Self Nomination Quotes

The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man.

Passionate people are always ready to stand for their dreams even if no one stand with them. They vote and vote alone for their dreams but never loss their nomination for excellent leadership!

If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official "Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.

People always describe jealousy as this sharp, green, venomous thing. Unfounded, vinegary, mean-spirited. But I’ve found that jealousy, to writers, feels more like fear. Jealousy is the spike in my heart rate when I glimpse news of Athena’s success on Twitter—another book contract, awards nominations, special editions, foreign rights deals. Jealousy is constantly comparing myself to her and coming up short; is panicking that I’m not writing well enough or fast enough, that I am not, and never will be, enough. Jealousy means that even just learning that Athena’s signing a six- figure option deal with Netflix means that I’ll be derailed for days, unable to focus on my own work, mired by shame and self-disgust every time I see one of her books in a bookstore display.

Your business, son.” “Yes. Self. I must grok each cusp myself alone. And so must you . . . and so must each self. Thou art God.” “I don’t accept the nomination.” “You can’t refuse it. Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok.

Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people… and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition, narcissists tend to “self-nominate”; consequently, when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.

If I could nominate one candidate for “biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony,” it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest. Naive realism gives us a world full of good and evil, and this brings us to the most disturbing implication of the sages’ advice about hypocrisy: Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was. For now she had devoted herself, nominally at least, to theology and philosophy, as well as to explorations of the natural sciences, such as on this expedition. She had even received grants to help support this mission to the stepwise East from the Vatican, the Mormons, from Muslim orders, and various philosophical foundations. Dealing with such bodies, she had quickly learned when not to share her view that organized religion was a kind of mass delusion.

42. What is the name of her first EP? Title 43. When was her first EP released? September 9, 2014 44. What was she nominated for at the 2014 American Music Awards? New Artist of the Year 45. What was she nominated for at the 2014 MTV Europe Music Awards? Best Song with a Social Message 46. What was she nominated for at the 2014 NewNowNext Awards? Best New Female Musician 47. What was she nominated for at the 2014 Capricho Awards? Revelation International 48. What was she nominated for at the 2015 People's Choice Awards? Favorite Breakout Artist and Favorite Song 49. What was she nominated for at the 2015 Grammy Awards? Record of the Year and Song of the Year 50. Which albums of hers are self-released? I'll Sing with You and Only 17

People always describe jealousy as this sharp, green, venomous thing. Unfounded, vinegary, mean-spirited. But I've found that jeal-ousy, to writers, feels more like fear. Jealousy is the spike in my heart rate when I glimpse news of Athena's success on Twitter-another book contract, awards nominations, special editions, foreign rights deals. Jealousy is constantly comparing myself to her and coming up short; is panicking that I'm not writing well enough or fast enough, that I am not, and never will be, enough. Jealousy means that even just learning that Athena's signing a six-figure option deal with Net-fix means that I'll be derailed for days, unable to focus on my own work, mired by shame and self-disgust every time I see one of her books in a bookstore display.

