Severe Injury Quotes

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

Dad leapt over the garden wall instead of going through the gate. Sadly he didn‘t do himself a severe injury, and so he lives to embarrass me to death another day.

You see, that's the thing with you detrus," Chase began in a contemplative tone. "Your bodies are abominations. If I severed your arms--" Lothaire yawned loudly. "--you'd merely regenerate from the injury. You might experience pain, but you wouldn't suffer the horror of permanent loss, not like a human." Lothaire grew increasingly bored by this. "When I get free, I believe I'll show you your spine. I'll hand it to you so casually, politely even, as if expecting you to remark upon it.

Miles was…the thing is, he was afflicted with a severe birth injury. He grew up pretty much crippled, so he poured all his frustrated energy into his intellect. Since the Vorkosigan family motto might as well be, Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving, the effect was pretty frightening. And it worked for him, so he did it some more.

And what renders him so unmarriageable?” Eloise asked. Francesca leveled a serious stare at her older sister. Eloise was mad if she thought she should set her cap for Michael. “Well?” Eloise prodded. “He could never remain faithful to one woman,” Francesca said, “and I doubt you’d be willing to put up with infidelities.” “No,” Eloise murmured, “not unless he’d be willing to put up with severe bodily injury.

She’s dying?!” “What?!” “He didn’t say that!” “Let me evaluate the severity of her injuries!” “Dude, get your stupid medical bag.” “It’s not so stupid now that we need it, is it?!” “Shut the bloody hell up and get the bag!

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengence need not be feared" Nicolo Machiavelli Nicholas Jayzon

Man near entrance is shot in the head at close range from behind. The other two, multiple stab wounds, genitals severed, other injuries. Also head and pubic hair ignited, shot, muzzle in mouth. Three bullets recovered, 45 calibre." Villani: “So you can’t rule out an accident?

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later.

Mortimer had maxed three credit cards stocking the cave with canned goods and medical supplies and tools and everything a man needed to live through the end of the world. There were more than a thousand books along shelves in the driest part of the cave. There used to be several boxes of pornography until Mortimer realized that he'd spent nearly ten days in a row sitting in the cave masturbating. He burned the dirty magazines to keep from doing some terrible whacking injury to himself.

the hospital treated 11,602 patients, sixty-four a day, for injuries and ailments that suggest that the mundane sufferings of people have not changed very much over the ages. The list included: 820 cases of diarrhea; 154, constipation; 21, hemorrhoids; 434, indigestion; 365, foreign bodies in the eyes; 364, severe headaches; 594 episodes of fainting, syncope , and exhaustion; 1 case of extreme flatulence; and 169 involving teeth that hurt like hell.

On Ryukyu islands, the expert Kara-te practitioners, used their skills to subdue, control and generally teach bullies A lesson, rather than severely injure or kill their attackers. They knew full well the consequences of their actions and the trail of blood and retribution that would ensue

Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a "population" of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience. Similar considerations arise with regard to recover and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this. And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.

God will not let any violence go unpunished, but He Himself will take vengeance on our enemies and will send home to them what they have deserved by the way they have treated us. As He Himself says (Deut. 23:55): “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.” On the basis of this, St. Paul admonishes the Christians (Rom. 12:19): “Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.” These words are not only instruction but also consolation, as if He were to say: “Do not take it upon yourselves to avenge yourselves on one another or to speak curses and maledictions. The person that does you harm or injury is interfering with the office of God and sinning against God as gravely as this man has sinned against you. Therefore, keep your fist to yourself. Leave it to the charge of His wrath and punishing, for He will not let it remain unavenged, and His punishment is more severe than you would like. This man has not assailed you but God Himself, and has already fallen into His wrath. He will not escape this. No one ever has. So why get angry with him when the anger of God, immensely greater and more severe than the anger and punishment of the whole world, has already come upon him and has already avenged itself more thoroughly than you ever could? Besides, he has not injured you one tenth as much as he has injured God. When you see him lying under the severe condemnation, why so many curses and threats of vengeance? Rather you should take pity on his plight, and pray for him to be rescued from it and to reform.

Walter told me that it was working from morning until night, being outdoors, that made him feel normal again. Then one afternoon, tragedy struck. He was cutting a tree when a branch dislodged and struck him, breaking his neck. It was a serious injury that left Walter in very poor condition for several weeks. He didn't have a lot of care available, so he came to live with me in Montgomery for several months until he recovered.

Henry hooked his legs on the branch and flipped over gingerly, until he was hanging upside-down, grinning at Vlad. Then Henry's grin slipped. He fell to the ground several feet below with a thump, crying out as his body made impact. Vlad shimmied down the tree as fast as he could. "Henry ! Are you okay?" Henry sat up, clutching his wounded knee. He looked very much like he was going to start crying any second. A small, thin line of blood oozed from the scrape on his knee. Vlad's tiny fangs shot from his gums. Henry's eyes went wide, his injury all but forgotten. "What are those?" Vlad's small shoulders sank. He'd let his dad down. "They're my fangs." "Vlad, are you a vampire or something?" Henry's eyes were big, and Vlad was certain he saw fear in them. Not as much fear as when Henry had been falling from the tree, but close. He took a deep breath, glancing at the house. Then he sat down in front of Henry and said, "Yeah, Henry. I'm a vampire. But it's a secret. A very, very, very big secret and you can't tell anyone ever.

I can smell the ocean in the distance. The salt wraps around my body, making my skin feel tight, and already I want to shower. I can do big cities, and small cities, and the even the occasional mountaintop is cool. But oceans are ridiculous. They take up way too much space in this overcrowded world and are filled with creatures that have several sets of teeth, like one row of man-eating teeth isn’t enough. And just to add insult to injury, all that water isn’t even drinkable. If you ask me, the ocean is kind of a prick.

