Sea Status Quotes

Am I more afraid Of taking a chance and learning I'm somebody I don't know, or of risking new territory, only to find I'm the same old me? There is comfort in the tried and true. Breaking ground might uncover a sinkhole, one impossible to climb out of. And setting sail in uncharted waters might mean capsizing into a sea monster's jaws. Easier to turn my back on these things than to try tjem and fail. And yet, a whisper insists I need to know if they are or aren't integral to me. Status quo is a swamp. And stagnation is slow death.

People had been shitting on me for having the wrong name/race/religion and socioeconomic status since as far back as I could remember, but my life had been so easy in comparison to my parents’ own upbringing that they genuinely couldn’t understand why I didn’t wake up singing every morning.

Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.

Males have no status apart from their mothers or an equivalent female.

Just because you have decided that all magical beings need to be tagged in the wild for tracking doesn't give you the right to question me or my legal status.

Romano Guardini, surveying the moral and intellectual ruin that was Europe after the Second World War, wrote that we had entered the era of “mass man,” that the individual was being submerged beneath phenomena of the masses, which did not rise to the status of a true culture. Mass man has no culture, no real home, no transcendent object of devotion, no aim but what is given to him in and through mass education, mass entertainment, and mass politics. He floats on the seas willy-nilly, like a jellyfish, without a mind and a North Star to guide him. He gives in, he goes along. He lives, easily and uneventfully, Life Under Compulsion. Submerged

Equally important was the fact that the interpretation provided the model for how Tianming had hidden his message in the three stories. He employed two basic methods: dual-layer metaphors and two-dimensional metaphors. The dual-layer metaphors in the stories did not directly point to the real meaning, but to something far simpler. The tenor of this first metaphor became the vehicle for a second metaphor, which pointed to the real intelligence. In the current example, the princess’s boat, the He’ershingenmosiken soap, and the Glutton’s Sea formed a metaphor for a paper boat driven by soap. The paper boat, in turn, pointed to curvature propulsion. Previous attempts at decipherment had failed largely due to people’s habitual belief that the stories only involved a single layer of metaphors to hide the real message. The two-dimensional metaphors were a technique used to resolve the ambiguities introduced by literary devices employed in conveying strategic intelligence. After a dual-layer metaphor, a single-layer supporting metaphor was added to confirm the meaning of the dual-layer metaphor. In the current example, the curved snow-wave paper and the ironing required to flatten it served as a metaphor for curved space, confirming the interpretation of the soap-driven boat. If one viewed the stories as a two-dimensional plane, the dual-layer metaphor only provided one coordinate; the supporting single-layer metaphor provided a second coordinate that fixed the interpretation on the plane. Thus, this single-layer metaphor was also called the bearing coordinate. Viewed by itself, the bearing coordinate seemed meaningless, but once combined with the dual-layer metaphor, it resolved the inherent ambiguities in literary language. “A subtle and sophisticated system,” a PIA specialist said admiringly. All the committee members congratulated Cheng Xin and AA. AA, who had always been looked down on, saw her status greatly elevated among the committee members. Cheng

As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.

Well, she’d chosen this. She’d chosen to live by the beach, as if she had as much right as anyone else. She could reward herself for two hours’ work with a walk on the beach. A walk on the beach in the middle of the day. She could go back to Blue Blues, buy a coffee to go and then take an arty photo of it sitting on a fence with the sea in the background and post it on Facebook with a comment: Work break! How lucky am I? People would write, Jealous! If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself. Or she could even post, Mad as hell!! Ziggy the only one in the class not invited to a birthday party!! Grrrrr. And everyone would write comforting things, like, WTF? and Awwww. Poor little Ziggy! She could shrink her fears down into innocuous little status updates that drifted away on the news feeds of her friends.

Alternatively, the name may refer to the prized textile dye, ranging in hue from red to dark purple, which was Phoenicia’s prime luxury product. Extracted from sea mollusks’ dead bodies through a secret process, this uniquely beautiful and expensive purple, exported in woven clothing and furnishings, became an international status symbol in antiquity, its use confined to the very rich, chiefly royalty. Down through the early 20th century A.D., the color purple was associated in Europe with kings and emperors.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

The problem isn’t meetings themselves—it’s how we run them. Think about the brainstorming sessions you’ve attended. You’ve probably seen people bite their tongues due to ego threat (I don’t want to look stupid), noise (we can’t all talk at once), and conformity pressure (let’s all jump on the boss’s bandwagon!). Goodbye diversity of thought, hello groupthink. These challenges are amplified for people who lack power or status: the most junior person in the room, the sole woman of color in a team of bearded white dudes, the introvert drowning in a sea of extraverts.