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

Intelligence finds itself determined: this is its apparent aspect from which in its immediacy it starts. But as knowledge, intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own. Its activity has to do with the empty form – the pretense of finding reason: and its aim is to realise its concept or to be reason actual, along with which the content is realised as rational. This activity is cognition. The nominal knowledge, which is only certitude, elevates itself, as reason is concrete, to definite and conceptual knowledge. The course of this elevation is itself rational, and consists in a necessary passage (governed by the concept) of one grade or term of intelligent activity (a so-called faculty of mind) into another. The refutation which such cognition gives of the semblance that the rational is found, starts from the certitude or the faith of intelligence in its capability of rational knowledge, and in the possibility of being able to appropriate the reason, which it and the content virtually is. The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called cognition (knowledge). Yet this does not mean intelligence inter alia knows – besides which it also intuits, conceives, remembers, imagines, etc. To take up such a position is in the first instance, part and parcel of that isolating of mental activity just censured; but it is also in addition connected with the great question of modern times, as to whether true knowledge or the knowledge of truth is possible – which, if answered in the negative, must lead to abandoning the effort. The numerous aspects and reasons and modes of phrase with which external reflection swells the bulk of this question are cleared up in their place: the more external the attitude of understanding in the question, the more diffuse it makes its simple object. At the present place the simple concept of cognition is what confronts the quite general assumption taken up by the question, viz. the assumption that the possibility of true knowledge in general is in dispute, and the assumption that it is possible for us at our will either to prosecute or to abandon cognition. The concept or possibility of cognition has come out as intelligence itself, as the certitude of reason: the act of cognition itself is therefore the actuality of intelligence. It follows from this that it is absurd to speak of intelligence and yet at the same time of the possibility or choice of knowing or not. But cognition is genuine, just so far as it realises itself, or makes the concept its own. This nominal description has its concrete meaning exactly where cognition has it. The stages of its realising activity are intuition, conception, memory, etc.: these activities have no other immanent meaning: their aim is solely the concept of cognition (§ 445 note). If they are isolated, however, then an impression is implied that they are useful for something else than cognition, or that they severally procure a cognitive satisfaction of their own; and that leads to a glorification of the delights of intuition, remembrance, imagination. It is true that even as isolated (i.e. as non-intelligent), intuition, imagination, etc. can afford a certain satisfaction: what physical nature succeeds in doing by its fundamental quality – its out-of-selfness – exhibiting the elements or factors of immanent reason external to each other – that the intelligence can do by voluntary act, but the same result may happen where the intelligence is itself only natural and untrained. But the true satisfaction, it is admitted, is only afforded by an intuition permeated by intellect and mind, by rational conception, by products of imagination which are permeated by reason and exhibit ideas – in a word, by cognitive intuition, cognitive conception, etc. The truth ascribed to such satisfaction lies in this, that intuition, conception, etc. are not isolated, and exist only as ‘moments’ in the totality of cognition itself.

Article 10: Whether symbolic logic is superior to Aristotelian logic for philosophizing? Objection 1 : It seems that it is, for it is a modern development, and would not have become popular if it were not superior. In fact, 99% of all formal logic textbooks in print today use symbolic rather than Aristotelian logic. Objection 2: It is as superior in efficiency to Aristotelian logic as Arabic numerals to Roman numerals, or a computer to an abacus. Objection 3: Aristotelian logic presupposes metaphysical and epistemological realism, which are no longer universally accepted. Symbolic logic is ideologically neutral. It is like mathematics not only in efficiency but also in that it carries less “philosophical baggage.” On the contrary , the authority of common sense is still on the side of Aristotelian rather than symbolic logic. But common sense is the origin, basis, and foundation of all further refinements of reason, including symbolic logic; and a branch should not contradict its trunk, an upper story should not contradict its foundation. All philosophical systems, including symbolic logic, since they are refinements of, begin with, and depend on the validity of common sense, even while they greatly refine and expand this foundation, should not contradict it, as symbolic logic does. (See below.) I answer that at least two essential principles of symbolic logic contradict common sense: (1) the counter-intuitive “paradox of material implication,” according to which a false proposition materially implies any proposition, false as well as true, including contradictories (see Socratic Logic , pp. 266-369); and (2) the assumption that a particular proposition (like “some elves are evil”) claims more, not less, than a universal proposition (like “all elves are evil'’), since it is assumed to have “existential import” while a universal proposition is assumed to lack it, since symbolic logic assumes the metaphysical position (or “metaphysical baggage”) of Nominalism. See Socratic Logic , pp. 179-81, 262-63 and The Two Logics by Henry Veatch. Furthermore, no one ever actually argues in symbolic logic except professional philosophers. Its use coincides with the sudden decline of interest in philosophy among students. If you believe that is a coincidence, I have a nice timeshare in Florida that I would like to sell to you. Reply to Objection 1: Popularity is no index of truth. If it were, truth would change, and contradict itself, as popularity changed — including the truth of that statement. And thus it is self-contradictory. Reply to Objection 2: It is not more efficient in dealing with ordinary language. We never hear people actually argue any of the great philosophical questions in symbolic logic, but we hear a syllogism every few sentences. Reply to Objection 3: Symbolic logic is not philosophically neutral but presupposes Nominalism, as shown by the references in the “/ answer that ” above.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.

Ultimately, the Valley attitude is an empowered anomie turbocharged by selfishness, respecting some nominal “feel-good” principals of progress or collective technological striving, but in truth pursuing a continual self-development refracted through the capitalist prism: hippies with a capitalization table and a vesting schedule.