The swelling from the injury was so severe, it was causing enormous pressure on my brain, which if left uncontrolled would have killed me. This surgery lasted about six hours

[Chia Lin enumerates several ways of inflicting this injury, some of which would only occur to the Oriental mind:

Our Chasers Aren’t Cheating! That was the stunned reaction of Quidditch fans across Britain last night when the so-called “Stooging Penalty” was announced by the Department of Magical Games and Sports last night. “Instances of stooging have been on the increase,” said a harassed-looking Departmental representative last night. “We feel that this new rule will eliminate the sever Keeper injuries we have been seeing only too often. From now on, one Chaser will attempt to beat the Keeper, as opposed to three Chasers beating the Keeper up. Everything will be much cleaner and fairer.” At this point the Departmental representative was forced to retreat as the angry crowd started to bombard him with Quaffles. Wizards from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement arrived to disperse the crowd, who were threatening to stooge the Minister of Magic himself. One freckle-faced six-year-old left the hall in tears. “I loved stooging,” he sobbed to the Daily Prophet. “Me and me dad like watching them Keepers flattened. I don’t want to go to Quidditch no more.” Daily Prophet, 22 June 1884

I found the head nurse and asked her, and she said Dan has been flown back to America on account of they can take better care of him there. I asked her if he is okay, and she said, 'Yeah, if you can call two punctured lungs, a severed intestine, spinal separation, a missing foot, a truncated leg, and third degree burns over half the body okay, then he is just fine. I thanked her, and went on my way.

In any given rape case, the jury is pulled from the same rape culture we all live in. And the defence will trot out every allowable rate myth to create reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror. If there's no rock solid physical evidence of video, maybe, or at least severe injuries to the victim, the battle may be simply unwinnable for the prosecution. And prosecutors really don't like that.

Life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.

Our emotions also motivate us, and people with a diminished capacity for emotion—whether from brain injury, severe depression, or another mental disorder—find it especially hard to make decisions let alone act upon them.

Amongst these brave soldiers was Dfr Vir Singh (Retd) of 4 Horse, whose flesh was charred off his bones by a Cobra missile that hit his tank. He spoke with great regard for his Squadron Commander Maj Bhupinder Singh, MVC, who too was severely burned in the same attack after they had destroyed many tanks in the Battle of Phillora. When the then Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri visited a dying Maj Singh in the Army Base Hospital, Delhi, the officer had tears in his eyes. A touched Shastri told Maj Singh that tears didn’t become a brave soldier like him. Maj Singh replied, ‘Sir, I’m not pained because of any injury. I’m anguished that a soldier is not being able to salute his Prime Minister.

As Grief Beyond Belief member Lisa M. Lilly said, “After my parents were killed by a drunk driver, people said things to me that I found extremely difficult to hear, such as that their deaths were God’s plan or God’s will. While I’m sure the speakers thought they were offering comfort, the idea that God wanted my mother to be run over and die in the street and my father to suffer 6 1/2 weeks with severe injuries, only to die after several surgeries, was appalling to me.

The commonest form of psychic attack is that which proceeds from the ignorant or malignant mind of our fellow human beings. We say ignorant as well as malignant, for all attacks are not deliberately motived; the injury may be as accidental as that inflicted by a skidding car. This must always be borne in mind, and we should not impute malice or wickedness as a matter of course when we feel we are being victimised. Our persecutor may himself be a victim. We should not accuse a man of malice if we had linked hands with him and he had stepped on a live rail. Nevertheless, we should receive at his hands a severe shock. So it may be with many an occult attack. The person from whom it emanates may not have originated it. Therefore we should never respond to attack by attack, thus bringing ourselves down to the moral level of our attackers, but rely upon more humane methods, which are, in reality, equally effectual and far less dangerous to handle.

MYTH625. | You can get knocked out for a while and still stand up without a problem. Doctors say that if you're ever knocked out for more than five minutes, you must go to the emergency room as there's a very good chance that you have severe brain injury.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared. He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command. One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived. Politics have no relation to morals

Sophie agreed to reset her inflicting—which means taking limbium and hoping Livvy and I can stop her allergy before it kills her. No pressure. SYMPTOMS/INJURIES: Sophie went with the stronger, more dangerous dose (Is anyone shocked by this?), so the reaction was severe—and her heart stopped.

John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated anyway.

When I first began looking at gender issues, I believed that violence was a by-product of boyhood socialization. But after listening more closely to men and their families, I have come to believe that violence is boyhood socialization. The way we “turn boys into men” is through injury: We sever them from their mothers, research tells us, far too early. We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase “Be a man” means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.

I’ve always been intimidated by gyms, have never been able to enjoy the towel-round-the-shoulder confidence of somebody who knows he can bench-press 250 pounds, or even knows what that means or how much 250 pounds weighs. I just know I don’t like lifting heavy things, especially since I had this wrist injury which stopped me playing tennis and which means that I’ve gone from being fit and thin-looking to just a feeble streak of unshouldered manhood whose only saving grace is that he doesn’t take up much space, who leaves plenty of room for others—especially now that I was several days into a quasi-hunger strike.

Little good comes from a head injury, but it does cut down the wait when you show up unannounced at the emergency room. Mentioning the words “horse,” “thrown,” and “head” pushes you right up to the front of the line, ahead of everyone apart from people who have stopped breathing, people whose hearts have given out, and people with severed limbs.

The chief care of the legislators [in the colonies of New England] was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: thus they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which was no subject to magisterial censure. The reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. The judge was empowered to inflict either a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage, on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not unfrequent. We find a sentence, bearing date the 1st of May, 1660, inflicting a fine and reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed. The Code of 1650 abounds in preventive measures. It punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity. Innkeepers were forbidden to furnish more than certain quantities of liquor to each customer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious, is checked by a fine or a flogging. In other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself demanded in Europe, makes attendance on divine service compulsory, and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment, and even with death, Christians who choose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own. Sometimes, indeed, the zeal for regulation induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco. It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested in them, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and puritanical than the laws.... These errors are no doubt discreditable to human reason; they attest the inferiority of our nature, which is incapable of laying firm hold upon what is true and just, and is often reduced to the alternative of two excesses. In strict connection with this penal legislation, which bears such striking marks of a narrow, sectarian spirit, and of those religious passions which had been warmed by persecution and were still fermenting among the people, a body of political laws is to be found, which, though written two hundred years ago, is still in advance of the liberties of our own age.