Maybe” comes with no guarantees, only a chance. But “maybe” has always been the best odds the world has offered to those who set out to alter its course—to find a new land across the sea, to end slavery, to enable women to vote, to walk on the moon, to bring down the Berlin Wall.   “Maybe” is not a cautious word. It is a defiant claim of possibility in the face of a status quo we are unwilling to accept. And as you will see from reading this book, transforming the world is possible because the very complex forces of interconnection that make systems resistant to change are the same ones that can be harnessed to propel change.   “Maybe” is hope incarnate—for all but the complacent and the cynical.

The male imperative to compete for females often comes at a heavy cost. In some mammals, such as kangaroos, mountain sheep, deer and sea elephants, it leads to fights that can result in life-threatening injuries. At a minimum, the loser can expect a drop in status as well as eviction from the most favorable feeding grounds, leading to a shortened life expectancy. Moreover, sexual selection often operates at cross-purposes with other evolutionary forces.[152] A male who develops disproportionately sized organs, or displays brilliant color, or emits certain sounds, may well lose some of his mobility or become more vulnerable to predators. Trying to attract a female, in other words, may cost him his life.

In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love.

Case study: The Zoroastrians Would it really have been so bad if the Muslims had conquered Europe? After all, the Christians would still have been able to practice their religion. They would just have had to put up with a little discrimination, right? Although “a little discrimination” is all that most Islamic apologists will acknowledge about dhimmitude, the long-term effects of the dhimma were much more damaging for non-Muslims. Even centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the Coptic Christians maintained an overwhelming majority there. Yet today the Copts amount to just 10 percent, or less, of the Egyptian population. It’s the same story with every non-Muslim group that has fallen completely under Islamic rule. The Zoroastrians, or Parsis, are followers of the Persian priest and prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra (628–551 B.C.). Before the advent of Islam, Zoroastrianism was for a long period the official religion of Persia (modern-day Iran), and was the dominant religion when the Persian Empire spanned from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River. Zoroastrians were commonly found from Persia to China. But after the Muslim conquest of Persia, Zoroastrians were given dhimmi status and subjected to cruel persecutions, which often included forced conversions. Many fled to India to escape Muslim rule, only to fall prey to the warriors of jihad again when the Muslims started to advance into India. The suffering of the Zoroastrians under Islam was strikingly similar to that of Christians and Jews under Islam farther to the West, and it continued well into modern times (even to this very day under the Iranian mullahocracy).

Power, then, which can have no morality in itself, is yet dependent on human energy, on the wills and desires of human beings. When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt. When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities-- and seas of blood. The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything. They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know that the future belongs to them. They realize this-- paradoxically-- by the failure of the moral energy of their oppressors and begin, almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, to create the principles on which a new world will be built.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

By the time Sami entered high school Mustafa had grudgingly accepted that the boy needed to know something of the patriarchs. For the sake of Sami’s secular education he gulped back his discomfort. These Semitic myths, after all, were essential to the literary traditions Sami would study. So Mustafa delivered his interpretation of religious pre-history. He explained that, as with Oedipus or Achilles, there was psychopathic drama in the lives of the heroes, a drama in its essence no different from that of today’s Speakers’ Corner soapbox types, or of the schizophrenics following mysterious itineraries through the city’s streets. The scriptural heroes heard the same internal mumblings and insinuations, but as they belonged to an epic age, with epic genres, these were granted mythic status. It was pre-psychological, pre-ironic. There was high seriousness everywhere, blowing out of the desert and rolling up from the sea. There was prophetic articulation of destiny. There was the terror of God’s voice.

Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains? The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken. Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform. This limited degree of concern is a reflection of an inner conflict which measures cautiously the impact of any change on the status quo. As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.

*Africans, Embrace One Another* -------------------------- My fellow African, when you look at another African, what do you see? Do you not see the reflection of yourself? Do you not see someone who was once a victim of the dark past? Someone who has now emerged as a survivor at last; just as your forefathers did before the shadows enslaved your kins! Do you not see the same colour of your skin? Do you not see the same texture of your hair? Yes, you see yourself, it's clear. Now, since you're looking at your reflection, don't you wish to cover yourself with affection? Beloved Africans, you were once the victims of confusion in the past. But you shouldn't remain in that disillusioned class. Today you're free and enriched with resources to maintain yourselves. Let the victim mentality go as a start. Like the three wise men, embrace your survivor status. Be wise and be resourceful. Africans, you have the permission to celebrate your roots, your heritage, and the teachings of your books. Go on and heal your bodies with your traditional herbs. And teach your children the secrets of your ancestors. Tell your children that your ancestors were self-sufficient. Efficient, your ancestors lived well — with little to nothing. Yet, they were the happiest. The merriest. Embrace the secrets of your traditions, just like the seas. You're safe and free.