Demonstrating her self-confidence, Janet had pushed the administration to nominate Stan, a choice that I strongly supported. Not every new chair would be comfortable with such a strong number two. The

The oldest Vedantic school, Advaita [‘Not two’], represents an extreme and purist position in arguing that Brahman alone is real. The self and the world are within Brahman, with any apparent difference arising from illusion [maya] and ignorance [avidya]. It is as with a rope, which seems to be a snake, or a seashell, which seems to be of silver. This world is like the foam on the sea, or a peacock’s egg, created simply for play [lila]. Since Brahman is all, Brahman is without attributes. When the mind, which is given to maya, tries to conceive of Brahman, it sees Ishvara in one of his many forms. If certain Upanishadic statements appear to be theistic, it is because their author (nominally, Brahman) is catering to his audience. Only in deep sleep, when we are no longer dreaming, might we experience something of the formlessness of Brahman. We are then pure, disengaged consciousness, like the sun after it has set. This is the experience of disembodied Atma, of death, of home.

So assuming one could argue that Google is a monopoly and needs to enter into a consent decree, would the Bell Labs model work? If Google were required to license every patent it owns for a nominal fee to any American company that asks for it, it would have to license its search algorithms, Android patents, self-driving car patents, smart-thermostat patents, advertising-exchange patents, Google Maps patents, Google Now patents, virtual-reality patents, and thousands of others. What is clear from the Bell Labs model is that such a solution actually benefits innovation in general.

A widely quoted study from the Oxford Martin School predicts that technology threatens to replace 47 percent of all US jobs within 20 years. One of Pew experts even foresees the advent of “robotic sex partners.’’ The world’s oldest profession may be no more. When all this happens, what, exactly, will people do? Half of those in the Pew report are relatively unconcerned, believing — as has happened in the past — that even as technology destroys jobs, it creates more new ones. But half are deeply worried, fearing burgeoning unemployment, a growing schism between the highly educated and everyone else, and potentially massive social dislocation. (The fact that Pew’s experts are evenly split also exposes one of the truths of prognostication: A coin flip might work just as well.) Much of this debate over more or fewer jobs misses a key element, one brought up by some of those surveyed by Pew: These are primarily political issues; what happens is up to us. If lower-skilled jobs are no more, the solution, quite obviously, is training and education. Moreover, the coming world of increasingly ubiquitous robotics has the potential for significant increases in productivity. Picture, for instance, an entirely automated farm, with self-replicating and self-repairing machines planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and delivering. Food wouldn’t be free, but it could become so cheap that, like water (Detroit excepted), it’s essentially available to everyone for an almost nominal cost. It’s a welfare state, of course, but at some point, with machines able to produce the basic necessities of life, why not? We’d have a world of less drudgery and more leisure. People would spend more time doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do. It might even cause us to rethink what it means to be human. Robots will allow us to use our “intelligence in new ways, freeing us up from menial tasks,’’ says Tiffany Shlain, host of AOL’s “The Future Starts Here.’’ Just as Lennon hoped and Star Trek predicted.

GOSPEL REDISCOVERY Along with extraordinary, persistent prayer, the most necessary element of gospel renewal is a recovery of the gospel itself, with a particular emphasis on the new birth and on salvation through grace alone. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel emphasis on grace could be lost in several ways. A church might simply become heterodox — losing its grip on the orthodox tenets of theology that under-gird the gospel, such as the triune nature of God, the deity of Christ, the wrath of God, and so on. It may turn its back on the very belief in justification by faith alone and the need for conversion and so move toward a view that being a Christian is simply a matter of church membership or of living a life based on Christ’s example. This cuts the nerve of gospel renewal and revival.2 But it is possible to subscribe to every orthodox doctrine and nevertheless fail to communicate the gospel to people’s hearts in a way that brings about repentance, joy, and spiritual growth. One way this happens is through dead orthodoxy, in which such pride grows in our doctrinal correctness that sound teaching and right church practice become a kind of works-righteousness. Carefulness in doctrine and life is, of course, critical, but when it is accompanied in a church by self-righteousness, mockery, disdain of everyone else, and a contentious, combative attitude, it shows that, while the doctrine of justification may be believed, a strong spirit of legalism reigns nonetheless. The doctrine has failed to touch hearts.3 Lloyd-Jones also speaks of “defective orthodoxy” and “spiritual inertia.”4 Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines — yet they do not see them. It is possible to get an “A” grade on a doctrinal test and describe accurately the doctrines of our salvation, yet be blind to their true implications and power. In this sense, there are plenty of orthodox churches in which the gospel must be rediscovered and then brought home and applied to people’s hearts. When this happens, nominal Christians get converted, lethargic and weak Christians become empowered, and nonbelievers are attracted to the newly beautified Christian congregation.

