Relying On Nobody Quotes

I was never able to accept anyone else’s support but my own –

I had no doubt that Tiny thought he got depressed, but that was probably because he had nothing to compare it to. Still, what could I say? that I didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? That if he got blue, I got black? That I hated those pills so much because I knew how much I relied on them to live? No, I couldn't say any of this because when it all comes down to it, nobody wants to hear it. No matter how much they like you or love you, they don't want to hear it.

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

love everyone,trust a few and rely on nobody

Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and open every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody's walking, you should walk; when few people are reading profound books, you should read. ... rather than seeking a plusher life you should pursue some hardship. Eat simple food. When everyone's going for quick results, pursue things of lasting value. Don't follow the crowd; go in the opposite direction. If others are fast, be slow. -- Jin Yongquan

In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else--where everybody learns to make his or her own way.

Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America’s ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners’ certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O’Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.

I love the way you feel inside me,” he said. Ryder made a low, rumbling noise of contentment. “I love the way I feel inside you, too.” “I love that you did this for me because you wanted to give me something special.” Luca started rocking back and forth on Ryder’s cock. “I love that you’ve never done it for anyone else.” Ryder’s brow creased. “Luca…” Luca put his hand over Ryder’s mouth, a domineering gesture that silenced Ryder instantly. He didn’t know where the words were coming from, just that they were clawing at his throat, demanding to get out. “I love the way you treat me,” he said. “I love that you’re so much stronger than me but you never make me feel weak. I love that you take care of me without implying that I can’t take care of myself. I love that you let me take control but always call me on my bullshit.” Luca had to pause for a moment; the pleasure of their slow, rhythmic fucking was making it difficult for him to gather his thoughts. Ryder waited, eyes watchful. “I love that you’re always worried about doing the right thing, even when nobody else is.” Certain that Ryder wouldn’t interrupt now, Luca let go of his mouth and braced his hands on Ryder’s chest. He bounced shallowly on Ryder’s cock, soaking up his size, his strength, his steady, reassuring presence. “I love that I can trust you, and I love that I can rely on you, and – and I love you, Ryder, I do, I love you – ” Because he did, of course he did. It was crazy to pretend that he didn’t. He might be damning them both, but he couldn’t hide from this any longer, couldn’t let Ryder go on thinking he wasn’t head-over-heels in love with him.

Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?" Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. "Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined." "But surely there's something more to it than that." "It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once." De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?" The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next. "Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-" "No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling." De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise. "Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'" The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance. He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.

Life is a delicate balance between the idea that we need others for almost everything and the striking reality that nobody owes you anything!

We do have some strong traditions of community in the United States, but it’s interesting to me that our traditionally patriotic imagery in this country celebrates the individual, the solo flier, independence. We celebrate Independence Day; we don’t celebrate We Desperately Rely on Others Day. Oh, I guess that’s Mother’s Day [laughter]. It does strike me that our great American mythology tends to celebrate separate achievement and separateness, when in fact nobody does anything alone.

To make you my puppet I engage on a two-pronged approach. Firstly, I make you utterly dependent on me. I open the doors and let you look upon heaven. That way you are in awe of what I can give you and you want it, oh you really, really want it. Secondly, I will then remove every method of support both real and potential that you might rely on to try and recover your free will (family, friends, colleagues and so on - I will be posting about how I do this through my slur campaign in a separate post) so that you have nobody to turn to. Thus, as you look on heaven entranced and enraptured, I am opening the trapdoor to hell right under your feet.

He sat down in the grass. I pointed at the row of trees that lined the fence to the left of the yard. "You see that tree over there?" In the middle of the row of trees was a oak tree that stood taller than all the rest of the trees. Atlas glanced over at it and dragged his eyes all the way up the top of the tree. "It grew on its own," I said. "Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.

Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.

Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town. Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men? I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer. I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis. To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.

And you two could use someone else around. Aunt Lillian, you’re too hard on Ash, and he’s going to start having the vapors and taking to the fainting couch.” “Oh, thanks,” Ash snapped, and Jared grinned at him. “You can’t be mean to him all the time. I want to be mean to him sometimes. We can switch days. I doubt we can get along,” Jared said. “But we could rely on each other enough to know that we’ll turn on anyone who goes after one of us. And we could have fights and know nobody’s going to run away and live in the tavern.” “You can rest assured, Jared,” Lillian said, very drily, “I do not ever intend to run away and live in the tavern. 

Because nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can’t care while preoccupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong. All this time nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what’s real. And that’s disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind—mere humanity. But

Recognition is a complex neurological process and humans are very, very good at masking the absence of it. People adapt around memory losses. They rely on other things—visual cues, social cues—they get good at reading people, situations; they find ways around things until an answer presents itself.

