs of God’s renewed creation to birth even in the midst of the present age.

The sacred site thus created is a space that nurtures the sense of the continuum in which we are immersed. Many indigenous cultures still have this sacred relational sense of the world that is nurtured by ceremonies; and many of a variety of cultures in these times of great change seek such a relational sense – and who may identify as being in “recovery from Western civilization” . I have been engaged for decades now, in re-turning to my indigenous religious heritage of Western Europe, re-creating, and re-inventing a ceremonial practice that celebrates the sacred journey around Sun: it has been an intuitive, organic process synthesizing bits that I have learned from good teachers and scholars, and bits that have just shown up within dreams and imagination, as well as academic research. It has been a shamanic journey: that is, I have relied on my direct lived experience for an understanding of the sacred, as opposed to relying on an external authority, external imposed symbol, story or image. It has not been a pre-scriptive journey: I have scripted it myself, self-scribed it, and in cahoots with the many who participated in the storytelling circles, rituals and classes over decades. The pathway was and is made in the walking. It is part of a new fabric of understanding – created by new texts and contexts, both personal and communal - that have been emerging in recent decades, and continue so, at awesome speed in our times.

329 Leisure and Idleness. - There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work- the characteristic vice of the New World-already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange lack of intellectuality. One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually " afraid of letting opportunities slip." " Better do anything whatever, than nothing "-this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappear. The proof of this is the clumsy perspicuity which is now everywhere demanded in all positions where a person would like to be sincere with his fellows, in intercourse with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, pupils, leaders and princes,-one has no longer either time or energy for ceremonies, for roundabout courtesies, for any esprit in conversation, or for any otium whatever. For life in the hunt for gain continually compels a person to consume his intellect, even to exhaustion, in constant dissimulation, overreaching, or forestalling: the real virtue nowadays is to do something in a shorter time than another person. And so there are only rare hours of sincere intercourse permitted: in them, however, people are tired, and would not only like " to let themselves go," but to stretch their legs out wide in awkward style. The way people write their letters nowadays is quite in keeping with the age; their style and spirit will always be the true " sign of the times." If there be still enjoyment in society and in art, it is enjoyment such as over-worked slaves provide for themselves. Oh, this moderation in "joy" of our cultured and uncultured classes! Oh, this increasing suspiciousness of all enjoyment! Work is winning over more and more the good conscience to its side: the desire for enjoyment already calls itself " need of recreation," and even begins to be ashamed of itself. " One owes it to one's health," people say, when they are caught at a picnic. Indeed, it might soon go so far that one could not yield to the desire for the vita contemplativa (that is to say, excursions with thoughts and friends), without self-contempt and a bad conscience.-Well! Formerly it was the very reverse: it was "action" that suffered from a bad conscience. A man of good family concealed his work when need compelled him to labour. The slave laboured under the weight of the feeling that he did something contemptible :- the "doing" itself was something contemptible. "Only in otium and bellum is there nobility and honour:" so rang the voice of ancient prejudice !

A constant of reality is that anything that cannot be perfectly recreated like the original is called an accident. A string of accidents proportionally related to the one, original accident is called situational chaos. That is the basis of the universe.

Those who were oblivious to, or content with, the situation lived relatively peaceful lives, but those who exercised their democratic right to advocate for change – either from inside or outside the system – were bullied, ignored, discredited, or terrorised, while systemic corruption within the police force and sections of the government (and that government’s perversion of the Westminster doctrine of separation of powers) allowed criminal elements to prosper. The situation in which the public was monitored and restricted while corrupt police sanctioned criminal behaviour was hardly conducive to social or recreational bliss. Activists and alternatives devised their own entertainment, and those with a penchant for illegal casinos and prostitutes were well catered for; but the people of mainstream Brisbane took turns in the Hilton’s glass elevator.

siblings? With my in-laws? With my other relatives? Do I need to forgive any family member? How do I want to relate to my spouse or ex-spouse with respect to the upbringing of our children? What type of family life feels right to me? — My friends and social life: How much time do I want to spend with my friends and acquaintances? What types of friendships do I want to encourage? Do I prefer one or two close friends, or a group of friends? What qualities and characteristics do my friends and I have? What activities would I most enjoy undertaking with them? What changes do I want to make with the people I currently socialize with? Do I need to set or maintain boundaries with any people currently in my life? Do I need to forgive any of my present or past friends? How much time do I want to spend on the telephone with my friends? What are my true beliefs about giving help to my friends? — My hobbies and recreational life: What do I most like to do? What did I like to do for fun when I was a kid? When I was a teenager? What new hobbies or sports do I want to learn? How do I want to spend my weekends and other free time? What equipment, trips, classes, or memberships do I want to purchase? When will I use them? Where? How often? With whom? — My education: What do I want to learn? What