It was easier to be the headstrong monk, a boy on a long-shot mission, before he actually won anything. With the prize in hand, he realized his single-minded drive came across as aloof cockiness; his painful martyrdom certainly looked like self-nomination for sainthood. He's not sure he can keep up this exhausting, aw-shucks façade for much longer.

youngest child entered first grade. During the next few years, she joined Romance Writers of America, learned a few things about writing a book, and decided the process was way more fun than analyzing financial statements. Melinda’s debut novel, She Can Run, was nominated for Best First Novel by the International Thriller Writers. Melinda’s bestselling books have garnered three Daphne du Maurier Award nominations and a Golden Leaf Award. When she isn’t writing, she is an avid martial artist: she holds a second-degree black belt in Kenpo karate and teaches women’s self-defense. She lives in a messy house with her husband, two teenagers, a couple

The slow, relentless destruction of self-confidence is something that is impossible to explain.” I bet you thank God that you’re married to Will! We had to sit through the clips from the other nominations in my category, but finally it was the moment of truth. The host stepped back up to the microphone. “And the winner is…It’s All in the Family. Please welcome to the stage the producer of the programme, Laura Kennedy!” The

Your expenses grow to match your income. As the decades pass and you realize that no, you’re not going to save the world, the money becomes a more and more important part of the justification. And when you have kids, you’re stuck; it’s much easier to deprive yourself of money (and what it buys) than to deprive your children of money. More important, you internalize the rationalizations for the work you are doing. It’s easier to think that underwriting new debt offerings really is saving the world than to think that you are underwriting new debt offerings, because of the money, instead of saving the world. And this goes for many walks of life. It’s easier for college professors to think that, by training the next generation of young minds (or, even more improbably, writing papers on esoteric subjects), they are changing the world than to think that they are teaching and researching instead of changing the world. Sure, there are self-parodying, economically delusional, psychotherapy-needing, despicable people on Wall Street . . . but there are also a lot of people who went there because it was easy and stayed because they decided they couldn’t afford not to and talked themselves into it. A college student asked me at a book talk what I thought about undergraduates who go work on Wall Street. And individually, I have nothing against them, although I do think they should do their best to keep their expenses down so they will be able to switch careers later. But as a system, it’s a bad thing that a small handful of highly profitable firms are able to invest those profits into skimming off some of the top students at American universities—universities that, even if nominally private, are partially funded by taxpayer money in the form of research grants and federal subsidies for student loans—and absorbing them into the banking-consulting-lawyering Borg.7

Even the person—sakkāya—is khandha and santāna, an aggregate and a current of elements and of impermanent, "compounded," and conditioned states. It is also sankhata. Its unity and reality are purely nominal, at the most "functional." It is said: as the word "wagon" is used when the various parts of a wagon are found together, so when the various elements making up human individuality are present, we speak of a "person." "As the joining together of the various parts makes up the concept of a wagon, so the aggregation or series of states gives name to a living being."4 The wagon is a functional unity of elements, not a substance; so with the person and the "mind"—"in the same way the words 'living being' and 'I' are only a way of speaking of the fivefold stem of attachment."5 When the conditions that have determined the combination of elements and states in that stem are no longer effective, the person as such—that is, as the particular person—dissolves. But even while he endures, the person is not a "being" but a flowing, a "current" (santāna) or rather a section of a "current," since santāna is thought of as something that is neither started by birth nor interrupted by death.6

the installation of Congress ministries in six large provinces of British India was a major milestone in the constitutional history of the subcontinent. Much more power had devolved on to the shoulder of Indians than at any previous time in the history of the Raj. Indeed, since precolonial regimes were themselves devoid of democratic representation, and were run by unelected kings who nominated their ministers, this was the furthest that Indians had thus far got in the direction of self-rule, swaraj. Surely it was now only a matter of years before the Congress, and India, achieved the next step, of Dominion Status, thus to place themselves on par with Canada, Australiaand South Africa. A sign of how much of a departure from colonial practice these elections were is underlined in a humble office order issued by the Central Provinces government after their own Congress ministry was installed. It was signed by an Indian ICS officer, C.M. Trivedi, then serving as the secretary to the general administration department. The order was sent to all commissioners and deputy commissioners, the chief conservator of forests, the inspector general of police, all secretaries to government, and a host of other senior officials (including the military secretary and the governor), almost all of whom were, of course, British. The text of the order was short and simple, albeit, in the eyes of its recipients, not altogether sweet. It read: ‘In future Mr. Gandhi should be referred to in all correspondence as “Mahatma Gandhi”.