Imagine this: A world where the quality of your life is not determined by how much money you have. You do not have to sell your labour to survive. Labour is not tied to capitalism, profit or wage. Borders do not exist; we are free to move without consequence. The nuclear family does not exist; children are raised collectively; reproduction takes on new meanings. In this world, the way we carry out dull domestic labour is transformed and nobody is forced to rely on their partner economically to survive. The principles of transformative justice are used to rectify harm. Critical and comprehensive sex education exists for all from an early age. We are liberated from the gender binary’s strangling grip and the demands it places on our bodies. Sex work does not exist because work does not exist. Education and transport are free, from cradle to grave. We are forced to reckon with and rectify histories of imperialism, colonial exploitation, and warfare collectively. We have freedom to, not just freedom from. Specialist mental health services and community care are integral to our societies. There is no “state” as we know it; nobody dies in “suspicious circumstances” at its hands; no person has to navigate sexism, racism, ableism or homophobia to survive. Detention centres do not exist. Prisons do not exist, nor do the police. The military and their weapons are disbanded across nations. Resources are reorganised to adequately address climate catastrophe. No person is without a home or loving community. We love one another, without possession or exploitation or extraction. We all have enough to eat well due to redistribution of wealth and resource. We all have the means and the environment to make art, if we so wish. All cultural gatekeepers are destroyed. Now imagine this vision not as utopian, but as something well within our reach.

what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed — instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live? no, i couldn't say any of this. because, when it ll comes down to it, nobody wants to hear it, no matter how much they like you or love you, they don't want to hear it.

still, what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed — instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live? no, i couldn't say any of this. because, when it all comes down to it, nobody wants to hear it. no matter how much they like you or love you, they don't want to hear it.

One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life. We may certainly aim to live in a society in which nobody should be held back from what they can do because of some personal characteristic allotted to them by chance. If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.

Nobody is a whole team . . . We need each other. You need someone and someone needs you. Isolated islands we’re not. To make this thing called life work, we gotta lean and support. And relate and respond. And give and take. And confess and forgive. And reach out and embrace and rely . . . Since none of us is a whole, independent, self-sufficient, super-capable, all-powerful hotshot, let’s quit acting like we are. Life’s lonely enough without our playing that silly role. The game is over. Let’s link up.

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.

For a detained patriot, breaking through the doubled walls of gray silence, attempting even a symbolic link with the outside world, is an act of resistance And resistance--even at the level of merely asserting one's rights, of maintaining one's ideological beliefs in the face of a programmed onslaught--is in fact the only way political prisoners can maintain their sanity and humanity. Resistance is the only means of trying to prevent a breakdown. The difficulty lies in the fact that in this effort one must rely first and foremost on one's own resources (writing defiance on toilet paper for instance), and nobody can teach one how to do it.

When I was younger and full of Dr. Spock I used to make the common mistake of trying to be “fair” with the children. At the peak of every crisis I would summon the entire brood from the four corners of the television set and ask stern, equivocal questions like “Who threw the calendar in the toilet?” Naturally, nobody did. Now I rely on blind instinct. After assessing the evidence and asking myself a few routine questions like who was in the bathroom last and who is sopping wet, I seize the probable culprit, give him a little whack, and announce flatly, “So, you threw the calendar in the toilet!” This undoubtedly leads to an occasional injustice, but you’d be surprised how it cuts down on the plumbing bills.

We do have some strong traditions of community in the United States, but it’s interesting to me that our traditionally patriotic imagery in this country celebrates the individual, the solo flier, independence. We celebrate Independence Day; we don’t celebrate We Desperately Rely on Others Day. Oh, I guess that’s Mother’s Day [laughter]. It does strike me that our great American mythology tends to celebrate separate achievement and separateness, when in fact nobody does anything alone. Nobody in this auditorium is wearing clothing that you made yourself from sheep that you sheared and wool that you spun. It’s ridiculous to imagine that we don’t depend on others for the most ordinary parts of our existence, let alone the more traumatic parts when we need a surgeon or someone to put out the fire in our home. In everyday ways we are a part of a network. I guess it’s a biological way of seeing the world. And I don’t understand the suggestion that interdependence is a weakness. Animals don’t pretend to be independent from others of their kind—I mean no other animal but us. It seems like something we should get over [laughter].

The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?

So you could say that one alternative to the free market system is the one we already have, because we often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free-market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful. For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement.

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles. Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state—as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two types of bureaucracy, especially if one pays too much attention to the striking psychological similarity of petty officials. But if the French people have made the very serious mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country—even though the consequence has been that nobody rules it. The French atmosphere of government has become one of inefficiency and vexation; but it has not created and aura of pseudomysticism. And it is this pseudomysticism that is the stamp of bureaucracy when it becomes a form of government. Since the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge. Within the framework of such endless interpretive speculation, so characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth. There is a dangerous charm in this aura because of its seemingly inexhaustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is consistently checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence and controllable experience.

According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. Capitalism processes data by directly connecting all producers and consumers to one another, and allowing them to exchange information freely and make decisions independently. For example, how do you determine the price of bread in a free market? Well, every bakery may produce as much bread as it likes, and charge for it as much as it wants. The customers are equally free to buy as much bread as they can afford, or take their business to the competitor. It isn’t illegal to charge $1,000 for a baguette, but nobody is likely to buy it. On a much grander scale, if investors predict increased demand for bread, they will buy shares of biotech firms that genetically engineer more prolific wheat strains. The inflow of capital will enable the firms to speed up their research, thereby providing more wheat faster, and averting bread shortages. Even if one biotech giant adopts a flawed theory and reaches an impasse, its more successful competitors will achieve the hoped-for breakthrough. Free-market capitalism thus distributes the work of analysing data and making decisions between many independent but interconnected processors. As the Austrian economics guru Friedrich Hayek explained, ‘In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.