What I saw of military life left me humbled. As long as I’d been alive, I’d never encountered the kind of fortitude and loyalty that I found in those rooms. One day in San Antonio, Texas, I noticed a minor commotion in the hallway of the military hospital I was visiting. Nurses shuffled urgently in and out of the room I was about to enter. “He won’t stay in bed,” I heard someone whisper. Inside, I found a broad-shouldered young man from rural Texas who had multiple injuries and whose body had been severely burned. He was in clear agony, tearing off the bedsheets and trying to slide his feet to the floor. It took us all a minute to understand what he was doing. Despite his pain, he was trying to stand up and salute the wife of his commander in chief.

Maddie de Garay, a 14-year-old who participated in the Pfizer trial, suffered severe neurological injuries including seizures and permanent paralysis. However, Pfizer reported only that Maddie suffered a stomach ache. The Pfizer vaccine only gained emergency authorization for use in children because Pfizer manipulated trial data and committed serious offences, like hiding Maddie de Garay’s injury.

I still had moments when my nerves got to me, but whenever I’d start to get anxious, Kyla Ross would remind me, “Simone, just do what you do in practice.” And before I went out for each event, she’d high-five me and say, “Just like practice, Simone!” I’d say the same thing to her when it was her turn to go up. “Just like practice” became our catchphrase. As I walked onto the mat to do my floor exercise, I held on to that phrase like it was a lifeline, because I was about to perform a difficult move I’d come up with in practice—a double flip in the layout position with a half twist out. The way it happened was, I’d landed short on a double layout full out earlier that year during training, and I’d strained my calf muscle on the backward landing. Aimee didn’t want me to risk a more severe injury, so she suggested I do the double layout—body straight with legs together and fully extended as I flipped twice in the air—then add a half twist at the end. That extra half twist meant I’d have to master a very tricky blind forward landing, but it would put less stress on my calves. I thought the new combination sounded incredibly cool, so I started playing around with it until I was landing the skill 95 percent of the time. At the next Nationals Camp, I demonstrated the move for Martha and she thought it looked really good, so we went ahead and added it to the second tumbling pass of my floor routine. I’d already performed the combination at national meets that year, but doing it at Worlds was different. That’s because when a completely new skill is executed successfully at a season-ending championship like Worlds or the Olympics, the move will forever after be known by the name of the gymnast who first performed it. Talk about high stakes! I’ll cut to the chase: I nailed the move, which is how it came to be known as the Biles. How awesome is that! (The only problem is, when I see another gymnast perform the move now, I pray they don’t get hurt. I know it’s not logical, but because the move is named after me, I’d feel as if it was my fault.)

When Barlinnie’s Prison doctor, Dr Danson, came to see Dingus, he turned in disgust at the state Dingus was left to lie in. Doctor Danson refused to treat him as he knew Dingus’s injuries were life threatening, he told the top warden that Dingus would need to be rushed to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency surgery. The screws in the seg block refused to listen to the doctor, they pushed and manhandled their own doctor out of Dingus’s cell and threatened him with a severe beating if he made anything public about Dingus’s injuries.

The seven people murdered by Chechen immigrants Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who planted a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. In addition to the three people killed in the blast, including an eight-year-old boy, dozens of Americans suffered severe injuries in the marathon bombing and are still learning to live with prosthetics and other artificial devices to replace lost legs, feet, eyes, and hearing—all thanks to an immigration policy that allows other countries to dump their losers on us. Days after setting off the bomb, the duo murdered a young MIT police officer during their attempted escape, and two years earlier Tamerlan and another Muslim immigrant slit the throats of three Jewish men on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack—which I believe was also the work of immigrants. CNN headline after the attack: “Boston Bombing Shouldn’t Derail Immigration Reform.”32 Leaving aside the wanton slaughter, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were tremendous assets to America. They were on welfare and getting mostly Fs in school. Good work, U.S. immigration service!

Midway through the gruesomely pleasant dinner, Kev became aware that Amelia, who was seated at the end of the table, was unusually quiet. He looked at her closely, realizing her color was off and her cheeks were sweaty. Since he was seated at her immediate left, Kev leaned close and whispered, “What is it?” Amelia gave him a distracted glance. “Ill,” she whispered back, swallowing weakly. “I feel so … Oh, Merripen, do help me away from the table.” Without another word, Kev pushed his chair back and helped her up. Cam, who was at the other end of the long table, looked at them sharply. “Amelia?” “She’s ill,” Kev said. Cam reached them in a flash, his face taut with anxiety. As he gathered Amelia in his arms and carried her, protesting, from the room, one would think she’d suffered a severe injury rather than a probable case of indigestion. “Perhaps I might be of service,” Dr. Harrow said with quiet concern, laying his napkin on the table as he made to follow them. “Thank you,” Win said, smiling at him gratefully. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Kev barely restrained himself from gnashing his teeth in jealousy as Harrow left the room. The rest of the meal was largely neglected, the family going to the main receiving room to wait for a report on Amelia. It took an unnervingly long time for anyone to appear. “What could be the matter?” Beatrix asked plaintively. “Amelia’s never ill.” “She’ll be fine,” Win soothed. “Dr. Harrow will take excellent care of her.” “Perhaps I should go to their room,” Poppy said, “and ask how she is.” But before anyone could offer an opinion, Cam appeared in the doorway of the receiving room. He looked bemused, his hazel eyes vivid as he glanced at the assorted family members around him. He appeared to search for words. Then a dazzling smile appeared despite his obvious effort to moderate it. “No doubt the gadje have a more civilized way to put this,” he said, “but Amelia is with child.” A chorus of happy exclamations greeted the revelation. “What did Amelia say?” Leo asked. Cam’s smile turned wry. “Something to the effect that this wouldn’t be convenient.” Leo laughed quietly. “Children rarely are. But she’ll adore having someone new to manage.