CHALLENGES TO YOUNG POETS Invent a new language anyone can understand. Climb the Statue of Liberty. Reach for the unattainable. Kiss the mirror and write what you see and hear. Dance with wolves and count the stars, including the unseen. Be naïve, innocent, non-cynical, as if you had just landed on earth (as indeed you have, as indeed we all have), astonished by what you have fallen upon. Write living newspaper. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance level for hot air. Write and endless poem about your life on earth or elsewhere. Read between the lines of human discourse. Avoid the provincial, go for the universal. Think subjectively, write objectively. Think long thoughts in short sentences. Don't attend poetry workshops, but if you do, don't go the learn "how to" but to learn "what" (What's important to write about). Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces. Resist much, obey less. Secretly liberate any being you see in a cage. Write short poems in the voice of birds. Make your lyrics truly lyrical. Birdsong is not made by machines. Give your poem wings to fly to the treetops. The much-quoted dictum from William Carlos Williams, "No ideas but in things," is OK for prose, but it lays a dead hand on lyricism, since "things" are dead. Don't contemplate your navel in poetry and think the rest of the world is going to think it's important. Remember everything, forget nothing. Work on a frontier, if you can find one. Go to sea, or work near water, and paddle your own boat. Associate with thinking poets. They're hard to find. Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. "First thought, best thought" may not make for the greatest poetry. First thought may be worst thought. What's on your mind? What do you have in mind? Open your mouth and stop mumbling. Don't be so open minded that your brains fall out. Questions everything and everyone. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and status quo. Be a poet, not a huckster. Don't cater, don't pander, especially not to possible audiences, readers, editors, or publishers. Come out of your closet. It's dark there. Raise the blinds, throw open your shuttered windows, raise the roof, unscrew the locks from the doors, but don't throw away the screws. Be committed to something outside yourself. Be militant about it. Or ecstatic. To be a poet at sixteen is to be sixteen, to be a poet at 40 is to be a poet. Be both. Wake up and pee, the world's on fire. Have a nice day.

But I had no need to suppose anything of the sort, she might well have disdained the use of her eyes to ascertain what her instinct must have adequately enough detected, for, throughout her service with me and my parents, fear, prudence, alertness and cunning had finally taught her that instinctive and almost divinatory knowledge of us that the sailor has of the sea, the quarry of the hunter, and if not the doctor then often the patient of the disease. All the knowledge she was in the habit of acquiring would have astounded anyone for as good a reason as the advanced state of certain areas of knowledge among the ancients, given the almost negligible means of information at their disposal (hers were no less so: a handful of chance remarks forming barely a twentieth part of our conversation at dinner, gleaned in passing by the butler and inaccurately transmitted to the staff quarters). Even her mistakes resulted, like theirs, like the fables in which Plato believed, from a false conception of the world and from preconceived ideas rather than from an inadequacy of material resources... But if the drawbacks of her position as a servant had not prevented her from acquiring the learning indispensable to the art which was its ultimate goal – the art of confounding us by communicating the results of her discoveries – the constraints on her time had been even more effective; here hindrance had not merely been content not to paralyse her enthusiasm, it had powerfully fired it. And of course Françoise neglected no auxiliary stimulant, like diction and attitude for instance. While she never believed anything we said to her when we wanted her to believe it, and since she accepted beyond a shadow of doubt the absurdest things anyone of her own status told her which might at the same time offend our views, in the same way that her manner of listening to our assertions pointed to her incredulity, so the tone she used to report (indirection enabling her to fling the most offensive insults at us with impunity) a cook’s account of threatening her employers and forcing any number of concessions out of them by treating them like dirt in public, indicated that she treated the story as gospel truth. Françoise even went so far as to add: ‘If I’d been the mistress, I’d have been very put out, I can tell you.’ However much, despite our initial dislike of the lady on the fourth floor, we might shrug our shoulders at this unedifying tale as if it were an unlikely fable, its teller knew just how to invest her tone with all the trenchant punch of the most unshakeable and infuriating confidence in what she was saying. But above all, just as writers, when their hands are tied by the tyranny of a monarch or of poetic convention, by the strict rules of prosody or state religion, often achieve a power of concentration they would not have done under a system of political freedom or literary anarchy, so Françoise, by not being free to respond to us in an explicit manner, spoke like Tiresias and would have written like Tacitus.5 She knew how to contain everything she could not express directly in a sentence we could not denounce without casting aspersions on ourselves, in less than a sentence in fact, in a silence, in the way she placed an object.