It is easier to attain Marx's goal, however, if you do not have to rely on everyone being morally magnificent all the time. Socialism is not a society which requires resplendent virtue of its citizens. It does not mean that we have to be wrapped around each other all the time in some great orgy of togetherness. This is because the mechanisms which would allow Marx's goal to be approached would actually be built into social institutions. They would not rely in the first place on the goodwill of the individual.... One would expect any socialist institution to have its fair share of chancers, toadies, bullies, cheats, loafers, scroungers, freeloaders, free riders and occasional psychopaths...Communism would not spell the end of human strife. Only the literal end of history would do that. Envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist. It is just that they could not take the forms they assume under capitalism - not because of some superior human virtue, but because of a change of institutions. These vices would no longer be bound up with the exploitation of child labour, colonial violence, grotesque social inequalities and cutthroat economic competition. Instead, they would have to assume some other form. Tribal societies have their fair share of violence, rivalry and hunger for power, but these things cannot take the form of imperial warfare, free-market competition or mass unemployment, because such institutions do not exist among the Nuer or the Dinka. There are villains everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to be able to steal pension funds or pump the media full of lying political propaganda. Most gangsters are not in a position to do so. Instead, they have to content themselves with hanging people from meat hooks. In a socialist society, nobody would be in a position to do so. This is not because they would be too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or privately owned media. Shakespeare's villains had to find outlets for their wickedness other than firing missiles at Palestinian refugees. You cannot be a bullying industrial magnate if there isn't any industry around.

All of a sudden (in 1938 I think), in order to extend its autarchy to the domain of cinema, Italy decreed an embargo on American films. It wasn’t a question of censorship: as usual the censors granted or denied permission to individual films, and nobody saw the ones that didn’t get it and that was it. In spite of the awkward anti-Hollywood propaganda campaign that accompanied the measure (right around that time the regime began to conform to Hitler’s racism), the true reason for the embargo was supposed to be commercial protectionism, in order to make room in the market for Italian (and German) productions. For this reason the four largest American production and distribution companies—Metro, Fox, Paramount, Warner—(I’m still relying on memory, trusting the accuracy of the registration of my trauma), whereas films by other American companies like RKO, Columbia, Universal, United Artists (which had also been distributed before then by Italian companies) continued to arrive until 1941, that is until Italy found itself at war with the United States. I was still granted some sporadic satisfaction (in fact, one of the greatest: Stagecoach [John Ford, 1939]) but my collector’s voracity suffered a fatal blow. Compared to all of the prohibitions and obligations that fascism had imposed on us, and to the even more severe ones that it continued to enforce in those years before and then during the war, the veto on American films was certainly a minor or small loss, and I wasn’t foolish enough not to know it. Yet it was the first to affect me directly, and I hadn’t known any years other than those of fascism nor had I felt any needs other than those that the environment in which I lived could suggest and satisfy. It was the first time a right I enjoyed had been taken from me: more than a right, a dimension, a world, a space in my mind; and I felt this loss as cruel oppression which embodied all the forms of oppression that I’d heard about or seen other people suffer. If I can still talk about it today like a lost privilege it’s because something disappeared like that from my life, never to return again. So many things had changed after the war was over: I’d changed, cinema had become something else, something different in itself and in relation to me. My biography as a spectator resumed, but it was that of another spectator who wasn’t just a spectator anymore.

When applied to the prefrontal lobes, TMS has been shown to enhance the speed and agility of cognitive processing. The TMS bursts are like a localized jolt of caffeine, but nobody knows for sure how the magnets actually do their work.” These experiments hint, but by no means prove, that silencing a part of the left frontotemporal region could initiate some enhanced skills. These skills are a far cry from savant abilities, and we should also be careful to point out that other groups have looked into these experiments, and the results have been inconclusive. More experimental work must be done, so it is still too early to render a final judgment one way or the other. TMS probes are the easiest and most convenient instrument to use for this purpose, since they can selectively silence various parts of the brain at will without relying on brain damage and traumatic accidents. But it should also be noted that TMS probes are still crude, silencing millions of neurons at a time. Magnetic fields, unlike electrical probes, are not precise but spread out over several centimeters. We know that the left anterior temporal and orbitofrontal cortices are damaged in savants and likely responsible, at least in some part, for their unique abilities, but perhaps the specific area that must be dampened is an even smaller subregion. So each jolt of TMS might inadvertently deactivate some of the areas that need to remain intact in order to produce savantlike skills. In the future, with TMS probes we might be able to narrow down the region of the brain involved with eliciting savant skills. Once this region is identified, the next step would be to use highly accurate electrical probes, like those used in deep brain stimulation, to dampen these areas even more precisely. Then, with the push of a button, it might be possible to use these probes to silence this tiny portion of the brain in order to bring out savantlike skills. FORGETTING TO FORGET AND PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY Although savant skills may be initiated by some sort of injury to the left brain (leading to right brain compensation), this still does not explain precisely how the right brain can perform these miraculous feats of memory. By what neural mechanism does photographic memory emerge? The answer to this question may determine whether we can become savants. Until recently, it was thought that photographic memory was due to the special ability of certain brains to remember. If so, then it might be difficult for the average person to learn these memory skills, since only exceptional brains are capable of them. But in 2012, a new study showed that precisely the opposite may be true. The key to photographic memory may not be the ability of remarkable brains to learn; on the contrary, it may be their inability to forget. If this is true, then perhaps photographic memory is not such a mysterious thing after all.