The truth of the New Democrats’ purpose was presented by the journalist Joe Klein in his famous 1996 roman à clef about Clinton’s run for the presidency, Primary Colors. Although the novel contains more than a nod to Clinton’s extramarital affairs, Klein seems broadly sympathetic to the man from Arkansas as well as to the DLC project more generally. Toward the equality-oriented politics of the Democratic past he is forthrightly contemptuous. Old people who recall fondly the battles of the Thirties, for example, are objects of a form of ridicule that Klein thinks he doesn’t even need to explain; it is self-evident that people who care about workers are fools. And when an old-school “prairie populist” challenges the Clinton character for the nomination, Klein describes him as possessing “a voice made for crystal radio sets” and “offering Franklin Roosevelt’s jobs program (forestry, road-building) to out-of-work computer jockeys.” Get it? His views are obsolete! “It was like running against a museum.” That was the essential New Democrat idea: The world had changed, but certain Democratic voters expected their politicians to help them cling to a status that globalization had long since revoked. However,

In terms of ESP, Rawls and Davis discovered that the “third eye,” or sixth chakra area of the brain, stimulates inner vision or awareness. Subjects experienced an increase in this ability, as well as peace and calm, by holding a magnet in the left palm or on the back of the right hand. In 1976, Davis and Rawls were nominated for a Nobel Prize in medical physics. In summation, the electrical flow in the body is maintained by certain ions, such as sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. Imbalances in these fundamental materials can cause disease—and can occur because of disease. These imbalances will alter the electrical activity of the body and therefore the actual appearance—shape and form—of the various magnetic or auric fields outside of the body. This might explain the ability of certain “auric readers” to use their psychic skills to perceive deep-seated problems in the body even before medical technology can detect them, as well as the reverse ability to heal the aura and therefore, heal the body. The link between the meridians and the electrical system of the body, as Nordenström proposed, also provides an explanation for healing through the meridians and acupoints. The glial cells act as yet another major player in the body’s microcircuit system, receiving information from the magnetic spectrum inside and outside it, thus adding another dimension to Nordenström’s discoveries. Nordenström used his theories to cure cancer, sending electrical charges into a tumor to shrink it. What did Rawls and Davis discover but one of the primary concepts of healing? There is polarity to every aspect of life. Humans are electrical and magnetic, yin and yang, and health is dependent upon maintaining the appropriate balance of each. Humans are L-fields, acted upon by electricity. And humans are T-fields, acted upon by magnetism. Through the bipolarity that is “L,” or electrical, humans generate life, movement, and activity. Through the bipolarity of our “T,” or magnetic self, we attract what we need and what we can become. Humans are composed of the stuff of thought—and matter. FIGURE 3.6 FORMS OF MAGNETISM In his book A Practical Guide to Vibrational Medicine, Dr. Richard Gerber outlines many forms of magnetism.83 Here is a brief description of each, along with a sample of its effects.

It was an odd promise considering the source. Rod’s career, until that point, had been anything but a paradigm of reform. His father-in-law, Dick Mell, was a Chicago alderman and ward boss, and used his influence to get Rod elected to the state legislature in Springfield. After four years of doing little in state government, opportunity struck. Dan Rostenkowski, the longtime congressman from Chicago’s north side, was forced to resign in scandal after being caught writing personal checks on his government account. In the next election, a Republican—Mike Flanagan—managed to win the seat. But this was a Democratic district through and through and whoever won the nomination to oppose Flanagan next time around was guaranteed victory. Rod, although having accomplished literally nothing in his four years in the state legislature, had two things going for him: his innate political skills and his father-in-law. In many ways, Rod exemplified the distinction between the skill set needed to run for office and the skill set needed to serve in office. Rod was an incredible public speaker. Charismatic. Charming. Funny. Self-deprecating. He could go into a black church, sing gospel—unironically—and bring the place down. He knew what you wanted to hear and had no qualms saying it, regardless of what it was or whether he actually meant it. He could shine in a speech to the state legislature, at a union hall, and in a TV ad. His retail political skills were better than anyone I’d ever seen (except maybe Bill Clinton) and when you combined that with his ward boss father-in-law’s clout, beating more-qualified opponents to win the Democratic nomination to the House was within reach.