I wasn't in a moment's danger. Ravenel was the one who held off a belligerent bull while I fetched the boy." Evie closed her eyes briefly at the thought of it and reached for the crystal glass in his hand. She downed what little was left and set the glass on the floor. "You suffered no injuries?" Two long, wet fingers hooked the top of her neckline and tugged her closer to the side of the bathtub. Sebastian's eyes were pale, lucent blue, sparkling like winter starlight. "I may have enough of a sprain to require your services." A smile curved her lips. "What services?" "I need a bath maid." Catching one of her hands, he drew it down into the water. "For my hard-to-reach places." Evie resisted with a throaty chuckle, tugging at her imprisoned wrist. "You can reach that by yourself." "My sweet," he said, nuzzling into her neck, "I married you so I wouldn't have to do it myself. Now... tell me where you think my sprain is." "Sebastian," she said, trying to sound severe as his wet hands roved over her bodice, "you're going to r-ruin my dress." "Unless you remove it." He gave her an expectant glance.

In the course of an extended investigation into the nature of inflammation, and the healthy and morbid conditions of the blood in relation to it, I arrived several years ago at the conclusion that the essential cause of suppuration in wounds is decomposition brought about by the influence of the atmosphere upon blood or serum retained within them, and, in the case of contused wounds, upon portions of tissue destroyed by the violence of the injury. To prevent the occurrence of suppuration with all its attendant risks was an object manifestly desirable, but till lately apparently unattainable, since it seemed hopeless to attempt to exclude the oxygen which was universally regarded as the agent by which putrefaction was effected. But when it had been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic properties of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles.

I opened the curtain and entered the confessional, a dark wooden booth built into the side wall of the church. As I knelt on the small worn bench, I could hear a boy's halting confession through the wall, his prescribed penance inaudible as the panel slid open on my side and the priest directed his attention to me. "Yes, my child," he inquired softly. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my First Confession." "Yes, my child, and what sins have you committed?" .... "I talked in church twenty times, I disobeyed my mother five times, I wished harm to others several times, I told a fib three times, I talked back to my teacher twice." I held my breath. "And to whom did you wish harm?" My scheme had failed. He had picked out the one group of sins that most troubled me. Speaking as softly as I could, I made my admission. "I wished harm to Allie Reynolds." "The Yankee pitcher?" he asked, surprise and concern in his voice. "And how did you wish to harm him?" "I wanted him to break his arm." "And how often did you make this wish?" "Every night," I admitted, "before going to bed, in my prayers." "And were there others?" "Oh, yes," I admitted. "I wished that Robin Roberts of the Phillies would fall down the steps of his stoop, and that Richie Ashburn would break his hand." "Is there anything else?" "Yes, I wished that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib, and that Alvin Dark of the Giants would hurt his knee." But, I hastened to add, "I wished that all these injuries would go away once the baseball season ended." ... "Are there any other sins, my child?" "No, Father." "For your penance, say two Hail Mary's, three Our Fathers, and," he added with a chuckle, "say a special prayer for the Dodgers. ...

If she had to choose which aspect of the suite she despised most, it would have been a hard call between the lock and the garden, though these days she nursed a particular grudge against the curtains. She hid behind them to watch Arin leave the house, and return--very often on her horse. Despite the way he had looked after the battle, his injuries weren’t serious. His limp lessened, the bandage on his neck disappeared, and the raging bruises muted into ugly greens and violets. Several days passed without any words between him and her, and that set Kestrel on edge. It was hard to rub out the memory of his smile--exhausted, sweet. And then that waterfall of relief. Kestrel sent him a letter. Jess was likely to recover, she wrote. She asked to visit Ronan, who was being held in the city prison. Arin’s reply was a curt note: No. She decided not to press the issue. Her request had been due to a sense of obligation. She dreaded seeing Ronan--even if he agreed to speak with her. Even if he did not loathe her now. Kestrel knew that to look upon Ronan would be to come face-to-face with her failure. She had done everything wrong…including not being able to love him. She folded the one-word letter and set it aside.

Honoria nodded and was about to say something utterly forgettable when she saw that his hand had been bandaged. “I hope your injury is not severe,” she said politely. “Oh, this?” he held up his hand. His fingers were free to waggle, but the rest of it looked rather like a mitt. “It’s nothing. An altercation with a letter opener.” “Well, please do be careful of infection,” Honoria said, somewhat more forcefully than was de rigueur. “If it grows red, or swollen, or even worse, yellow, then you must see a doctor at once.” “Green?” he quipped. “I beg your pardon?” “You listed so many colors about which I must be wary.” For a moment Honoria could only stare. Wound infection was not a laughing matter. “Lady Honoria?” he murmured. She decided to proceed as if he’d said nothing. “Most importantly, you must watch for reddish streaks spreading from the wound. Those are the worst.” He blinked, but if he was startled by the turn of the conversation, he did not show it. Instead he looked down at his hand with a curious eye and said, “How red?” “I beg your pardon?” “How red do the streaks have to be before I must worry?” “How do you know so much about medicine?” Lady Danbury cut in. “Do you know, I’m not sure how red,” Honoria told Mr. Bridgerton. “I would think anything stripey ought to be a cause for alarm.

Boston University’s CTE Center has established a “brain bank,” where former athletes with symptoms consistent with CTE can donate their brains upon death. Now with 425 brains, the center published a study in 2017 of former professional and amateur football players. Among 111 NFL players, the brains of all but one of them showed signs of severe CTE. That’s sobering and frightening, but it’s extremely important to keep in mind that this study involved former players who already showed personality and mental changes consistent with brain injury. It was not a random sample of NFL players, most of whom never show such changes despite having experienced concussions.

Sad as the position of a slave is, my uncle’s hardness of heart added much to the unhappiness of those who had the misfortune to be his property. My uncle was one of the happily small number of planters from whom despotic power had taken away the gentler feelings of humanity. He was accustomed to see his most trifling command unhesitatingly obeyed, and the slightest delay on the part of his slaves in carrying it out was punished with the harshest severity; while the intercession either of my cousin or of myself too often merely led to an increase of the punishment, and we were only too often obliged to rest satisfied by secretly assuaging the injuries which we were powerless to prevent.