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

Whenever somebody turned his head, he shouted, "Stop looking behind you!: There was a strict rule against head turns. When reversing, you were supposed to rely on mirrors only; the blind spot didn't exist, at least not in Coach Tang's eyes. Nobody ever wore a seat belt. I never saw a turn signal flash on the parking range at the Public Safety Driving School.

The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you bad to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteenyear- old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea. But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line. It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people -- store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America -- other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.

Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.

Might he have been unhappy, Stevie? Do you think something could have happened to make him want to, you know, do something like that?’ ‘Look everyone gets a bit sad once in a while. Doesn’t make them suicidal.’ ‘Yeah I know, but maybe..’ ‘Meg,’ he said, holding up his hand like a little shield. ‘I need to be able to rely on you to keep the faith. You have to believe that he’s alive. If we stop believing that, then nobody will be rooting for him, and wherever he is right now, he needs someone on his side. Don’t you see? It’s obvious he’s just gone somewhere for a while. I know he’s coming back. Our job is to find out where that somewhere is, and do whatever we need to do to help him come home. This is not the time for any doubt, Meg. It’s really important. In fact, it is the most important thing we’ll ever have to believe in our whole lives.

So, what will make you change? A crisis? A knock on the head? Sorrow? Tears? All that has happened - crisis after crisis. You have shed tears endlessly, and nothing seems to change you because you are relying on somebody else to do the job... Nobody says, "I am going to find out.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl argued that a life purpose is not some mystical fairy tale, but the reality of every single human being on our planet. What is more, having an understanding of your life’s purpose has life-saving potential. He observed this while being detained in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Similar experiences were recounted by the survivors from USS Indianapolis, a United States heavy cruiser that was sunk at the end of the World War II. The need to maintain radio silence meant nobody in naval command knew about the attack until days afterwards. The survivors had several nights in the water before rescue came. They reported that virtually everybody wanted to give up their struggle for life at one point or another. The effort to stay afloat so long was overwhelming. Some did give up and died. But the rest, when tempted to quit the effort, focused on their reasons to keep fighting. They encouraged each other with thoughts of people who depended on them in their civil lives: spouses, parents, siblings, and kids. If someone had no one to live for, others would tell them about those in their future who would surely need them—their future spouses and kids. They had a reason to survive: wanting to be there for others who needed them. Those sailors became committed to fulfill this, and their commitment was enough to keep them alive. A good reason is a magnificent tool. A reason-powered motivation can save your life in more than one way. We’ve seen how a reliance on emotion-filled inspiration derived from others doesn’t ultimately motivate you at all if your core values are not involved. However, that does not mean that emotions won’t help you. Far from it. Just be aware of the limitations of relying on your emotions to power consistent action. Emotions are elusive in their nature, but as long as they last, they can boost your abilities many-fold. Emotions give you the ability to get fired-up to begin something. You’ve probably heard the saying, “Well begun is half done.” Starting is the action that magically produces progress. Consider things you’ve begun in the past. One moment you were doing nothing, so had exactly zero potential to reach your goal. Then you made a decision that you would do this and a surge of enthusiasm moved you forward. You were in motion; you’d started. An infinite ocean of possibilities had opened in front of you. Any decision to start something will have this effect.

If the weather does remain fair, I would like to take Winnie with me into town soon.” Emmie nodded but pulled her feet up under her, making herself look smaller and even a little defensive. “Miss Farnum, nobody will treat her badly in my company.” “They would not dare,” she agreed, but her tone was off. A little flippant or bitter. “But?” He sipped his drink and tried not to focus on the way candlelight glinted off her hair, which was swept back into a soft, disheveled bun at her nape. “Winnie will parade around town with you,” she said, an edge to her voice, “and have a grand time as long as you are at her side. Emboldened by your escort and her happy experiences, she will wander there again on her own, and sooner or later, somebody will treat her like the pariah she is.” “Go on.” He was a bastard, but he hadn’t considered this. “I wonder, when I watch you and Lord Amery cosseting and fussing over Winnie, if I don’t do her a disservice by allowing such attentions. She is desperate for your regard and affection, your time, and yet she cannot grow to depend on it. Still, her instincts are right: She is deserving of just such care, and had her father been a decent man, she would have had at least some of that from him.” “But?” The earl watched the emotions play across the lady’s face and saw there was much she wasn’t saying. “But she cannot grow to rely on such from others,” Emmie said, setting her drink down with a definite clink. “Sooner or later, you will return to London or take a wife, and Winnie will be sent off, to school, to a poor relation, to somewhere. Her future is not that of the legitimate daughter of an earl, and she must learn to rely on herself.” “As you have?” He watched as she rose and started pacing the room. She crossed her arms and hunched her shoulders, her expression troubled. “Of course as I have.” She nodded then startled as thunder rumbled even closer. “Winnie deserves the hugs and cuddles and compliments and guidance you give her, but what she deserves and what life will hand her are two different things. She needs to know not every friendly gentleman who offers her a buss on the cheek can be trusted to respect her.” The

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? Nobody really knows what the world and the job market will look like in 2040, hence nobody knows what to teach young people today. Consequently, it is likely that most of what you currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time you are 40. So what should you focus on? My best advice is to focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence. Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of life you built a stable identity and acquired personal and professional skills; in the second part of life you relied on your identity and skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to society. By 2040, this traditional model will become obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves again and again. The world of 2040 will be a very different world from today, and an extremely hectic world. The pace of change is likely to accelerate even further. So people will need the ability to learn all the time and to reinvent themselves repeatedly—even at age 60.