Downdraughts and Upwellings Just the mention of a downcurrent is enough to inspire fear in many divers as they visualize themselves getting caught by an irresistible force that drags them into the abyss with no opportunity for escape. The natural response when confronted with a situation like this where you feel out of control is to panic but there is no need. Normally, downdraughts or downcurrents are localized phenomena that occur along reef walls: think of them as waterfalls in the sea. When you encounter one, the first thing to do is get out of the flow by moving closer in to the wall so that the contours offer you shelter. Once out of the stream, relax, exhale, take a few deep full breaths, check your air supply, depth and decompression status, look around you and plan. Look to see where the big fish are hiding or if there is a place where the sea whips are not waving around. It is not a good idea to fight a downcurrent. It is a struggle you cannot win. The oft-quoted tactic of inflating your BCD to counteract its efforts to carry you down is potentially dangerous as the current might suddenly release you from its hold and you will find yourself on a runaway ascent to the surface, which will do you much more harm than the current could do. Unless you have spotted a place further along the wall that seems calm, usually the best advice is to swim laterally out away from the reef towards the blue. If you find yourself being carried a little deeper initially, stay calm and keep swimming, you will emerge from the pull of the downcurrent before long or its effect will weaken and allow you to begin your ascent and return to the wall. Think of upwellings as reverse down currents. The same advice applies. First move into the wall out of the flow, relax, think, observe and act calmly.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

We believe we are disputing the merits of a balanced budget and a sound currency when the real conflict is deciding what group shall regulate the distribution of the currency. We imagine we are arguing over the moral and legal status of the principle of the freedom of the seas when the real question is who is to control the seas.

Comparisons of women and Blacks continue throughout the book, but they never meet in, say, the category of “black woman.” In one section, de Beauvoir compares anti-Black racism to anti-feminism, saying that antifeminists offer “separate but equal” status to women in the same way that Jim Crow subjects Blacks to extreme forms of discrimination. There are, she says, “deep analogies” between women and Blacks; both must be liberated from the same paternalism and master class that wants to keep them in their place. In every comparison that de Beauvoir makes between women and Blacks, however, the Blacks are assumed to be American and male and the women are assumed to be white. In The Second Sex, she uses the character Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son to evoke the parallel—but not intersecting—situation of women: “he watches planes pass and knows that because he is black the sky is out of bounds for him. Because she is woman, the girl knows that the sea and the poles, a thousand adventures, a thousand joys are forbidden to her: she is born on the wrong side.”9 It does not seem to occur to her that one could be oppressed by both of these systems, race and gender.

the Israelis and Palestinians were at a demographic tipping point, with more-or-less parity in the number of Jews and Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The century-long struggle over the land was only becoming more intractable. The Israeli Zionist left had long warned that the dream was at stake and that Israel could not have it both ways: Without partition into two separate homelands for Jews and Palestinians, Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish democracy, however compromised those terms were, could not be sustained and Israel would inevitably become a binational country. If all the Palestinians were given equal rights and the vote in Israel, it would not have a Jewish majority. Without partition and without allowing Palestinians to vote for the government that controlled fundamental aspects of their lives, Israel’s claim to be a democracy would eventually implode. The temporary occupation had gone on so long that many critics were already describing the separate statuses of Israel and the occupied territories as a fiction meant to obscure what was already a binational, one-state reality. Instead of a light unto the nations, Israel was being cast by its harshest liberal-left critics and human rights groups such as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as a single-state entity and territory that had already veered into a system of varying degrees of “Jewish supremacy” or racial “domination” over the Palestinians in different geographical areas that, they asserted, fit international definitions of apartheid and crimes against humanity. With a weak Palestinian leadership split between the increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza, and after years without any semblance of a peace process, Israel, more than seventy years after its founding, was more divided over its endgame than it was on the eve of its independence. Esh Kodesh and a rash of other settlement outposts had stepped into the void to try to determine the outcome and doom Israel to victory, or at least to deepen the entanglement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I caught a glimpse of Esmaris over the young man’s shoulder. He was clad in a shock of color — bright red — which stood out in a sea of white. He didn’t need to prove his wealth or status, after all, with his choice of clothing. But even beyond the shade of his shirt, there was still something about him that separated him from the crowd. A certain cool, authoritative air, like he strode through the world expecting it to bend to him. It usually did.

There were quite a few returnees from Hong Kong and Macau, but... most of the two thousand plus students at our school came from South and Southeat Asia: Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines. They had all come back for pretty much the same reason: a strong anti-Chinese sentiment mushrooming in their countries, which had recently freed themselves from colonialism… Chinese were targeted for attack by the newly empowered natives because under colonial rule the Chinese had enjoyed a social and economic status higher than that of the indigenous population.