Such then is the nature of quasispecies : the density of the sequence cloud at any point in sequence space is determined by the relative fitness of the sequence; regions of the cloud representing sequences of lesser fitness will be less densely populated and those with higher fitness, most populated. Here lies the most powerful quality of viral quasispecies: the density distribution of fitness variants dictates that sequences are represented at frequencies in relation to their relative fitness. Genomes with lower fitness will replicate poorly, or not at all, and the fittest genomes will replicate most efficiently. It therefore follows that there is a large bias toward the production of well-adapted genotypes: there are more of them, and they undergo most replicative cycles. This can permit viruses to experience evolutionary adaptation at rates that are orders of magnitude higher than those that could be achieved by truly random unbiased mutation. Sequences rapidly condense around the fittest area of the sequence space. Should the environment change, and, therefore, selective pressures change, a quasispecies can opportunistically exploits its inherent adaptive potential. Genotypes rapidly and ever-faster gravitate toward the cloud's new notational center of gravity. Changes in the fitness landscape of the sequence space that is occupied by a quasispecies are the natural consequence of altered selective pressures operating on the virus population. Such alterations may be the consequence of changed immunologic pressures exerted by the host, the application of antiviral drug therapy, or even cross-species transmission requiring the virus to adapt to a new host. Genotypes that once occupied the 'central' space, reserved for the fittest genotypes, are reduced in frequency and now occupy the more sparsely populated fringes of the fitness landscape; the very edge of the sequence cloud if you will. Here too lies an advantage for a quasispecies: it has a memory. The once best-adapted genotypes, now at a fitness disadvantage, can persist in the quasispecies as minor sequence variants. Under circumstances of fluctuating selective pressures, the ability of the population to recall an 'old' genome variant is a great asset. The quasispecies can rapidly respond and adapt by plucking out a preexisting variant and quickly coalescing around it to recreate an optimal fitness landscape.

You said to get involved with people, that I can’t learn about connections in a vacuum.” I agreed. “So what’s not working?” She pulled a long list from her purse. “This,” Linda said, “is a list I put together of all the involvements I’ve had in the past few months. And nothing’s happening.” I read the list, which looked something like this: Dancing lessons: ballroom, disco, and line Sports: sailing, rollerblading, golf, and tennis Music: opera, modern, and piano lessons Art: ceramics and museums Spiritual: Bible study, worship, and missions Career: Ongoing training, night school to earn an MBA “What are you grinning at?” Linda asked me. I wasn’t even aware I was smiling. I told her, “This is a proud moment for me. I’ve never met a real live renaissance woman.” “Now I’m really confused,” Linda said. I explained, “Linda, this is the most well-rounded, comprehensive, and exhausting list I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine how you can even get up in the mornings. But it’s not solving your problem. “These are all great activities, designed to develop you and help you in your life. But each of them is primarily functional, rather than relational. Their goal is competence in some skill, or recreation, or learning more about God’s creation. But relationship isn’t the goal. These are ‘doing’ things, not ‘connecting’ things.” Linda started to get it. “You know, I’ve noticed that I am talking to people at these activities. But all the talk is about tennis or management theories. I’ve wondered when someone in the classroom was going to ask me about my emotional and spiritual life.” “Don’t hold your breath,” I said.

Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. Wendat torture, in the same period of history, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to make clear that no form of physical chastisement should even be countenanced inside a community or household. Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated. Seen in this light, the distinctive features of Wendat prisoner torture come into focus. It seems to us that this connection - or better perhaps, confusion - between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely tor create ourselves by recreating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.

Abortion, acting as the ultimate backstop that renders sex intentionally recreational and sterile rather than relational and fruitful, has poisoned the relationship between men and women.

Far from threatening the neo-liberal order, fixation with identity, whatever its nature, looks like a fall-back position for subjects weary of themselves, for all those who have abandoned the race or been excluded from the outset. Worse, it recreates the logic of competition at the level of relations between 'little communities.' Far from being valuable in itself, independently of any articulation with politics, individual subjectivation is bound up at its very core with collective subjectivation. In this sense, sheer aestheticization of ethics is a pure and simple abandonment of a genuinely ethical attitude. The invention of new forms of existence can only be a collective act, attributable to the multiplication and intensification of cooperative counter-conduct. A collective refusal to 'work more', if only local, is a good example of an attitude that can pave the way for such forms of counter-conduct.

Each and every day, we all are faced with potential risks and must make risk-to-benefit calculations repeatedly. This is a basic fact of life. Our right to make decisions based on the outcome of these calculations is not outlawed by the government, except when it comes to certain recreational drugs. As a scientist, I find this exception particularly frustrating, even hypocritical. The justification for restricting specific drugs is often related to the purported inherent dangers posed by these chemicals. Heroin use, for example, is said to be inherently more dangerous than other legal activities such as gun or car use are. Really? Guns, let’s not forget, are specifically designed to kill. This is not to say that every owner purchases a gun with this goal in mind. As a budding gun hobbyist, I know that’s not true. Still, each year there are about forty thousand gun-related deaths, and more than half are suicides.2 In 2017, heroin-involved deaths reached an all-time peak at just over fifteen thousand, a number well below that of gun deaths.3 (Again, it’s important to note that most of these heroin deaths occurred because the drug was contaminated with a far more potent fentanyl analog or because it was combined with another sedating drug, such as alcohol or sleeping pills.)