My particular personality traits seem less worthy of preservation, but they are my own and I love them. I hate them a lot, too, but I can rely on them.

It grew on its own,' I said. 'Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.

Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.

You see that tree over there?' In the middle of the row of trees was an oak tree that stood taller than all the rest of the trees. Atlas glanced over at it and dragged his eye all the way up to the top of the tree. 'It grew on its own,' I said. 'Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.

Russians ought to have attacked en masse, but they didn’t, they broke down into small groups because their morale was so high that individual men could be relied on to attack the French without waiting for orders, and nobody needed to be forced into hardship and danger.

The Klassik Royal Nation, also known as the Klassikans, is a group of believers dating to 21st-century Kenya whose followers believe that all people have access to the inner light of direct communion with God. Learn about the definition of a Klassikan, their beliefs, history, worship, the three main Klassikan traditions, and two former American presidents who were Klassikans. WHAT ARE KLASSIKANS? Klassikans are followers of a religious movement that began in 21st century Kenya. The movement emphasizes equal, inward access to God for all people. Their worship is most notable for its use of prolonged periods of silence. There were approximately 140,000 Klassikans worldwide as of 2021. Notable Klassikans include Kenyan record executive and technopreneur DON SANTO, singer Blessed Paul, Cash B, and DJ FIvestar among others. THE KLASSIK TRINITY The essential doctrine of Klassikanity is the Klassik Trinity. Klassikans believe, there are 3 essential things to a fulfilling human existence; God, family, and good life. Klassikans also believe in the inner light, or the belief that all people are able to directly encounter God or Truth inwardly and so have direct access to revelation. Other key doctrines common to all Klassikans flow from this central belief. Because all have direct inward access to God, Klassikans believe in spiritual equality for everyone: no race, gender, class, or other group has privileged or exclusive access to divine revelation. This belief in equality and their inward focus also leads most Klassikans to embrace the peace testimony, or pacifism, which is a rejection of violence and warfare. Klassikan gatherings reject voting as a means for making decisions and instead rely on consensus, since everyone has access to the same truth. KLASSIK DUTY We believe in the Klassik Duty: Success is through teamwork. Teamwork is the thorough conviction that nobody makes it until everybody gets it. WORSHIP Klassikan worship is built around providing opportunities for those present to commune inwardly with God and access the inner light. Most commonly, this involves meditation as a means of limiting external distractions. Kalpop music is also an important agent for spreading Klassikanity. Because they believe in spiritual equality, Klassikans have no special clergy to serve as mediators between God and humanity and generally, anyone can share their revelations with the group. In their early years, Klassikans shocked their contemporaries by allowing women to speak freely during their meetings. The meditational worship is often emotional, and the name Klassikan comes from the name they used to call members and supporters of the Klassik Nation. ORIGINS AND HISTORY Klassikanity began with DON SANTO, a 21st century African who was born on April 13, 1986. Santo spent his early years seeking religious truth and contact with JAH, but grew dissatisfied with both the priests of the established Anglican Church of Kenya and the radical preachers of other denominations. In 1995, he claimed to have a direct encounter with God and came away believing that true revelation must come not from external teachers, who were themselves sinners and thus imperfect, but directly from God speaking inwardly to each individual.

Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a western one.

It grew on its own,” I said. “Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.

Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.

Miracle Supreme (The Sonnet) Sapiens is shelter, Shelter is sapiens. Only miracle in the world, Is the miracle of kindness. Hateless heart is a living church, External churches are mere counterfeits. Unless you can face hate without hate, Stories of "water to wine" are plain myths. True miracle does not rely on myths, True miracle is the greatest unmiracle. Miracle is an expression of mutation, hence, Mutation of selflessness is the highest miracle. Nobody can walk on water, it is just fairytale. Be human across fairytale 'n lo, you're walking miracle.

You see that tree over there? In the middle of the row of trees was an oak tree that stood taller than all the rest of the trees. Atlas glanced over at it and dragged his eyes all the way up to the top of the tree. It grew on its own, I said. Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.

Motivation that goes up and down is not a fault in the system. It’s part of being human. It is a sensation that comes and goes just like our emotions, so we can’t always rely on it to be there.