Aung San spent the rest of 1940 in the Japanese capital, learning Japanese and apparently getting swept away in all the fascist euphoria surrounding him. “What we want is a strong state administration as exemplified in Germany and Japan. There shall be one nation, one state, one party, one leader . . . there shall be no nonsense of individualism. Everyone must submit to the state which is supreme over the individual . . . ,” he wrote in those heady days of the Rising Sun.8 He spoke Japanese, wore a kimono, and even took a Japanese name. He then sneaked back into Burma, landing secretly at Bassein. He changed into a longyi and then took the train unnoticed to Rangoon. He made contact with his old colleagues. Within weeks, in small batches and with the help of Suzuki’s secret agents in Rangoon, Aung San and his new select team traveled by sea to the Japanese-controlled island of Hainan, in the South China Sea. There were thirty in all—the Thirty Comrades—and they would soon be immortalized in nationalist mythology. Aung San at twenty-five was one of the three oldest. He took Teza meaning “Fire” as his nom de guerre. The other two took the names Setkya (A Magic Weapon) and Ne Win (the Bright Sun). All thirty prefixed their names with the title Bo. “Bo” meant an officer and had come to be the way all Europeans in Burma were referred to, signifying their ruling status. The Burmese were now to have their own “bo” for the first time since 1885. But six months of harsh Japanese military training still lay ahead. It wasn’t easy, and at one point some of the younger men were close to calling it quits. Aung San, Setkya, and Ne Win received special training, as they were intended for senior positions. But all had to pass through the same grueling physical tests, saluting the Japanese flag and learning to sing Japanese songs. They heard tales of combat and listened to Suzuki boasting of how he had killed women and children in Siberia.9 It was a bonding experience that would shape Burmese politics for decades to come.

Don’t be ridiculous, dear. There is no reason for you to carry on as you are. I can give you everything you need—lovely clothes, servants, and maids; grand parties, balls, and soirees. You will entertain dignitaries, diplomats, and naval officers, take tea with members of your own fair sex instead of crossing swords with criminals, killers, and rogues. By God, never again will you have to steal just to feed yourself, fight just to defend your honor! I will take care of you, Maeve. I will love you. As my wife you shall enjoy the life you deserve to have, one of grandeur, society, and status.” “But that is not the life I want.” He drew back, hurt. “What do you mean? Isn’t that what every woman wants?” “It is not what I want. And I am not ‘every woman.’” “Well, what do you want, then?” He twisted the purple ribbon in his hands, looking bewildered, confused, lost. “Ask, Maeve, and you shall have it.

You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, and he might as well have been writing about the newly minted Imperial Japanese Navy aviator, resplendently clad in blue and brass, returning home to visit his family. Of course his parents and siblings were overjoyed to see him, and he them. He had done them a great honor, lifting the status of his entire clan in the eyes of neighbors, colleagues, and friends. He was bigger, stronger, tougher, older, wiser. But his homecoming was inevitably poignant, and more than a little strange. He might have dreamed of home every night he was away, clasping it in his imagination as a sanctuary from the brutality of his tormentors and the unremitting toil of his training. Once there, however, he was inevitably taken aback by the comfort, the ease, the disorder, the aimlessness. The reality of home had steadily diverged from the image he had carried in his mind. It contrasted too sharply with the harsh, purposeful life to which he had grown accustomed. He loved his family as much as he ever had, and they loved him as much as they ever had, but he was aghast at how much space had grown between them. They could never fully understand what he had done and endured, or what he had become. That was a secret known only to his classmates, his fellow survivors, who had shared in the long crucible of his training—the fatigue, the humiliations, the beatings, the deprivations, the chronic dread of expulsion, the ecstasy of flight, and the inconceivable joy he had felt upon receiving those blessed wings. He might never admit it, but his fellow airmen were closer to him now than his own kin. He belonged with them. He could not go home again because now the navy was his home.

In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love. If only we had had the sense, he said, to make our peace with one another then, to start from the honest proposition that we were two people not in love who nonetheless meant one another no harm; well, he said, his eyes brimming again, if that had been the case I believe we might have learned truly to love one another and to love ourselves. But instead we saw it as another opportunity for progress, saw the journey unfolding once more, only this time it was a journey through destruction and war, for which both of us demonstrated just as much energy and aptitude as always.