St. Maximus himself wrote that “the holy Church of God works the same things and in the same way as God does around us, as an image relates to its archetype. For, from among men, women, and children, nearly boundless in number, who are many in race and class and nation and language and occupation and age and persuasion and trade and manners and customs and pursuits, and again, those who are divided and most different from one another in expertise and worth and fortune and features and habits, those who are in the holy Church and are regenerated by her and are recreated by the Spirit - to all He gives equally and grants freely one divine form and designation, that is to be and to be called from Christ…Therefore, the holy Church is the image of God, as it has been said, because she works the same oneness around the faithful as God does. And even if they are different in their characteristics, and from different places, and have different customs, those who are present are made one according to the same oneness through faith.”[10] Thus we can see that in the view of St. Maximus, the purpose of the Orthodox Church is to graft each Christian into Christ Himself - regardless of the differences between those being grafted in. The Church transcends what is worldly, what is fallen, what is artificial and what ultimately will pass away when the cosmos is transfigured into the eternal Kingdom of God.

High Switching Costs Products that require a significant amount of work to migrate away are said to have high switching costs. High switching costs reduce your churn and create a moat that keeps customers from switching to a competitor simply because that competitor is newer, cheaper, or even builds a better product. Most APIs are difficult to leave because to do so requires expensive developer time to integrate with a new product. Companies like Stripe, Twilio, and SendGrid have a pretty hefty switching cost moat. Tools like Slack are difficult to switch from because of the need to obtain buy-in from every manager in an organization. Also, because of the high number of integrations pushing data, Slack requires effort to recreate. Tools with low switching costs are those in which history is mostly irrelevant, and the time it takes to recreate something you’ve built in the tool is low or nonexistent. For example, a social media scheduling tool is easy to switch from because there is no critical history stored or complex workflows that need to be recreated using a new tool. Likewise, one-click SaaS analytics tools that tie into your Stripe account are relatively easy to switch from because they are “one-click easy” to set up.

And she saw Mr. Nobley clearly. The thin wrinkles just beginning at the corners of his eyes, the whiskers on his chin darkening already after his morning shave, the hint of lines around his mouth that suggested he might smile more in real life. He had the kind of face you wanted to kiss--lips, forehead, cheeks, eyelids, everywhere except his chin. That you wanted to bite. Jane thought: I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers. Miss Erstwhile thought: My, what a catch. How the society page would rant! “I think you should stay away from him, Miss Erstwhile.” Mr. Nobley turned his back on Martin and took her arm, returning her to the path. “I don’t know why you care, sir,” she said, doing her best to sound Austen-y, “but I certainly will, if you’ll do me a favor. Perform in the theatrical.” “Miss Erstwhile…” “Oh, come on! It will please me to no end to see you so uncomfortable. You’re not afraid, are you? You seem so stuck on being proper all the time, but there can’t be anything really wrong in doing a little theatrical. This is, after all, the nineteenth century. So perhaps your protests stem from your fear of appearing the fool?” “You accuse me of vanity. It may be that the enterprise simply does not seem to me amusing. And yet in part you are right. I am not much of an actor.” “Aren’t you?” She looked at him meaningfully. He flinched and recovered. “My true concerns, however, are in regards to the delicate sentiments of our good hostess.” “And if we propose the recreation to her and she approves, will you participate?” “Yes, I suppose I must.” He tightened his lips, in annoyance or against a smile, she wasn’t sure. “You are infuriatingly persistent, Miss Erstwhile.” “And you, Mr. Nobley, are annoyingly stubborn. Together we must be Impertinence and Inflexibility.” “That was clever.” “Was it? Thanks, it just came to me.” “No forethought?” “Not a lick.” “Hm, impressive.” Jane jabbed him with her elbow. When they caught up to the rest of the party, Miss Charming was engaging Colonel Andrews in a discussion on the “relative ickiness of tea” and Captain East and Amelia were either walking in silence or whispering their hearts’ secrets. “We’re going to do the theatrical,” Jane announced to the others. “Mr. Nobley is clay in my hands.

the two forces of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force were, in fact, the same force behaving in two different ways at our everyday low energies. If it is sufficiently hot enough then the electromagnetic force and the weak force would merge into a single force. This was confirmed in the 1980s in CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, when they recreated the temperature of the early universe and demonstrated the existence of the so-called electroweak force.

The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.

Although most of us have affirmed that God is the Creator of all things, it is quite easy to worship him as Creator on Sunday and curse his work during the week. We do this when we are dissatisfied with the way God has made the people we relate to every day. When we fail to worship God as Creator in our relationships, we try to ascend to his throne and do all we can to recreate others in our own image. This always leads to frustration and failure.

Essayist and critic Wendell Berry, in his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1994), takes aim at a premise beneath much of today’s hostility to the Christian ethic—namely, the assumption that sex is private, and what I do in the privacy of my bedroom with another consenting adult is strictly my own business. Thinkers like Berry retort that this claim appears on the surface to be broad minded but is actually very dogmatic. That is, it is based on a set of philosophical assumptions that are not neutral at all but semi-religious and have major political implications. In particular, it is based on a highly individualistic understanding of human nature. Berry writes, “Sex is not, nor can it be any individual’s ‘own business,’ nor is it merely the private concern of any couple. Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business . . .” (p. 119). Communities occur only when individuals voluntarily out of love bind themselves to each other, curtailing their own freedom. In the past, sexual intimacy between a man and a woman was understood as a powerful way for two people to bind themselves to stay together and build a family. Sex, Berry insists, is the ultimate “nurturing discipline.” It is a “relational glue” that creates the deep oneness and therefore stability in the relationship that not only is necessary for children to flourish but is crucial for local communities to thrive. The most obvious social cost to sex outside marriage is the enormous spread of disease and the burden of children without sufficient parental support. The less obvious but much greater cost is the exploding number of developmental and psychological problems among children who do not live in stable family environments for most of their lives. Most subtle of all is the sociological fact that what you do in private shapes your character, and that affects how you relate to others in society. When people use sex for individual recreation and fulfillment, it weakens the entire body politic’s ability to live for others. You learn to commodify people and think of them as a means to satisfy your own passing pleasure. It turns out that sex is not just your business; it’s everybody’s business.