There is a term for those who triumph against the odds—for winners nobody saw coming. They are called dark horses. The expression 'dark horse' first entered common parlance after the publication of The Young Duke in 1831. In this British novel, the title character bets on a horse race and loses big after the race is won by an unknown “dark horse, which had never been thought of.” The phrase quickly caught on. “Dark horse” came to denote an unexpected victor who had been overlooked because she did not fit the standard notion of a champion. Ever since the term was coined, society has enjoyed a peculiar relationship with dark horses. By definition, we ignore them until they attain their success, at which point we are entertained and inspired by tales of their unconventional ascent. Even so, we rarely feel there is much to learn from them that we might profitably apply to our own lives, since their achievements often seem to rely upon haphazard spurts of luck. We applaud the tenacity and pluck of a dark horse like Jennie or Alan, but the very improbability of their transformation—from fast-food server to planet-hunting astronomer, from blue-collar barkeep to upscale couturier— makes their journeys seem too exceptional to emulate. Instead, when we seek a dependable formula for success, we turn to the Mozarts, Warren Buffetts, and Tiger Woodses of the world. The ones everybody saw coming.

It’s just hard,” I continue. “Being a mother. It’s not what you expect it to be.” Nobody ever warns you about the spite that comes in the night when you’re operating on two hours of sleep. Nobody ever tells you about how resentful you begin to feel toward a person you created. A person who relies on you for everything. A person who never asked for any of this.

As Rockefeller instructed a recruit, “Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.”25 True to this policy, Rockefeller tried to extricate himself from the intricate web of administrative details and dedicate more of his time to broad policy decisions.

the two men had not been close, Muhammad would never have asked what he did. He’d never have felt he had the right to even broach the idea. So when he requested the hand of abu-Talib’s daughter Fakhita in marriage, he certainly cannot have expected to be refused. Yet he was. This was no tale of young star-crossed lovers, however. Marriage in the sixth century was a far more pragmatic arrangement. We know nothing of Fakhita aside from her name. Muhammad’s proposal was made to the father, not the daughter. In effect, he was asking abu-Talib to publicly acknowledge their closeness by declaring him not just “like a son” but a full member of the family. He would no longer be merely a poor relation who had risen in the world, but a son-in-law. Abu-Talib’s decision had nothing to do with the fact that Muhammad and Fakhita were first cousins. Gregor Mendel and the science of genetics were still eleven hundred years in the future, and marriage between cousins was as common in the sixth century, both in Arabia and elsewhere, as it had been in biblical times. It was considered a means of strengthening the internal bonds of a clan, and indeed would remain so in the marriage patterns of European royalty well into the twentieth century. So there is only one possible reason for abu-Talib’s denial of his nephew’s request: he did not consider this an advantageous marriage for his daughter. No matter how much he trusted and relied on Muhammad, the father was not about to marry his daughter to an orphan with no independent means. He intended for her to marry into the Meccan elite, and quickly made a more suitably aristocratic match for her. If Bahira had indeed foreseen a great future for Muhammad, abu-Talib had clearly not taken him seriously. And if Muhammad had imagined that he had overcome the limitations of his childhood, he was now harshly reminded that they still applied. Abu-Talib’s denial of his request carried a clear message. “This far and no further,” he was saying in effect. “Good but not good enough.” In his uncle’s mind, Muhammad was still “one of us, yet not one of us.” In time, abu-Talib would come to regret this rejection of Muhammad. The two men would eventually overcome the rift it caused between them and become closer than ever. But in a pattern that was to recur throughout Muhammad’s life, rejection would work to his long-term advantage. Abu-Talib’s denial of him as a son-in-law would turn out to be one of those ironic twists that determine history—or, if you wish to see things that way, fate. If Muhammad had married his cousin, nobody today might even know his name. Without the woman he did go on to marry, he might never have found the courage and determination to undertake the major role that waited for him.

If the two men had not been close, Muhammad would never have asked what he did. He’d never have felt he had the right to even broach the idea. So when he requested the hand of abu-Talib’s daughter Fakhita in marriage, he certainly cannot have expected to be refused. Yet he was. This was no tale of young star-crossed lovers, however. Marriage in the sixth century was a far more pragmatic arrangement. We know nothing of Fakhita aside from her name. Muhammad’s proposal was made to the father, not the daughter. In effect, he was asking abu-Talib to publicly acknowledge their closeness by declaring him not just “like a son” but a full member of the family. He would no longer be merely a poor relation who had risen in the world, but a son-in-law. Abu-Talib’s decision had nothing to do with the fact that Muhammad and Fakhita were first cousins. Gregor Mendel and the science of genetics were still eleven hundred years in the future, and marriage between cousins was as common in the sixth century, both in Arabia and elsewhere, as it had been in biblical times. It was considered a means of strengthening the internal bonds of a clan, and indeed would remain so in the marriage patterns of European royalty well into the twentieth century. So there is only one possible reason for abu-Talib’s denial of his nephew’s request: he did not consider this an advantageous marriage for his daughter. No matter how much he trusted and relied on Muhammad, the father was not about to marry his daughter to an orphan with no independent means. He intended for her to marry into the Meccan elite, and quickly made a more suitably aristocratic match for her. If Bahira had indeed foreseen a great future for Muhammad, abu-Talib had clearly not taken him seriously. And if Muhammad had imagined that he had overcome the limitations of his childhood, he was now harshly reminded that they still applied. Abu-Talib’s denial of his request carried a clear message. “This far and no further,” he was saying in effect. “Good but not good enough.” In his uncle’s mind, Muhammad was still “one of us, yet not one of us.” In time, abu-Talib would come to regret this rejection of Muhammad. The two men would eventually overcome the rift it caused between them and become closer than ever. But in a pattern that was to recur throughout Muhammad’s life, rejection would work to his long-term advantage. Abu-Talib’s denial of him as a son-in-law would turn out to be one of those ironic twists that determine history—or, if you wish to see things that way, fate. If Muhammad had married his cousin, nobody today might even know his name. Without the woman he did go on to marry, he might never have found the courage and determination to undertake the major role that waited for him.