. Adam never actually got his authority over the animals through naming them! Verse 1:26 of Genesis states, “Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings* in our image, to be like ourselves. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on Earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” As shown with the verse above, naming, which includes the naming of the animals and later on the naming of Eve, was not what gave Adam his authority over the animals. God alone gave human beings the authority to “reign over” the animals. Naming did nothing. This exemplifies that naming, indeed, had a negligible impact on a being’s level of authority. God was the only being who created the dichotomy between animals and humanity, in which the former, through God, not through naming, is of a comparatively lower status than the latter

Her most important findings involved the human toil behind the color purple, underscoring its elite status and expense. From the dangerous diving and baiting to the maggots and the terrible stains and odor that would have plagued the dye-makers—likely enslaved people—conspicuous consumption always had a flip side: human suffering and ecological calamity.

There is no foreseeable scenario under which Beijing will back away, either rhetorically or in practice, from its territorial claims in Taiwan and in the South and East China Seas. As Xi Jinping told the then US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis in June 2018, China will not give up 'even an inch' of its territory, which includes its expansive maritime claims and a large land area disputed with India. Within the Chinese system, any leader who stepped back from these claims would be committing political suicide. The internal sensitivity of the territorial issue helps explain the bellicose way Beijing handles these disputes outside of its borders. China constantly schools its Asian neighbours on its red lines in territorial disputes, all the while rapidly building up its military capability and regional diplomatic sway to entrench them. With the possible exception of Vietnam, smaller countries have taken to either submitting or swerving in the face of Beijing's pressure. Yet it is far from game over, if history is any guide. Total capitulation in international relations is rare. Behind the scenes in Beijing, there has always been recognition that it was dangerous for China to bully its way to regional domination. 'The history of contemporary relations does not provide any precedent of a large country successfully bringing to its knees another country,' wrote Wang Jisi, formerly of Peking University, and for many years an informal government adviser. Wang pointed to America's experience in Vietnam and more recently Afghanistan, where its vastly superior military firepower couldn't drag it out of a military and then political quagmire. Wang was writing in 2014. Such strategic humility is rare in Beijing these days, either because the Chinese themselves have become cockier or because the country's diplomats fear being caught out of step with the temper of Xi's times. Nonetheless, the point stands. Beijing cannot bully its way to superpower status without engendering a strong pushback from other countries, which is exactly what is happening.

the Nines’ need to avoid conflict at all costs. Nines fear that expressing their preferences or asserting their agenda will put important relationships at risk and upset the calm surface of their inner sea. What if their priorities and wants compete with the agenda of someone they care about and this difference leads to conflict and relational disconnection? What if asserting their own opinions, needs and desires creates disharmony between them and the people they love? Nines so value feeling comfortable and tranquil, maintaining the status quo, and preserving connections with others that they set aside their own viewpoints and aspirations to merge with those of others. This doesn’t seem like a big deal for Peacemakers, who often grew up feeling like neither their presence nor priorities matter much to others.

In facing a serious problem—controlling superior numbers—Sparta reacted like an animal that develops a shell to protect itself from the environment. But like a turtle, the Spartans sacrificed mobility for safety. They managed to preserve stability for three hundred years, but at what cost? They had no culture beyond warfare, no arts to relieve the tension, a constant anxiety about the status quo. While their neighbors took to the sea, learning to adapt to a world of constant motion, the Spartans entombed themselves in their own system. Victory would mean new lands to govern, which they did not want; defeat would mean the end of their military machine, which they did not want, either. Only stasis allowed them to survive. But nothing in the world can remain stable forever, and the shell or system you evolve for your protection will someday prove your undoing. In the case of Sparta, it was not the armies of Athens that defeated it, but the Athenian money. Money flows everywhere it has the opportunity to go; it cannot be controlled, or made to fit a prescribed pattern. It is inherently chaotic. And in the long run, money made Athens the conqueror, by infiltrating the Spartan system and corroding its protective armor. In the battle between the two systems, Athens was fluid and creative enough to take new forms, while Sparta could grow only more rigid until it cracked.

Lying in state now in an exhibit case at London’s National Maritime Museum, H-4 draws millions of visitors a year. Most tourists approach the Watch after having passed the cases containing H-1, H-2, and H-3. Adults and youngsters alike stand mesmerized before the big sea clocks. They move their heads to follow the swinging balances, which rock like metronomes on H-1 and H-2. They breathe in time to the regular rhythm of the ticking, and they gasp when startled by the sudden, sporadic spinning of the single-blade fan that protrudes from the bottom of H-2. But H-4 stops them cold. It purports to be the end of some orderly progression of thought and effort, yet it constitutes a complete non sequitur. What’s more, it holds still, in stark contrast to the whirring of the going clocks. Not only are its mechanisms hidden by the silver case enclosure, but the hands are frozen in time. Even the second hand lies motionless. H-4 does not run. It could run, if curators would allow it to, but they demur, on the grounds that H-4 enjoys something of the status of a sacred relic or a priceless work of art that must be preserved for posterity. To run it would be to ruin it.