As this model of work gains ever more prominence, as fixed premises and traditional jobs are subsumed into the space of flows and flexible contracts, there is the prospect of this sort of remote-controlled labour spreading out from the entrepreneurial sphere to become the norm. The supposedly classless society of the future might well arrange itself around an elite of WiFi managers serviced by a mass of virtual assistants who are kept occupied well beyond their nominal work duties. This will be a society where self-marketing is just another administrative task, employment involves fitting multiple differently shaped assignments into every available gap, and there is no real beginning or end to the working day; a world in which we are all either willing or reluctant jugglers.

One cannot despise Christians and love Christ at the same time. Too many are fooled into the self-righteous notion that those who stand boldly in the faith are nothing more than religious zealots and Pharisees, and that they themselves are closer to Jesus by communing with the mockers.

Before turning to Marx’s writings, we must note the radical divide that separates his position from orthodox Marxism. Marx never conceived of socialism or communism as state control of the economy. Nor did he ever endorse the notion of a single-party state that rules on behalf of the masses. His conception of the new society is thoroughly democratic, based on freely associated relations of production and in society as a whole. He was primarily concerned with freeing individuals from alienated and dehumanised social relations—not simply with increasing the productive forces so that developing societies can catch up with developed ones… [Marx] then turns to the future, writing: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free people, working with the means of production held in common” (Marx 1977: 171). This does not refer to a formal transfer of private property to collective or state entities. Transferring property deeds is a juridical relation, which does not end class domination. Marx refers to “free people” owning the means of production, which means they exert effective and not just nominal control over the labour process. And that is not possible unless the producers democratically control the labour process through their own self-activity. He then goes on to state that in this post-capitalist society, products are “directly objects of utility” and do not assume a value form. Exchange value and universalised commodity production come to an end. Producers decide how to make, distribute, and consume the total social product. One part is used to renew the means of production; the other “is consumed by members of the association as means of subsistence” (Marx 1977: 171–72). He invokes neither the market nor the state as the medium by which this is achieved. He instead envisions a planned distribution of labour time by individuals who are no longer subjected to socially necessary labour time. Abstract labour is abolished, since actual labour time—not socially necessary labour time—serves as a measure of social relations.

Arthur’s ties to the powerful New York State Republican machine won him nomination as candidate for vice president. To near-universal dismay, he had entered the White House when President James A. Garfield died from an assassin’s bullet. A good storyteller and man about town, fond of whiskey, cigars, and expensive clothes, the dapper, sideburned Arthur is perhaps best remembered for saying, “I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damned business.” On this trip to Florida, however, his private life fitted very nicely into someone else’s business. The owner of the Belair orange plantation was General Henry Shelton Sanford, the man who had helped Leopold recruit Stanley. Sanford did not bother to leave his home in Belgium to be in Florida for the president’s visit. With the self-assurance of the very rich, he played host in absentia. He made sure that the president and his party were greeted by his personal agent, and that they got the best rooms at the Sanford House hotel, which stood on a lakeshore fringed with palm trees in the town of Sanford. When the president and his guests were not out catching bass, trout, and catfish, or shooting alligators, or exploring the area by steamboat, the Sanford House was where they stayed for the better part of a week. There is no record of who paid the hotel bill, but most likely, as with the rail journey south, it was not the president. Ironically, the huge Sanford orange plantation the Washington visitors admired was proving as disastrous a venture as Sanford’s other investments. Some Swedish contract laborers found the working conditions too harsh and tried to leave as stowaways on a steamboat. A slaughterhouse Sanford invested in had a capacity fifty times larger than what the local market could consume and went bankrupt. A 540-foot wharf with a warehouse at the end of it that he ordered built was washed away by a flood. The manager of one of the hotels in Sanford absconded while owing him money. Foremen failed to put up fences, and wandering cattle nibbled at the orange trees. But if everything Sanford touched as a businessman turned to dust, as an accomplice of Leopold he was a grand success. Sanford was a long-time supporter of President Arthur’s Republican Party. For two years, he had been corresponding with Arthur and other high United States officials about Leopold’s plans for the Congo. Now, after the president’s trip to Florida, confident that Arthur would pay attention, he pressed his case with more letters. Seven months later, Leopold sent Sanford across the Atlantic to make use of his convenient connection to the White House. The man who had once been American minister to Belgium was now the Belgian king’s personal envoy to Washington. Sanford carried with him to Washington a special code for telegraphing news to Brussels: Constance meant “negotiations proceeding satisfactorily; success expected”; Achille referred to Stanley, Eugénie to France, Alice to the United States, Joseph to “sovereign rights,” and Émile to the key target, the president.