In large-scale strategy, the presence of numerous troops is linked with an extra-long sword. Smaller numbers are consistent with the use of a short one. Is it not viable for a small number of troops to take the fight to a larger force? The virtue of strategy is precisely that smaller numbers can triumph [if guided correctly]. From the earliest days, there are many examples of small forces crushing big armies. In our school, this kind of narrow-minded preconception is to be rejected above all else. Research this well. (2) About Schools That Use Swords with Force （一、他流におゐてつよみの太刀と云事） One should not consider a sword [stroke] in terms of being strong or weak. The cut will be coarse if the sword is brandished with too much brute force. Such an uneven technique will make victory difficult. You will not succeed in cutting through human flesh and bone if you think only of striking with brute force. It is also bad to use too much power when testing the cutting power of a blade (tameshi-giri).4 When punishing some mortal foe, nobody thinks of cutting feebly or brutishly. “Cutting to kill” it is not achieved with a mind to do it strongly, and certainly not weakly. It is achieved with just enough power to ensure death. Your own sword could break into pieces by hitting the enemy’s sword with excess strength. Consequently, it is senseless to strike with excessive force. In large-scale strategy, relying on force of numbers to rout the enemy will lead to him countering with equal force. Both sides will be the same. Winning at anything is not achievable if correct principles are ignored. Thus, the underlying principle of my school is to defeat the enemy in any situation by applying strategic wisdom, without incorporating anything that is “excessive.”5 This must be researched attentively. (3) Schools That Use Short Swords （一、他流に短き太刀を用る事） Some warriors try to win using only short swords but this is at variance with the true Way. Since antiquity, swords were called tachi and katana, proving that distinctions have long been made between short and longer lengths.6 Warriors of superior strength can brandish a long sword as if it were light and thus there is no reason for them to prefer a shorter sword. They are, in fact, capable of wielding even longer weapons, such as yari (pikes) and naginata (glaives). With shorter swords, it is ill advised to look for openings as the enemy swings his blade and closing the distance to grab him. Aiming for an opening as the opponent attacks gives the impression of relinquishing the initiative and should be avoided as your swords will become entangled.

There’d been 350 fewer murders in 1994 than in 1993; 650 fewer than in 1990. Even Bratton didn’t take all the credit: “Nobody can be sure exactly what is going on,” he told the Times in an article titled “When Crime Recedes: New York Crime Falls, But Just Why Is a Mystery.” What the NYPD could own was the start of a virtuous cycle. At first, “fear,” wrote Fred Siegel, “declined even more rapidly than crime.” Subway ridership was up, and more New Yorkers spending more time in public space dampened opportunistic crime. The next year, murders fell to a 25-year low, making the panic over young Black superpredators appear less like science and more like White panic, but theories on both sides were being disproved. Three-quarters of New Yorkers below the poverty line were statistically in “extreme poverty,” and by 1998, more than 600,000 people a month relied on emergency meals, more than twice the number as when Giuliani took office, so if hunger made you a criminal, crime should have been shooting up. Nor were the moral measures that a Manhattan Institute type might look for—single-parent homes, for example—getting any better.

So a sucker problem would make us tend to believe that mathematics led to these beautiful objects, with exceptions here and there such as the pyramids, as these preceded the more formal mathematics we had after Euclid and other Greek theorists. Some facts: architects (or what were then called Masters of Works) relied on heuristics, empirical methods, and tools, and almost nobody knew any mathematics—according to the medieval science historian Guy Beaujouan, before the thirteenth century no more than five persons in the whole of Europe knew how to perform a division. No theorem, shmeorem. But builders could figure out the resistance of materials without the equations we have today—buildings that are, for the most part, still standing

THINGS I LEARNED FROM DAVID CARR: A LIST Listen when you enter a room. Don’t buy into your myth. Don’t be the first one to talk, but if you do talk first, say something smart. Speak and then stop; don’t stutter or mumble; be strong in what you have to say. Be defiant. You have to work the phones. Call people. Don’t rely on emails. Ask questions but ask the right questions. Ask people what mistakes they’ve made so you can get their shortcuts. Know when enough is enough. Make eye contact with as many people as possible. Don’t be in shitty relationships because you are tired of being alone. Be grateful for the things you have in this life. You are lucky. Practice patience even though it’s one of the hardest things to master. Failure is a part of the process, maybe the most important part. Alcohol is not a necessary component of life. Street hotdogs are not your friend. Remind yourself that nobody said this would be easy. If more negative things come out of your mouth than positive, then Houston, we have a problem. We contain multitudes. Always love (See band: Nada Surf). Have a dance move and don’t be afraid to rock it. Don’t go home just because you are tired. Don’t take credit for work that is not yours. If your boss does this, take note. Be generous with praise and be specific in that praise: “That line was killer.” Cats are terrible; they poop in your house. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Do the next right thing. Our dogs are us. Only cuter. And finally: You are loved and you belong to me, the world, and yourself. BOOKS I READ WHILE WRITING THIS BOOK The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life—His Own by David Carr The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion The Gilded Razor: A Memoir by Sam