My fellow resident Jeff and I worked traumas together. When he called me down to the trauma bay because of a concurrent head injury, we were always in sync. He'd assess the abdomen, then ask for my prognosis on a patient's cognitive function. "Well, he could still be a senator," I once replied, "but only from a small state." Jeff laughed, and from that moment on, state population became our barometer for head-injury severity. "Is he a Wyoming or a California?" Jeff would ask, trying to determine how intensive his care plan should be. Or I'd say, "Jeff, I know his blood pressure is labile, but I gotta get him to the OR or he's gonna go from Washington to Idaho---can you get him stabilized?

One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed. As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young. However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers." Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone. Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations. To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own. Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

The Boston marathon bombings, which took place on April 15, 2013, resulted in injuries to 264 people and the deaths of 3 people. In the ensuing police chase, one of the perpetrators, Tamerian Tsarnaev, was shot several times and run over by his own brother Dzhokhar. When the dust finally settled, the Boston funeral home that had volunteered to care for Tamerian’s body required a round the clock police guard. However, no cemetery in New England would accept the body. Weeks later, in desperation, the Boston police department appealed to the public to help them find a cemetery. In rural Virginia, Martha Mullen, sipping coffee at Starbucks, heard that appeal and said to herself, “Somebody needs to do something about that.” She decided to be that somebody. Through her efforts, Tsarnaev’s body finally found a burial place at the end of a long, quiet gravel road off Sadie Lane in Doswell, Virginia. Needless to say, when this was discovered by the local community, all sorts of controversy arose. The people of her county were upset, and the family members of others buried in that cemetery rose up in anger. Reached by reporters from the AP by phone, she was asked what her response was to all of the hubbub. Her explanation was simple. Martha calmly said, “Jesus said love your enemies.” He did say precisely that, and that revolutionary call echoed through two millennia of time to minister to a dead Muslim’s grieving family in Boston. Is it ministering to anybody around you?

My husband has trouble communicating his feelings, so I may have to translate for him. He feels guilt. He remembers everything he has done, the people he killed, and the lives he ruined. It gnaws at him and it's ripping him apart. There are times he doesn't sleep for several days. He works himself to exhaustion trying to protect us, and he blames himself for every death and injury. He left our castle and our people and came here, because you need him. You are in critical danger. He can't change the past, but he can alter the future, and if you let him, he will do everything in his power to help. He isn't trying to win your forgiveness. He is here to atone, I am here because I love him. This is very difficult for him and I didn't want him to face it alone.

This sorrow, which has cut down to the root, has come to you while you are so young—try to think of it not as a spoiling of your life, but as a preparation for it. Let it be a preparation——” Any one overhearing his tones would have thought he was entreating for his own happiness. “See! you have been saved from the worst evils that might have come from your marriage, which you feel was wrong. You have had a vision of injurious, selfish action—a vision of possible degradation; think that a severe angel, seeing you along the road of error, grasped you by the wrist and showed you the horror of the life you must avoid. And it has come to you in your spring-time. Think of it as a preparation. You can, you will, be among the best of women, such as make others glad that they were born.

There’s a startling fact that you read somewhere: after airbags became standard in cars, statisticians noticed that the incidence of severe leg injuries increased dramatically. Think about it for a minute: Why should that be? Is there something about the way airbags inflate during collision that targets the passengers’ legs, makes them more vulnerable? No. It’s a matter of checks and balances. Before airbags, there were certain accidents that would have killed you; you’d be a corpse in the morgue, and no one would be paying any attention to your legs. When we change the way we do things—the way we shop for groceries or take care of our children or protect ourselves from harm—we set other changes in motion, for good or for ill. And it may be years before we figure out what we’ve done.

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later. Specifically, according to Vronsky, while all American soldiers who fought in WWII were trained to kill, a small contingent used the cover of state-sanctioned violence to also rape, torture, and collect human body parts as trophies. Though most returning GIs successfully reintegrated into society, some brought the brutality of war into their homes, abusing their families behind closed doors. That abuse, occurring as it did in a culture openly promoting war, created the fertile ground from which the first major crop of American serial killers would spring.

Nay, Sir Walter,” cried Mrs Clay, “this is being severe indeed. Have a little mercy on the poor men. We are not all born to be handsome. The sea is no beautifier, certainly; sailors do grow old betimes; I have observed it; they soon lose the look of youth. But then, is not it the same with many other professions, perhaps most other? Soldiers, in active service, are not at all better off: and even in the quieter professions, there is a toil and a labour of the mind, if not of the body, which seldom leaves a man’s looks to the natural effect of time. The lawyer plods, quite care-worn; the physician is up at all hours, and travelling in all weather; and even the clergyman—” she stopt a moment to consider what might do for the clergyman;—“and even the clergyman, you know is obliged to go into infected rooms, and expose his health and looks to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere.

Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, was only thirty-two but was already a physical wreck after ten physically and mentally draining years of pregnancy and childbirth. Her always precarious mental state was severely undermined by the discovery of Alexey’s condition and she tormented herself that she of all people had unwittingly transmitted haemophilia to her much-loved and longed-for son.* Her already melancholic air henceforth became an inexplicably tragic one to those not privy to the truth. The whole focus of the family now dramatically shifted, to protecting Alexey against accident and injury – to literally keeping him alive within their own closely controlled domestic world. Nicholas and Alexandra therefore abandoned their newly refurbished apartments in the Winter Palace and ceased staying in town for the court season. Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof would from now on be their refuge.

One of the most severe and challenging of all pains is said to be phantom limb pain, when the sufferer perceives agonies in a part of the body that has been lost to accident or amputation. It is an obvious irony that one of the greatest pains we feel can be in a part of us that is no longer there. Worse, unlike normal pain, which usually abates as a wound heals, phantom pain may go on for a lifetime. No one can yet explain why. One theory is that in the absence of receiving any signal from the nerve fibers in the missing body part, the brain interprets this as an injury so severe that the cells have died, and so sends out an unending call of distress, like a burglar alarm that won’t turn off. If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain.