Skating and dancing are the only two forms of recreative exercise within the reach of the gentler sex, the former being infinitely more healthful than the latter, from the fact that the rapid motion through a clear, bracing atmosphere, incident to skating, quickens the circulation and introduces the pure oxygen of nature into the system, instead of the noxious gases of the ballroom, where the atmosphere is redolent of carbonic acid, frivolous tittle tattle, eau de cologne, insipid small talk, cutaneous exhalations, and simpering stupidity. The contrast, too, between the social surroundings of the skating pond and the ballroom is equally in favor of the outdoor recreation. But there is one circumstance which tends to give skating the precedence over any other amusement, and that is the privilege a gentleman enjoys of imparting instruction in the art to his fair companion. To intervene, just in the critical moment, between her departure from the perpendicular and her assumption of the horizontal is to enjoy a combination of duty and pleasure not often within reach, and no relation is more calculated to produce tender attachments than that of pupil and tutor under such circumstances. In fact, the exercise not only brings roses to the cheeks, and imparts buoyancy to the spirits, but weaves nets to catch Cupid, and makes cages to retain him. From The New York Herald, December 24, 1864.

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person’s personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person’s sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author’s own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.

Parents are man’s first educators. In a family, man can learn to live and to manifest the presence of God. If Christ is the bond that holds a family together, then it will have an indestructible solidity. In Africa, an important place is reserved for the elderly; the respect due to old people is one of the cornerstones of African society. I think that Europeans do not realize how shocked the peoples of Africa are by how little attention is paid to the elderly in Western countries. This tendency to hide old age and marginalize it is the sign of a worrisome selfishness, heart-lessness, or, more accurately, hard-heartedness. To be sure, old people have all the comfort and the physical care they need. But they lack the warmth, closeness, and human affection of their relatives and friends, who are too busy with the professional obligations, their recreation, and their vacations. Indeed,

Alejandro de Humboldt National Park Outside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people. One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct. The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles. “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.

[gospel is that the] right and proper judgment of God against our rebellion has not been overturned; it has been exhausted, embraced in full by the eternal Son of God himself. . . . God uses words in the service of his intention to rescue men and women, drawing them into fellowship with him and preparing a new creation as an appropriate venue for the enjoyment of that fellowship. In other words, the knowledge of God that is the goal of God's speaking ought never to be separated from the centerpiece of Christian theology; namely, the salvation of sinners. This is certainly not elementary theologizing, but a grounding of even the very philosophy and understanding of human language in the gospel. The Word of the Lord (as we see in Jonah 1:1) is never abstract theologizing, but is a life-changing message about the severity and mercy of God. Why is this so important? First, in a time in which there is so much ignorance of the basic Christian worldview, we have to get to the core of things, the gospel, every time we speak. Second, the gospel of salvation doesn't really relate to theology like the first steps relate to the rest of the stairway but more like the hub relates through the spokes to the rest of the wheel. The gospel of a glorious, other-oriented triune God giving himself in love to his people in creation and redemption and re-creation is the core of every doctrine--of the Bible, of God, of humanity, of salvation, of ecclesiology, of eschatology. However, third, we must recognize that in a postmodern society where everyone is against abstract speculation, we will be ignored unless we ground all we say in the gospel. Why? The postmodern era has produced in its citizens a hunger for beauty and justice. This is not an abstract culture, but a culture of story and image. The gospel is not less than a set of revealed propositions (God, sin, Christ, faith), but it is more. It is also a narrative (creation, fall, redemption, restoration.) Unfortunately, there are people under the influence of postmodernism who are so obsessed with narrative rather than propositions that they are rejecting inerrancy, are moving toward open theism, and so on. But to some extent they are reacting to abstract theologizing that was not grounded in the gospel and real history. They want to put more emphasis on the actual history of salvation, on the coming of the kingdom, on the importance of community, and on the renewal of the material creation. But we must not pit systematic theology and biblical theology against each other, nor the substitutionary atonement against the kingdom of God. Look again at the above quote from Mark Thompson and you will see a skillful blending of both individual salvation from God's wrath and the creation of a new community and material world. This world is reborn along with us--cleansed, beautified, perfected, and purified of all death, disease, brokenness, injustice, poverty, deformity. It is not just tacked on as a chapter in abstract "eschatology," but is the only appropriate venue for enjoyment of that fellowship with God brought to us by grace through our union with Christ.