Some scholars argue that the future success of humans as a species relies on returning to cooperative breeding and alloparenting. The way modern societies are structured, though, does not make such a transition easy. One advantage of returning to a more alloparenting lifestyle is it releases the burden of parenting on single individuals. There are many single parents, most commonly single mothers, living with significant stressors and systemic prejudices that make parenting extremely difficult. Alloparenting also enables children to receive warmth and care from other adults, which is particularly important if their own parents are the source of threat or dysfunction. In alloparenting communities, the patients I see today who had nobody to turn to when they were upset a child would have had a grandmother or an uncle to run to so that they could receive some form of external regulation in the form of warmth and care. That's not to say alloparenting resolves everything, but it affords parents the support and connection that so many are desperately wanting, as evidenced by the number of parenting books being sold. The books are meant to fill the gap, but a page can't touch you, or say, 'You're doing great.' Hearing those words from somebody you love is immeasurably more powerful than reading them in a book.

She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.

I am sick and tired of hearing, the universe knows best. If the universe knew best, no child would cry of hunger. If the universe knew best, no young girl would fall victim to human trafficking. If the universe knew best, nobody would have to struggle till death to feed their family. If the universe knew best, not a single person would ever become a refugee. If the universe knew best, not a single human being would have to suffer on the face of earth. Any universe or god that allows for such horrors to teach humanity lessons or whatever, got to be extremely sick. Insects from the sewers deserve more respect than such sick forces. The reason these horrors take place is that, contrary to all cowardly beliefs, there is no higher force concerned with human welfare. If we want these horrors to end, we gotta take the initiative to end them ourselves, without relying on prehistoric fairytales. So, stop all that supernatural nonsense, and take some responsibility for the world you live in. Stop delegating your human duties to a fictitious force and stand civilized wielding your backbone for a change.

So many worthless people relying on French protection are enabled to sin against me with impunity, and nobody now feels that he has any duties toward me; everybody does as he pleases and is actuated by base and selfish motives. I have thus lost more than two-thirds of a fortune that was never very considerable. That is hard, but harder than everything else is my present condition.

I brought him here,” he said, eager to claim credit for whatever had so overjoyed his king. “I caught him making a sacrifice to Lord Hades at your shrine, my lord Theseus, and when I tried to stop him--” Theseus’s laughter crushed Telys’s weak attempt at boasting. “We all know what happened when you tried to stop him, you clown,” he said, wiping his eyes. “The whole palace is talking about how you were bested by a mere boy. Well, the truth is even better.” He was off the throne and across the floor in an instant, scattering everyone who stood between him and me. He bounded behind me, grabbed the waist of my tunic with both hands, and yanked it back, hard. I’d relied on the looseness of my clothing to hide my breasts, small as they were, but now the thin cloth pulled taut against every line of my body. I might as well have been wearing nothing at all. I heard the onlookers gasp. “Why aren’t you smiling, Telys?” Theseus leered as he confronted the horror-struck young guard. “You ought to be glad. You weren’t beaten by a boy after all.

Yesterday I saw my new born baby masseur ( local bai which has no idea what is right or wrong) massaging my new born baby . My instincts was telling me that a harsh massage is not required ( which she was doing by providing all kinds of wrong exercises as per pediatric) but with all elders experience and this being fourth newborn child in my house I decided to observe massage, though I was feeling to ask her to stop immediately but was helpless with all elders present .Soon after the massage I said my wife we need to consult pediatric about this massage (consultation should have been done before starting massage but was helpless in front of elders decision). In consultation pediatric informed us that massage is only for bonding between masseur and baby (so it is better if Mom gives massage). If massage is not provided to babies its completely fine and if done should be done gently. After listening to this I was feeling guilty and so bad as it is my duty to protect my new born baby against any harm and I was not able to do so. My new born was shouting and crying for help while having massage came in front of my eyes and for this I am very angry with myself and my family members excluding my wife as she herself had c-section delivery and was asked by doctor to rest. Mothers as it is don't get enough time even to sleep after delivery for at least a week. Nobody wants to harm baby but before taking any action it was my family's duty to know what is right. Nobody has the right to abuse anyone specifically newborn. From this blog I want to make everyone aware that please don't rely on anyone and take actions always take expert advice (pediatric) in case of babies as there are lot of misconceptions and I request elders that its OK if you don't know what's right but please don't misguide and only when damn sure then only advice. Also confirm that with expert before implementing. I hope that I am able to help some of the newborn by not getting that so called good massage (actually a harsh massage).

Pleased to have realized early on in my life that you can trust nobody. Rely on nobody. When someone tells you something, don’t believe them. When something is given to you as a fact, ask yourself whether it really is a fact. Everybody is out for themselves in this life. Everyone. And that’s how it should be. I should be out for myself.