They are swatting us like flies,’ a Soviet infantryman on the Finnish front complained in December 1939. By the time the conflict was over, more than 126,000 Soviet troops had been killed and another 300,000 evacuated from the front because of injury, disease or frostbite. Finnish losses were also severe, indeed proportionately even more so, at 50,000 killed and 43,000 wounded. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that the Finns had given the Soviets a bloody nose. Their troops showed not only courage and determination, fuelled by strong nationalist commitment, but also ingenuity. Borrowing from the example of Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, the Finns took empty bottles of spirits, filled them with kerosene and other chemicals, stuck a wick in each of them, then lit them and threw them at incoming Soviet tanks, covering them with flames. ‘I never knew a tank could burn for quite that long,’ said a Finnish veteran. They devised a new name for the projectile, too: in honour of the Soviet Foreign Minister they called them ‘Molotov cocktails’.

In our own bodies, only the liver is capable of limited regeneration, but chop a limb off a starfish or a salamander, and it will grow a new one. We are starting to understand the molecular signals that are used by these species to regenerate limbs in adult life. Mammals seem to only use this signalling pathway during the growth of the early embryo but it is a pathway that may well have the potential to be reactivated. Following surgical removal, the wings can grow back in embryonic chickens when the production of a protein called wnt is switched on. Frog limb regeneration can also take place later in the life cycle when wnt protein is expressed. Tadpoles have this ability but it is normally lost when they metamorphose into frogs. The expression of wnt signalling protein around an injury is thought to cause a reprogramming or transdifferentiation of mature cells into stem cells capable of producing the cell types needed for the limb. Very young children have been known to re-grow severed fingertips, and so there are intriguing possibilities for human tissue regeneration.

At eight-thirty that night Ian stood on the steps outside Elizabeth’s uncle’s town house suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to murder Elizabeth’s butler, who seemed to be inexplicably fighting down the impulse to do bodily injury to Ian. “I will ask you again, in case you misunderstood me the last time,” Ian enunciated in a silky, ominous tone that made ordinary men blanch. “Where is your mistress?” Bentner didn’t change color by so much as a shade. “Out!” he informed the man who’d ruined his young mistress’s life and had now appeared on her doorstep, unexpected and uninvited, no doubt to try to ruin it again, when she was at this very moment attending her first ball in years and trying bravely to live down the gossip he had caused. “She is out, but you do not know where she is?” “I did not say so, did I?” “Then where is she?” “That is for me to know and you to ponder.” In the last several days Ian had been forced to do a great many unpleasant things, including riding across half of England, dealing with Christina’s irate father, and finally dealing with Elizabeth’s repugnant uncle, who had driven a bargain that still infuriated him. Ian had magnanimously declined her dowry as soon as the discussion began. Her uncle, however, had the finely honed bargaining instincts of a camel trader, and he immediately sensed Ian’s determination to do whatever was necessary to get Julius’s name on a betrothal contract. As a result, Ian was the first man to his knowledge who had ever been put in the position of purchasing his future wife for a ransom of $150,000. Once he’d finished that repugnant ordeal he’d ridden off to Montmayne, where he’d sopped only long enough to switch his horse for a coach and get his valet out of bed. Then he’d charged off to London, stopped at his town house to bathe and change, and gone straight to the address Julius Cameron had given him. Now, after all that, Ian was not only confronted by Elizabeth’s absence, he was confronted by the most insolent servant he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. In angry silence he turned and walked down the steps. Behind him the door slammed shut with a thundering crash, and Ian paused a moment to turn back and contemplate the pleasure he was going to have when he sacked the butler tomorrow.

With one final flip the quarter flew high into the air and came down on the mattress with a light bounce. It jumped several inches off the bed, high enough for the instructor to catch it in his hand. Swinging around to face me, the instructor looked me in the eye and nodded. He never said a word. Making my bed correctly was not going to be an opportunity for praise. It was expected of me. It was my first task of the day, and doing it right was important. It demonstrated my discipline. It showed my attention to detail, and at the end of the day it would be a reminder that I had done something well, something to be proud of, no matter how small the task. Throughout my life in the Navy, making my bed was the one constant that I could count on every day. As a young SEAL ensign aboard the USS Grayback, a special operation submarine, I was berthed in sick bay, where the beds were stacked four high. The salty old doctor who ran sick bay insisted that I make my rack every morning. He often remarked that if the beds were not made and the room was not clean, how could the sailors expect the best medical care? As I later found out, this sentiment of cleanliness and order applied to every aspect of military life. Thirty years later, the Twin Towers came down in New York City. The Pentagon was struck, and brave Americans died in an airplane over Pennsylvania. At the time of the attacks, I was recuperating in my home from a serious parachute accident. A hospital bed had been wheeled into my government quarters, and I spent most of the day lying on my back, trying to recover. I wanted out of that bed more than anything else. Like every SEAL I longed to be with my fellow warriors in the fight. When I was finally well enough to lift myself unaided from the bed, the first thing I did was pull the sheets up tight, adjust the pillow, and make sure the hospital bed looked presentable to all those who entered my home. It was my way of showing that I had conquered the injury and was moving forward with my life. Within four weeks of 9/11, I was transferred to the White House, where I spent the next two years in the newly formed Office of Combatting Terrorism. By October 2003, I was in Iraq at our makeshift headquarters on the Baghdad airfield. For the first few months we slept on Army cots. Nevertheless, I would wake every morning, roll up my sleeping bag, place the pillow at the head of the cot, and get ready for the day.

Before she could study the damage, Zane grabbed her by her arm and pulled her to her feet. He took her hand in his and examined the injury. Several things occurred to her at once. First--that they’d never stood this close together before. He was so big, tall and broad that he made her feel positively delicate by comparison. Second--for a man who had spent his morning on a horse, he smelled really good. All clean and woodsy. Third--the instant his fingers touched her, the pain miraculously vanished. Talk about amazing. “Skin’s not broken,” he said as he turned over her hand. “Tell me if this hurts.” He bent her fingers back and forth. His warmth sent sizzling jolts of awareness slip-sliding all through her body. Despite the heat filling her, something was wrong with her lungs because it was impossible to breathe. He touched her gently, as if he didn’t want to hurt her. The logical part of her brain turned cynical, announcing that he was simply concerned about a lawsuit by a goat-bitten city girl. The romantic side of her suddenly understood all those country songs about cowboys. What was it that country star Lacey Mills had sung? “Go ahead, cowboy. Rope me in.” It was a brief battle, with romance emerging victorious.