Fiction” is defined as any imaginative re-creation of life in prose narrative form. All fiction is a falsehood of sorts because it relates events that never actually happened to people (characters) who never existed, at least not in the manner portrayed in the stories. However, fiction writers aim at creating “legitimate untruths,” since they seek to demonstrate meaningful insights into the human condition. Therefore, fiction is “untrue” in the absolute sense, but true in the universal sense.

3. Develop a personal learning style Having known your personal profile, you can pick the learning style that can give you the most benefits. There are three common types of learning styles; Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. By identifying the learning style that best suit your profile, you will be able to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. Visual Learning – If your dyslexia isn’t anything related to your visual processing or any visual dyslexia, this learning type may just suit you. Visual learners like to see things with the eyes. They likely think in pictures and uses different illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs, videos and mind maps when they study. If you are a visual learner it will be useful to rewrite notes, put information on post-it notes and stick it everywhere, and to re-create images in the mind. Auditory Learning – Auditory learners, on the other hand, think in verbal words rather than in pictures. The best they can do to learn is to tape the information and replay it. It also helps if they discuss the materials that must be learned with others by participating in class discussions, asking questions to their teachers and even trying teaching others. It is also helpful to use audio books and read aloud when trying to memorize information. Kinesthetic Learning – Kinesthetic learners are those who are better to learn with direct exposure to the activity. They are the ‘hands-on’ people and learn best when they actually do something. For them, wiring a circuit board would be much more informative than listening to a lecture about circuits or reading a text book or about it. However, it may also help to underline important terms and meanings and highlight them with bright colors, write notes in the margin when learning from text and repeat information while walking. 4. Don’t force your mind Don’t force your mind to do something beyond your ability. Don’t force yourself to enter a library and finish reading a shelf of books in one day. Be patient on yourself. Take everything slowly and learn step by step. Do not also push yourself if you are not in the mood to read, it will just cause you unnecessary stress. 5.

I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height. As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest—this was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.

A year on, in 2021, 43 international scientists would sign four letters calling for an investigation into a possible laboratory leak. The first group of 25 scientists went public with their letter on March 4, 2021 in response to the WHO’s flawed inquiry, which failed to investigate the Wuhan laboratories. The scientists published a series of letters outlining the steps the WHO needed to take for a rigorous scientific inquiry into the origins of the virus. One of the essential questions they identified that needs examining is this: “Did the WIV or any other laboratory ever attempt to recreate RaTG13 or any other coronaviruses by assembling them from synthetic gene sequences?” They want to obtain the records of laboratories involved in coronavirus research in Wuhan, such as laboratory notebooks, electronic records and details of gain-of-function research, including related sequences and isolates.

As these students re-created the problems they had in the outside world within the group, they revealed how our mental health issues are fueled by kinks in how we relate to others.

Never underestimate the power of your associations. By the phenomenon known as “emotional contagion” as well as through the activation of the mirror neurons in our brains, we model the behavior of the people we spend our days with. Fill your life with exceptionally excellent, enterprising, healthy, positive, ethical and sincerely loving people. And over time, you’ll exemplify these lofty traits. Allow dream stealers, energy thieves and enthusiasm bandits into your Tight Bubble of Total Focus and please know you’re sure to become like them. The real key is to avoid trouble creators. People who have grown up in an environment riddled with drama and non-stop problems will consciously and subconsciously re-create drama and nonstop problems because, as amazing as it seems, such conditions feel familiar, safe and like home to them. Stay away from all drama queens and negativity kings. If you don’t, sooner or later, they’ll dissolve your bigness and destroy your life. It’s just what they do. Relate peacefully, as much as possible, with everyone. Even one enemy is an enemy too many. Pass through life gracefully, taking the high road when conflict shows up. Should someone do you wrong, let karma do the dirty work. And let a world-class life be your revenge.

Armed human beings, officially trained in efficient methods of administering death and violence, should not be dispatched in response to a Black woman experiencing an episode related to a psychiatric disability. She may not only not receive help, but her behavior may well be used as a pretext to kill her. Safety and security require education, housing, jobs, art, music, and recreation.

Many females have a problem not only with stereotypes, but with other people’s opinions of them in general. They trust them too much... This vulnerability afflicts many of the most able, high-achieving females. Why should this be? When they’re little, these girls are often so perfect, and they delight in everyone’s telling them so. They’re so well behaved, they’re so cute, they’re so helpful, and they’re so precocious. Girls learn to trust people’s estimates of them. “Gee, everyone’s so nice to me; if they criticize me, it must be true.” Even females at the top universities in the country say that other people’s opinions are a good way to know their abilities. Boys are constantly being scolded and punished. When we observed in grade school classrooms, we saw that boys got eight times more criticism than girls for their conduct. Boys are also constantly calling each other slobs and morons. The evaluations lose a lot of their power. Even when women reach the pinnacle of success, other people’s attitudes can get them... The fixed mindset, plus stereotyping, plus women’s trust in people’s assessments: I think we can begin to understand why there’s a gender gap in math and science. That gap is painfully evident in the world of high tech. Julie Lynch, a budding techie, was already writing computer code when she was in junior high school. Her father and two brothers worked in technology, and she loved it, too. Then her computer programming teacher criticized her. She had written a computer program and the program ran just fine, but he didn’t like a shortcut she had taken. Her interest evaporated. Instead, she went on to study recreation and public relations. Math and science need to be made more hospitable places for women. And women need all the growth mindset they can get to take their rightful places in these fields.