Many characters exist in an organization. Someone explains the rules and logic by which the system operates in great detail. • Many of these characters, including the hero, go after a negative goal that involves killing someone or destroying something. • Each believes strongly in the goal and thinks what he is doing makes complete sense. In fact, it is totally illogical. • The opponents, also within the system, compete for the same goal and also give detailed but insane justifications. • One sane person, usually the ally, continually points out that none of this makes any sense and action will lead to disaster. He functions as a chorus, but no one listens to him. • All the characters, including the nominal hero, use extreme, sometimes even murderous, methods to reach the goal. • The actions of the characters lead to death and destruction for almost all. • The battle is intense and destructive, with everyone still thinking he is right. The consequences are death and madness. • No one, including the hero, has a self-revelation. But it is so obvious that the hero should have had a self-revelation that the audience has it instead. • The remaining characters are horribly maimed by the struggle but immediately resume their efforts to reach the goal. • Slightly more positive black comedies end with the sane person watching in horror and either leaving the system or trying to change it.

My problem is that if I engage in political activism, then the ultimate conclusion is always revolution. I'm a big Guy Fawkes fan, what can I say. I see the "democratic" system here as obsolete and wide open to corruption. I do have a solution, and it qualifies as a response to the degree of connection that has developed since the creation of parliament. Back then, people were obliged to have a representative (albeit a corrupt one) at the seat of power to ensure their best interests were being looked after. We don't suffer from distance like we used to, and the ubiquity of the internet means that people, close to the entire population are connected in communicative union that lends itself to a sort of hive government. As a citizen of a country your duty would be to engage in a nominal percentage of votes a year, with anyone with the support of a given number of voters able to table bills, which everyone then votes on. The next step would be an AI administrator to this networked hub....no, wait, a quantum AI administrator, call it Mother, a dynamic of algorithms that bears no consideration to a ten million pounds backhander, or the ethnicity of the citizen, but only serves self governance and the welfare of the populace. It sounds like a crazy sci-fi plotline, but it's absolutely doable.

Mordechai Abir noted, “[u]nlike the Shah’s Iran where only a small, self-indulgent upper middle class monopolized the country’s oil wealth, the Saudi regime prudently channeled it, however unevenly, to all Saudis.”14 These policies secured the allegiance of the country’s business community. They also created an economy that, although nominally based on market principles, was badly distorted, more distributive than productive, and could seldom compete globally in anything other than hydrocarbon-based products.

It would’ve been really easy to blow off the question. I could’ve said that the neurodiverse crowd simply hadn’t shown up. Or I could’ve cited my own limited knowledge of such disabilities as the reason for a lack of diversity, and that likely would’ve ended the conversation. It also would have ended my blog’s premise of being a resource devoted to offering a platform for the underrepresented. Instead, I took a different tack. I posted the reader’s question publicly and asked for help. Soon after I did this, I received messages from other readers who had more experience with, and knowledge of, disabilities than I had. Through this influx of new information, I was able to reach out to a polyamorous blogger with Asperger’s syndrome. I got some letter-writing assistance from a partner who has some familiarity with Asperger’s, and I communicated the needs of the blog, and let this blogger do their thing. What I received from this blogger, was one of the most personal and informative entries in the blog’s history. Not only was the profile amazing, the author immediately followed up its publishing with a second entry that drove even deeper into the intersection of autism and polyamory. Had the self-identities questions been available then, the follow-up might not have been needed. Instead, that follow-up became the signpost that such a question was necessary. It would be added to the submission form the very next week. So, what happened in this situation, is that I gave up control of my platform, and opened it up to ideas outside of my own. As far as representation goes, the goals of my blog are clear, but I understand that I don’t have the tools to manage them. Not completely and not by myself. Had I kept my hands on the steering wheel, this bit of magic would never have occurred. Furthermore, I’d have lost the idea that my platform was welcoming to neurodiverse people or people with disabilities. I didn’t want to be the kind of privileged person who tells oppressed people what their version of diversity should look like. It’s the reason why I readily accept nominations for blog contributors. Everyone can have a hand in the creative process, in as much as it pertains to them. So, instead of trying to control the narrative, the pen was passed to those with lived experience to express themselves in the way that felt most authentic to them. In response, Poly Role Models became a more honest and welcoming resource, especially with the newly inspired question.