The legal status of brothers serving together aboard one ship during wartime is particularly perplexing. After the catastrophic losses on the Arizona and the Juneau, as well as the near misses of the six Patten brothers on the Nevada and their later service on the Lexington at Coral Sea, the Navy modified its long-standing policy of encouraging or at least acquiescing to brothers serving together, but it never absolutely prohibited the practice.

beryls which display the best qualities of the most valuable gems, including the subtle-fires of the ruby, the flashing-purple of the amethyst and the sea-green tint of the emerald’. The most valuable beryls displayed aquamarine colours, but Pliny also mentions golden-yellow chrysoberyls and vivid-blue hyacinthizonte.30 For many Romans these Indian gems became an indispensable mark of their status. Beryl rings were cherished items and many

None of these contested islands amount to much. All of them together add up in terms of territory to no more than three times the size of Central Park in New York City. To make matters even more complicated, there is disagreement about whether some of the “land features” in the sea even count as islands at all in international law or are only “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own.” And “artificial islands, installations, and structures do not possess the status of islands,” and thus do not have legal rights to the waters around them. Yet they can become facts.2

There are bubbles of agile in a sea of Gantt charts with predetermined solutions, dates, and spending predicted at the point of knowing the least, an annual, bottom-up financial planning process that takes six months of the year to plan and re-plan and focuses on output over outcomes. There are “drop dead dates” and “deadlines” (in most cases it’s not life or death); RAG (red, amber, green) statuses and change control processes; a change lifecycle with twenty mandatory artifacts, most with their own stage-gate governance committee; a traditional waterfall Project Management Office; sixty-page Steering Committee decks; project plans with the word “sprint” ten times in the middle; a lack of psychological safety; a performance appraisal model that incentivizes mediocrity (underpromise to overdeliver) and uses a Think Big, Start Big, Learn Slow approach. The good news, with a charitable intent, is that the organization wants to improve.

Viewed from head-on the ship looked like Darth Vader’s helmet. Some Navy brass who saw her clenched their teeth in disgust at the sight of the most futuristic ship ever to ply the seas. A future commander resented having only a four-man crew to boss around on a ship that was so secret that the Navy could not even admit it existed. Our stealth ship might be able to blast out of the sky a sizable Soviet attack force, but in terms of an officer’s future status and promotion prospects, it was about as glamorous as commanding a tugboat. At the highest levels, the Navy brass was equally unenthusiastic about the small number of stealth ships they would need to defend carrier task forces. Too few to do anyone’s career much good in terms of power or prestige. The carrier task force people didn’t like the stealth ship because it reminded everyone how vulnerable their hulking ships really were.

Well-established law, going back to Roman law, to the Justinian Code in fact, turned out to be weirdly clear on the status of the intertidal. It’s crazy to read, like Roman futurology: The things which are naturally everybody’s are: air, flowing water, the sea, and the sea-shore. So nobody can be stopped from going on to the sea-shore. The sea-shore extends as far as the highest winter tide. The law of all peoples gives the public a right to use the sea-shore, and the sea itself. Anyone is free to put up a hut there to shelter himself. The right view is that ownership of these shores is vested in no one at all. Their legal position is the same as that of the sea and the land or sand under the sea.

The TransMilenio is not carbon neutral. To keep costs down, its caterpillar buses run on diesel rather than on cleaner fuels that are more expensive and less suited to the high altitude of Bogotá, which sits 8,500 feet above sea level. Nevertheless, a TransMilenio engine is so efficient that it emits less than half the pollution of an old-fashioned minibus. By embracing BRT, Bogotá has taken more than 9,000 small private buses off the roads, slashing the overall consumption of bus fuel since the first line opened in 2001. Some private cars vanished too. Last year Ortega sold his Audi sedan and now travels around Bogotá either by TransMilenio or taxi—a big step in a society where having your own wheels is the ultimate status symbol. “I just don’t feel like I need a car anymore,” he says. “You can live differently in this city now.