Therefore Flora said, though still not without a certain boastfulness and triumph in her legacy, that Mr F.'s Aunt was 'very lively to-day, and she thought they had better go.' But Mr F.'s Aunt proved so lively as to take the suggestion in unexpected dudgeon and declare that she would not go; adding, with several injurious expressions, that if 'He'--too evidently meaning Clennam--wanted to get rid of her, 'let him chuck her out of winder;' and urgently expressing her desire to see 'Him' perform that ceremony. In this dilemma, Mr Pancks, whose resources appeared equal to any emergency in the Patriarchal waters, slipped on his hat, slipped out at the counting-house door, and slipped in again a moment afterwards with an artificial freshness upon him, as if he had been in the country for some weeks. 'Why, bless my heart, ma'am!' said Mr Pancks, rubbing up his hair in great astonishment, 'is that you? How do you do, ma'am? You are looking charming to-day! I am delighted to see you. Favour me with your arm, ma'am; we'll have a little walk together, you and me, if you'll honour me with your company.' And so escorted Mr F.'s Aunt down the private staircase of the counting-house with great gallantry and success. — Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens

My general philosophy regarding endurance contains four key points: 1. Build a great aerobic base. This essential physical and metabolic foundation helps accomplish several important tasks: it prevents injury and maintains a balanced physical body; it increases fat burning for improved stamina, weight loss, and sustained energy; and it improves overall health in the immune and hormonal systems, the intestines and liver, and throughout the body. 2. Eat well. Specific foods influence the developing aerobic system, especially the foods consumed in the course of a typical day. Overall, diet can significantly influence your body’s physical, chemical, and mental state of fitness and health. 3. Reduce stress. Training and competition, combined with other lifestyle factors, can be stressful and adversely affect performance, cause injuries, and even lead to poor nutrition because they can disrupt the normal digestion and absorption of nutrients. 4. Improve brain function. The brain and entire nervous system control virtually all athletic activity, and a healthier brain produces a better athlete. Improved brain function occurs from eating well, controlling stress, and through sensory stimulation, which includes proper training and optimal breathing.

It is well known that animals respond poorly to living conditions that do not stimulate them mentally or physically. Rats, mice, monkeys, and other mammals confined for long periods in laboratory cages where they have little or no opportunity to engage in such natural behaviors as foraging, hiding, nest-building, or choosing social partners develop neurotic behaviors. Termed “stereotypies,” these behaviors involve repetitive, functionless actions sometimes performed for hours on end. Rodents, for example, will dig for hours at the corners of their cages, gnaw at the bars, or perform repeated somersaults. These “behavioral stereotypies” are estimated to afflict about half of the 100 million mice currently used in laboratory tests and experiments in the United States.16 Monkeys chronically confined to the boredom, stress, and social isolation of laboratory cages perform a wide range of abnormal, disturbing behaviors such as eating or smearing their own excrement, pulling or plucking their hair, slapping themselves, and self-biting that can cause serious, even fatal injury. Severely psychotic human patients display similar behaviors. If you’ve seen the repetitive pacing of caged big cats (and many other smaller animals) at the zoo, you’ve witnessed behavioral stereotypies.

Red: Maintaining health, bodily strength, physical energy, sex, passion, courage, protection, and defensive magic. This is the color of the element of fire. Throughout the world, red is associated with life and death, for this is the color of blood spilled in both childbirth and injury. Pink: Love, friendship, compassion, relaxation. Pink candles can be burned during rituals designed to improve self-love. They’re ideal for weddings and for all forms of emotional union. Orange: Attraction, energy. Burn to attract specific influences or objects. Yellow: Intellect, confidence, divination, communication, eloquence, travel, movement. Yellow is the color of the element of air. Burn yellow candles during rituals designed to heighten your visualization abilities. Before studying for any purpose, program a yellow candle to stimulate your conscious mind. Light the candle and let it burn while you study. Green: Money, prosperity, employment, fertility, healing, growth. Green is the color of the element of earth. It’s also the color of the fertility of the earth, for it echoes the tint of chlorophyll. Burn when looking for a job or seeking a needed raise. Blue: Healing, peace, psychism, patience, happiness. Blue is the color of the element of water. This is also the realm of the ocean and of all water, of sleep, and of twilight. If you have trouble sleeping, charge a small blue candle with a visualization of yourself sleeping through the night. Burn for a few moments before you get into bed, then extinguish its flame. Blue candles can also be charged and burned to awaken the psychic mind. Purple: Power, healing severe diseases, spirituality, meditation, religion. Purple candles can be burned to enhance all spiritual activities, to increase your magical power, and as a part of intense healing rituals in combination with blue candles. White: Protection, purification, all purposes. White contains all colors. It’s linked with the moon. White candles are specifically burned during purification and protection rituals. If you’re to keep but one candle on hand for magical purposes, choose a white one. Before use, charge it with personal power and it’ll work for all positive purposes. Black: Banishing negativity, absorbing negativity. Black is the absence of color. In magic, it’s also representative of outer space. Despite what you may have heard, black candles are burned for positive purposes, such as casting out baneful energies or to absorb illnesses and nasty habits. Brown: Burned for spells involving animals, usually in combination with other colors. A brown candle and a red candle for animal protection, brown and blue for healing, and so on.