Hydrolectricity is the largest modern non-fossil source of primary energy; the combination of relatively low cost, high suitability to cover peak demand, and the multi-purpose nature of most large reservoirs (they serve as sources of irrigation and drinking water, a protection against downstream flooding, recreation sites, and, increasingly, places for aquacultural production) should make it one of the most desirable choices in a world moving away from fossil fuels.

You are responsible to get certain things you need for your own personal development and emotional and spiritual health outside the marriage. If you’ve blown off your support system—your female friends, your hobbies, your recreation, your spiritual friendships—hoping your husband could replace all of these while also meeting all your relational needs, then you’re setting up yourself (and your marriage) for disappointment and failure. No husband, by himself, is enough; you still need others, and it’s your responsibility to cultivate those other relationships. Could

We discovered that existential authenticity has traditionally often been conceived as a matter of resisting collective complacency and of assuming responsibility for one’s beliefs, passions, and unique perspective. I would propose that the line of reasoning that Lacan advances regarding unconscious desire represents a specifically psychoanalytic answer to the question of authenticity. In other words, I would like to highlight the similarity between the philosophical conception of authenticity and the Lacanian conviction that actively listening to, and taking responsibility for, the “truth” of one’s desire—even (or particularly) when this “truth” seems alien or uncomfortable—allows one to distance oneself from the dominant dictates of the symbolic Other. Lacan in fact implies that only the subject who has been able to liberate itself from the Other’s desire retains the capacity for satisfaction. The flipside of this “unfettered” subject position is that the subject is less likely to expect the Other to compensate for the catastrophes of its desire. If the subject under the sway of fantasies tends to repeatedly re-create the same relationship—of being punished, suffocated, persecuted, loved, or admired, for instance—to the collective world of the Other, the shattering of fantasies allows it to gain a measure of self-sufficiency in relation to the Other. It grows to be less afraid of the world’s judgments, which suggests that it becomes increasingly capable of independent deliberation and action. As Bruce Fink underscores, one of the aspirations of Lacanian analysis is to facilitate the subject’s departure from ideals and configurations of thought that have been inculcated within its psyche by the various authority figures that surround it from birth; the goal of Lacanian analysis is to allow the subject to think and act without being overly dependent on the views and opinions of others.

Come out of the water, open your eyes and back to the here and now. Recreate the experience of swimming with dolphins using dance and movement. Objectives The aim of Swimming with Dolphins is to get clients to experience a range of feelings and thinking in a way that is relatively safe. Each client will have a different reaction to this visualisation and subsequent activity.

There is no definitive acquisition from which history can rise without losing an inch of the height it has attained: the bourgeoisie which was the revolution became the ancien regime, and, when reflecting on the French Revolution, it identifies itself with the old ruling class. At the same time that there is historical progress, there is, therefore, a consolidation, a destruction, a trampling of history; and at the same time as a permanent revolution, there is a permanent decadence which overtakes the ruling class in proportion as it rules and endures, for by ruling it abdicates what had made it "progressive," loses its rallying power, and is reduced to the protection of private interests. Throughout history, revolutions meet one another and institutions resemble one another; every revolution is the first revolution, and every institution, even a revolutionary institution, is tempted by historical precedents. This does not mean that everything is in vain and that nothing can be done: each time the struggle is different, the minimum of demandable justice rises, and, besides, according to these very principles, conservatism is utopian. But this means that the revolution which would recreate history is infinitely distant, that there is a similarity among ruling classes insofar as they are ruling and among ruled classes insofar as they are ruled, and that, for this reason, historical advances cannot be added like steps in a staircase. The Marxists know this very well when they say that the dictatorship of the proletariat turns the weapons of the bourgeoisie against the bourgeoisie. But then a proletarian philosophy of history holds to the miracle that the dictatorship may use the bourgeoisie's weapons without becoming something like a bourgeoisie; that a class may rule without becoming decadent when in point of fact any class which rules the whole proves to be particular by that very action; that a historical formation, the proletariat, may be established as a ruling class without taking upon itself the liabilities of the historical role; that it may accumulate and keep intact in itself all the energy of all past revolution and unfailingly give life to its institutional apparatus and progressively annul its degeneration. It is to act as if everything that historically exists were not at the same time movement and inertia, it is to place in history, as contents, on the one hand the principle of resistance (called the bourgeoisie) and on the other the principle of movement (called the proletariat), when these are the very structure of history as a passage to generality and to the institution of relationships among persons...To believe in proletarian revolution is to arbitrarily assert that history's sliding back on itself and the resurrection of past ghosts are bad dreams, that history carries within itself its own cure and will surprise us with it...One does not kill for relative progress. The very nature of revolution is to believe itself absolute and to not be absolute precisely because it believes itself to be so.