A Seed has no energy of its own, but it can respond in the right environment. Every form of life has a capacity for response but none so much as the human being. In an infertile environment this capacity for response may be dormant. The cultivation we need to provide is through conscious awareness. This makes the difference between nominally being alive and being alive abundantly. Life is not just this bioenergetic vitality, but a spiritual vitality that is eternal, and we are that. This life span that we know on earth is said to be one chapter in the story of Life. This eternal Life reflects through us. With awareness we can develop all our faculties. The body, mind, spirit, and ecology form an interconnected whole. When a harmonious relationship exists among all of these, we have abundant life.

Their approach is almost always to relativize Jesus, diminish his significance, or allow him to stand as part of the background noise while they direct the attention of believers to their own agenda—legalism, perhaps, or endless self-help, or sentimentalized therapy, or a Jesus who is no more than one of many options. Thus by their teaching they disown the Jesus whose death potentially embraced all, not least these false teachers who nominally submit to him but who in reality domesticate him or reinvent him.

Stalin’s machine politics of self-advancement were founded on the strategy of using the Secretariat to build a party clientele in the provinces and then transmuting this local power into central power. Through Uchraspred and the roving Central Committee instructors, individuals of ability who gave promise of serving the needs of the Stalin organization were identified. The next step was to advance them in their political careers, particularly in the network of provincial party organizations. The province, town, and district party committees were subject to election by local party conferences, and the party secretaries at all three levels—these being full-time party workers, or apparatchiki, in informal parlance—were subject to election by the committees. The elective procedures continued to be observed. Through the process of nomination, however, the electoral results came to be governed more and more by Central Committee recommendations having the force of directives. A former Central Committee secretary, Preobrazhensky, complained at the Twelfth Congress that approximately 30 per cent of the secretaries of the party committees of provinces had been “recommended” by the Central Committee.[

The proposal for a Russia-based party organ carried an overtone of self-nomination to the editorial role that Stalin in fact came to play when Pravda was founded in Petersburg three years later. In a resolution of January 22, 1910, written by Stalin, the Baku party committee not only repeated the proposal for an all-Russian party organ but called for “the transfer of the (directing) practical center to Russia.

At this crucial point, where all rationality risks crumbling beneath the immensity of propagandistic self-evidence, one must be careful to be sure of the details and, in particular, to examine the effects of the nominal chain induced by the passage from the adjective ‘terrorist’ – as the formal qualification of an act – to the substantive ‘terrorism’. For this is the moment when, insidiously, form becomes substance. This process gives rise to three kinds of effect: a subject-effect (facing ‘terrorism’ is a ‘we’ avenging itself); an alterity-effect (this ‘terrorism’ is the other of Civilization, barbarous Islam); and finally, a periodization-effect (now begins the long ‘war against terrorism’).

For example, efforts at party reform during the late 1960s and early 1970s aimed to remove the presidential nomination process from the hands of the politicians and turn it over to “the people.”31 This had two unintended negative results. First, the lack of an initial vetting process for potential candidates increased the risk of electing officeholders lacking basic competence or even personal integrity. Second, because the people as a collectivity are incapable of enforcing accountability between elections, and because their choice may not have the support of other officeholders, a new president facing an uncooperative Congress may be tempted to act unilaterally. F. H. Buckley sees this as a potentially fatal flaw in the system as a whole: “The increased likelihood of deadlock in a presidential system might invite dictators to step in and cure the problem by ruling extralegally, or at a minimum, by extending the scope of executive power.” Excessive democratization can produce conditions favorable to the rise of a plebiscitary ruler—a Napoleonic figure or “a Weberian charismatic hero with a dangerously exaggerated sense of self.”32 Clearly, the American example illustrates that while democratic checks on power are positive and beneficial, they cannot be applied indiscriminately throughout a political system without incurring negative consequences.33