Hitler’s notions of a social ‘new order’ have to be placed in this setting of conquest, ruthless exploitation, the right of the powerful, racial dominance, and more or less permanent war in a world where life was cheap and readily expendable. His ideas often had their roots in the resentment that still smouldered at the way his own ‘talents’ had been left unrecognized or the disadvantages of his own social status compared with the privileges of the high-born and well-to-do. Thus he advocated free education, funded by the state, for all talented youngsters. Workers would have annual holidays and could expect once or twice in their lives to go on a sea-cruise. He criticized the distinctions between different classes of passengers on such cruise ships. And he approved of the introduction of the same food for both officers and men in the army. Hitler might appear to have been promoting ideas of a modern, mobile, classless society, abolishing privilege and resting solely upon achievement. But the central tenet remained race, to which all else was subordinated. Thus, in the east, he said, all Germans would travel in the upholstered first- or second-class railway carriages – to separate them from the native population. It was a social vision which could have obvious attractions for many members of the would-be master-race. The image was of a cornucopia of wealth flowing into the Reich from the east. The Reich would be linked to the new frontiers by motor-ways cutting through the endless steppes and the enormous Russian spaces. Prosperity and power would be secured through the new breed of supermen who lorded it over the downtrodden Slav masses.

I loved the counter filled with lox, whitefish, sturgeon. Saperstein looked like a sturgeon, long, white, sharp-toothed. I marveled at the way he wielded his razor-sharp knife. Cutting a bit of translucent smoked sturgeon, you expected it to shred if you breathed on it. Manya achieved status as his sturgeon expert. She had grown up with sturgeon, a staple along the Black Sea, and she pronounced a sample too salty, too mealy from being packed in ice, too strong in flavor, or absolutely perfect. Saperstein, a purist, inevitably felt sad that his customers did not truly appreciate his top-of-the-line products. He communed with Bubby over a slice of sturgeon or belly lox as if having a religious moment. Even when bad weather kept customers away from our restaurant and we were low in cash, Bubby invested in a few slices of smoked sturgeon, not for her customers, but for our family. She could ignore lox, smoked whitefish, pickles or fresh herring, but she couldn't do without a weekly treat of sturgeon. To prove that he was a sporting man who approved of her taste, Saperstein created a cone from white paper and dropped in some caviar, which he kept in a tin secreted in a hole under the counter- God forbid during a robbery, the thieves would never discover his hiding place.

This sense of the beauty and significance of an object in itself is said to be quite general among the very young; and there can be few who do not remember being entranced by wet pebbles on the strand, sea-worn glass, or oil on puddles. In most people the vision dwindles or even perishes as the process of growing up, receiving accepted social, moral, and aesthetic notions grinds them down to size; but it certainly never did so in Picasso, who from his nature and from his status as an outsider was not to be ground down. In him it grew steadily more intense, and often he was able to persuade those who were still open to persuasion that other values, often very ancient, were still available to them. There is his magnificent, disreputable goat, for example, that defies all established, academic canons of beauty, and that has given innumerable beholders the joy of seeing the quintessence of the creature.

For Europe, as for other civilized lands, infections by familiar epidemic disease surely became more frequent, at least in the major ports and at other foci of communication; but infections that returned at more and more frequent intervals became, by necessity, childhood diseases. Older persons would have acquired suitably high and repeatedly reinforced levels of immunity through prior exposures. Thus by a paradox that is only apparent, the more diseased a community, the less destructive its epidemics become. Even very high rates of infant mortality were relatively easily borne. The costs of giving birth and rearing another child to replace one that had died were slight compared to the losses involved in massive adult mortality of the sort that epidemics attacking a population at infrequent intervals inevitably produce. Consequently, the tighter the communications net binding each part of Europe to the rest of the world, the smaller became the likelihood of really devastating disease encounter. Only genetic mutation of a disease-causing organism, or a new transfer of parasites from some other host to human beings offered the possibility of devastating epidemic when world transport and communications had attained a sufficient intimacy to assure frequent circulation of all established human diseases among the civilized populations of the world. Between 1500 and about 1700 this is what seems in fact to have occurred. Devastating epidemics of the sort that had raged so dramatically in Europe's cities between 1346 and the mid-seventeenth century tapered off toward the status of childhood diseases, or else, as in the case of both plague and malaria, notably reduced the geographic range of their incidence. The result of such systematic lightening of the microparasitic drain upon European populations (especially in northwestern Europe where both plague and malaria had about disappeared by the close of the seventeenth century) was, of course, to unleash the possibility of systematic growth. This was, however, only a possibility, since any substantial local growth quickly brought on new problems: in particular, problems of food supply, water supply, and intensification of other infections in cities that had outgrown older systems of waste disposal. After 1600 these factors began to affect European populations significantly, and their effective solution did not come before the eighteenth century - or later. All the same, the changing pattern of epidemic infection was and remains a fundamental landmark in human ecology that deserves more attention than it has ordinarily received. On the time scale of world history, indeed we should view the 'domestication' of epidemic disease that occurred between 1300 and 1700 as a fundamental breakthrough, directly resulting from the two great transportation revolutions of that age - one by land, initiated by the Mongols, and one by sea, initiated by Europeans.