P. Sainath says, 'What we need to do is not just destroy the caste hierarchy but simultaneously create respect for the work and labour that people do, for what they produce. I have always maintained that untouchability is not just a social evil. It’s more than that. It’s an extremely cruel, vicious but sophisticated form of exploitation by which we keep a large labour force permanently demoralised, humiliated and dependent. So we need to destroy the feudal relations of production completely; we need to accept that if a son or daughter of a potter, weaver or leather worker do not want to be in that field, it’s a perfectly legitimate need of theirs and they cannot under any circumstance be compelled. You need to break down the caste hierarchy and when you bring respect and economic returns for that skill, who knows—many other children in the village might want to do it. Look at the way we’ve destroyed weaving. Several weavers, who for countless years made the famous Kanjeevaram saree, are driving autorickshaws in Kanchi and Chennai, and this is called reskilling. These individuals hold within them cumulatively thousands of years of skill, knowledge and experience. We simply do not respect labour, we don’t give dignity to those who do this beautiful work. However, there are also professions and occupations that you want to see dead. I don’t want to see anybody take up or inherit manual scavenging. It is the greatest assault on human dignity that you can think of in a structured way. And it is perpetrated because we are somehow very comfortable with the idea of using the children of our poor to do the dirty work for us. So there are professions that have to be completely destroyed. And there are professions, occupations and livelihoods that have to be preserved. But not as they were in their old context but recreated in a new one.

Amid all the variability in responses to the choices presented by the Roman presence, we can recognize significant patterns, and they may represent common features in all situations of interaction between expanding complex societies and indigenous groups. Especially striking is initial eager adoption of Roman luxury goods and lifestyle by the urban elites in the conquered territories, while rural areas and others in the society maintained the traditional Iron Age material culture. Over the course of a few generations, rural communities also began to adopt new patterns, but after another few generations, signs of re-creation, or renewal, of old traditions appeared, perhaps as forms of resistance to provincial Roman material culture and society. Over time, new traditions developed, adapting elements of both indigenous and introduced practices and styles to create patterns different from any of the antecedents. In the unconquered regions, the patterns are different but related. The elites embraced many aspects of the imperial lifestyle that they consumed and displayed privately, such as ornate feasting paraphernalia, statuary, personal ornaments, and coins, but they did not adopt the public expressions of their affiliation with the cosmopolitan society - the dwellings, baths, or temples of the Roman provinces. Except near the frontiers, as at the site of Westick, the nonelite members of the societies beyond the frontier did not adopt the new cosmopolitan styles, probably because they had no direct access to the required goods. Beyond the frontier we see no clear resurgence of long-dormant styles, as in the case of the La Tene style in the provinces. When elements of the cosmopolitan lifestyle were integrated with those of local tradition, such as in the emergence of the confederations of the Alamanni and the Franks, that development was driven more exclusively by the elites than was the case in the Roman provinces.

Trendle wanted to show that a political system could be riddled with corruption and that one man could successfully combat this white-collar lawlessness. He was entranced with the sound of a bee and wanted to incorporate that into the show. Osgood relates many experiments that soundmen were put through, trying to re-create the buzzing that Trendle remembered, of a bee trapped in a hotel room where he had once stayed.

Please do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato, and I have never been able to join in the customary scholarly admiration for Plato the artist. The subtlest judges of taste among the ancients themselves are here on my side. Plato, it seems to me, throws all stylistic forms together and is thus a first-rate decadent in style: his responsibility is thus comparable to that of the Cynics, who invented the satura Menippea. To be attracted to the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers — Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic Greek instincts, is so moralistic, so pseudo-Christian (he already takes the concept of "the good" as the highest concept) that I would prefer the harsh phrase "higher swindle" or, if it sounds better, "idealism" for the whole phenomenon of Plato. We have paid dearly for the fact that this Athenian got his schooling from the Egyptians (or from the Jews in Egypt?). In that great calamity called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an "ideal," which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the Cross. And how much Plato there still is in the concept "church," in the construction, system, and practice of the church! My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli's Il Principe are most closely related to me by the unconditional will not to delude oneself, but to see reason in reality — not in "reason," still less in "morality." For that wretched distortion of the Greeks into a cultural ideal, which the "classically educated" youth carries into life as a reward for all his classroom lessons, there is no more complete cure than Thucydides. One must follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines. With him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression — this inestimable movement amid the moralistic and idealistic swindle set loose on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy: the decadence of the Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive with the older Greeks. In the end, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from a man like Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things.

…American men actually engage most in hunting and fishing. The desire of men in wealthy societies to re-create the food-gathering conditions of very primitive people appears to be an appropriate comment on the power of the hunting drives discussed earlier. Not only is hunting expensive in many places – think of the European on safari in Africa – but it is also time-consuming, potentially dangerous, and frequently involves considerable personal discomfort. Men do it because it is ‘fun’. So they say, and so one must conclude from their persistent rendition of the old pattern. What is relevant from our point of view is that hunting, and frequently fishing, are group activities. A man will choose his co-hunters very carefully. Not only does the relative intimacy of the hunt demand some congeniality, but there is also danger in hunting with inept or irresponsible persons. It is a serious matter, and even class barriers which normally operate quite rigidly may be happily breached for the period of the hunt. Some research on hunters in British Columbia suggests the near-piety which accompanies the hunt; hunting is a singular and important activity. One particular group of males takes along bottles of costly Crown Royal whisky for the hunt; they drink only superior whisky on this poignant re-creation of an ancient manly skill. But when their wives join them for New Year's celebrations, they drink an ordinary whisky: the purely formal and social occasion does not, it seems, merit the symbolic tribute of outstanding whisky. Gambling is another behaviour which, like hunting and sport, provides an opportunity in countless cultures for the weaving of and participation in the web of male affiliation. Not the gambling of the London casino, where glamorous women serve drinks, or the complex hope, greed, fate-tempting ritual, and action of the shiny American palaces in Nevada, and not the hidden gambling run by racketeers. Rather, the card games in homes or small clubs, where men gather to play for manageable stakes on a friendly basis; perhaps – like Jiggs and his Maggie – to avoid their women, perhaps to seek some money, perhaps to buy the pleasant passage of time. But also to be with their friends and talk, and define, by the game, the confines of their intimate male society. Obviously females play too, both on their own and in mixed company. But there are differences which warrant investigation, in the same way that the drinking of men in groups appears to differ from heterosexual or all-female drinking; the separation of all-male bars and mixed ones is still maintained in many places despite the powerful cultural pressures against such flagrant sexual apartheid. Even in the Bowery, where disaffiliated outcast males live in ways only now becoming understood, it has been noted that, ‘There are strong indications that the heavy drinkers are more integrated and more sociable than the light. The analytical problem lies in determining whether socialization causes drinking or drinking results in sociability when there is no disapproval.’ In the gentleman's club in London, the informally segregated working man's pub in Yorkshire, the all-male taverns of Montreal, the palm-wine huts of west Africa, perhaps can be observed the enactment of a way of establishing maleness and maintaining bonds which is given an excuse and possibly facilitated by alcohol. Certainly, for what they are worth in revealing the nature of popular conception of the social role of drinking, advertisements stress the manly appeal of alcohol – particularly whisky – though it is also clear that there are ongoing changes in the socio-sexual implications of drinking. But perhaps it is hasty to regard the process of change as a process of female emancipation which will culminate in similarity of behaviour, status, and ideals of males and females. The changes are still too recent to warrant this. Also, they have been achieved under sufficiently self-conscious pressure...

VanDrunen poses the question this way: “If the natural law written on the heart proclaims the works principle, and if in Christ we are no longer under the works principle . . . then are New Testament Christians in fact not under the natural law, though it seems to be constitutive of the very image of God in which we are being re-created?” (313). The reason VanDrunen is compelled to raise this rather provocative question is patent. If the obligations of the moral law, whether in the prelapsarian or the postlapsarian circumstances, necessarily place their recipients under the promises and sanctions of the covenant of works with its works-inheritance principle, then how can believers in the covenant of grace be subject to the law’s demands? Does not the freedom from the law that believers enjoy through Christ include a freedom from the moral law as well? VanDrunen does not shy away from this question, but answers it with the provocative claim that believers are not subject to the moral law as believers, so far as their conduct in relation to fellow believers within the “spiritual” kingdom of Christ is concerned. Though believers, so far as their conduct in the “natural” or “civil” kingdom is concerned, may be subject to the natural law, they are not subject to the natural law as Christians. Due

The tipping model is a special case—a broad class of special cases—of critical-mass phenomena. Its characteristics are usually that people have very different cross-over points; that the behavior involves place of residence or work or recreation or, in general, being someplace rather than doing something; that the critical numbers relate to two or more distinct groups, and each group may be separately tipping out or tipping

In fact, the entire range of human variation for some genetic traits can be found on the African continent.77 A person from the Congo, a person from South Africa, and a person from Ethiopia are more genetically different from each other than from a person from France.78 This seems astonishing because we are so used to focusing on a tiny set of physical features, especially skin color, to assign people to racial categories. It turns out that the genes contributing to these phenotypic differences represent a minute and relatively insignificant fraction of our genotypes and do not reflect the total picture of genetic variation among groups.79 What’s more, these phenotypic differences do not even fall neatly into the categories known as races. Rather, the physical features are “discordant” among groups—they are assorted randomly and do not come assembled in racial packages. “Sub-Saharan Africa is home to both the tallest (Maasai) and the shortest (pygmies) people, and dark skin is found in all equatorial populations, not just in the ‘Black race’ as defined in the United States,” writes Richard S. Cooper, a physician epidemiologist at Loyola University.80 And most genetic variation is found within any human population.81

Perhaps it is unfair to expect such a high degree of scientific precision. But studies that conclude health disparities are caused by genetic difference do not even come close. These studies typically control for the socio-economic status (SES) of the research subjects in an attempt to compare subjects of different races who have the same SES. If there remains a difference in the prevalence or outcome of a disease, the researchers typically attribute the unexplained variation to genetic distinctions between racial groups. But this conclusion suffers from a basic methodological error. The researchers failed to account for many other unmeasured factors, such as the experience of racial discrimination or differences in wealth, not just income, that are related to health outcomes and differ by race. Any one of these unmeasured factors—and not genes—might explain why health outcomes vary by race.

Tell friends what you’re looking for. Be strategic about where you recreate, work, shop, and worship. Get up and take action instead of crossing your fingers and waiting. That’s what God specifically tells us to do in Proverbs 31:10. It’s even what Abraham sent his servant to do on behalf of Isaac. Increase your odds of marrying well by focusing on your own character—spiritually, financially, relationally, and emotionally—so that you become more attractive as a marriage partner.