He gave the empty flask to Arya, and as she took it, he grasped her hand, her right hand, and turned it toward the light. The skin was once more smooth and unblemished. No sign of her injury remained. “Blödhgarm healed you?” said Eragon. Arya nodded, and he released her. “Mostly. I have full use of my hand again.” She demonstrated by opening and closing it several times. “But there is still a patch of skin by the base of my thumb where I have no feeling.” She pointed with her left index finger. Eragon reached out and lightly touched the area. “Here?” “Here,” she said, and moved his hand a bit to the right. “And Blödhgarm wasn’t able to do anything about it?” She shook her head. “He tried a half-dozen spells, but the nerves refuse to rejoin.” She made dismissive motion. “It’s of no consequence. I can still wield a sword and I can still draw a bow. That is all that matters.” Eragon hesitated, then said, “You know…how grateful I am for what you did--what you tried to do. I’m only sorry it left you with a permanent mark. If I could have prevented it somehow…” “Do not feel bad because of it. It’s impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.” “Angela said something similar about enemies--that if you didn’t make them, you were a coward or worse.” Arya nodded. “There is some truth to that.

Sophie tried to get off the bed and nearly fell over when she felt the stabbing pain in her ankle. “Ouch!” “Are you all right?” Sylvan looked at her anxiously. “Fine, it’s just my ankle.” It was true that her twisted ankle was still throbbing, but she could stand to put some weight on it now. And she was going to have to if she didn’t want him carrying her everywhere. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light coming through the windows and she could see a small room to one side. “That must be the bathroom. Think I’ll go check out the hot water situation.” He reached for her. “I’ll carry you.” “No, no! It’s better already—see?” Sophie put her foot flat down on the floor and tried to smile despite the pain. Sylvan frowned. “If you’re certain you’re all right. I must have misjudged the severity of your injury.” “I’m perfectly fine,” Sophie said, trying to make her voice cheerful and light. “I mean, aside from being chased by evil cyborg dogs from hell who want to drag me back to the Scourge overlord, I couldn’t be better.” Sylvan’s eyes were suddenly dark. “Don’t even joke about that.” “Sorry.” She shrugged. “I was just trying to lighten the mood. I’ll just…” She motioned at the bathroom and he nodded. Because he was still watching her, Sophie forced herself to walk without limping, even though her ankle was still so tender and it felt like someone was sticking a knife into it with every step. Finally she got to the bathroom and breathed a sigh of relief as she closed the door. *

Here’s how I’ve always pictured mitigated free will: There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brainspecific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book. And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science. That’s what mitigated free will is about. I see incredibly smart people recoil from this and attempt to argue against the extremity of this picture rather than accept its basic validity: “You’re setting up a straw homunculus, suggesting that I think that other than the likes of seizures or brain injuries, we are making all our decisions freely. No, no, my free will is much softer and lurks around the edges of biology, like when I freely decide which socks to wear.” But the frequency or significance with which free will exerts itself doesn’t matter. Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically determined (in the broadest sense of this book), and it is only once a decade that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating outside the rules of science. This is how most people accommodate the supposed coexistence of free will and biological influences on behavior. For them, nearly all discussions come down to figuring what our putative homunculus should and shouldn’t be expected to be capable of.

Many people perceive the merit of a manuscript which is read to them, but will not declare themselves in its favour until they see what success it has in the world when printed, or what intelligent men will say about it. They do not like to risk their opinion, and they want to be carried away by the crowd, and dragged along by the multitude. Then they say that they were amongst the first who approved of that work, and the general public shares their opinion. 32 Such men lose the best opportunities of convincing us that they are intelligent, clever, and first-rate critics, and can really discover what is good and what is better. A fine work falls into their hands; it is an author’s first book, before he has got any great name; there is nothing to prepossess any one in his favour, and by applauding his writings one does not court or flatter the great. Zelotes, you are not required to cry out: “This is a masterpiece; human intelligence never went farther; the human speech cannot soar higher; henceforward we will judge of no one’s taste but by what he thinks of this book.” Such exaggerated and offensive expressions are only employed by postulants for pensions or benefices, and are even injurious to what is really commendable and what one wishes to praise. Why not merely say—“That’s a good book?” It is true you say it when the whole of France has approved of it, and foreigners as well as your own countrymen, when it is printed all over Europe, and has been translated into several languages, but then it is too late.

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

I’ll fill a tray for Mr. Thornton,” she offered, eager for any excuse to check up on the man and judge the severity of his injuries for herself, “and take it to the workshop.” “That won’t be necessary, Miss Greyson, but thank you.” Nicole spun toward the doorway. “Dar—Mr. Thornton!” She raked her gaze over his tall form. He moved a bit gingerly as he entered the kitchen, but that was to be expected after the abuse his body had taken that afternoon. No bandages in evidence, at least none that she could see. She supposed it was possible he had a wound concealed beneath his dark trousers, but she gauged his movements as he ambled to the table and didn’t detect a limp or any hitch in his stride. “Do I pass inspection?” The amusement in his voice brought a rush of heat to her cheeks. “That depends,” she brazened, lifting her chin. “Are there any hidden injuries I should be concerned about?” He made his way around the table, running his fingers along the back of each chair. “Such a personal question, Miss Greyson.” A teasing gleam lit his eyes as he steadily approached. Nicole dropped the bread knife and turned to face him fully, reaching behind herself to grip the cabinet top for support. “But you can put your mind at ease.” He didn’t stop when he rounded the table. He kept coming. Nicole’s pulse fluttered, and her grip on the cabinet doubled. “Except for a pile of bruises and some overheated skin, I’m fine.” He ceased his advance. Finally. She had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze, though, so close had he come. “I’m glad to hear it. Sir.” She added the last to try to force some distance between them. With him standing so close, all she could think about was that unexpected kiss they’d shared. Not the healthiest train of thought for a young woman who planned to leave as soon as monetarily possible. He was her employer. That was all.

…the shutting up of houses was a subject of great discontent, and I may say indeed the only subject of discontent among the people at that time; for the confining the sound in the same house with the sick was counted very terrible, and the complaints of the people so confined were very grievous. They were heard into the very streets, and they were sometimes such that called for resentment, though oftener for compassion. They had no way to converse with any of their friends but out at their windows, where they would makes such piteous lamentations as often moved the hearts of those they talked with, and of others who, passing by, heard their story; and as those complaints oftentimes reproached the severity, and sometimes the insolence, of the watchmen placed at their doors, those watchmen would answer saucily enough, and perhaps be apt to affront the people who were in the street talking to the said families, I think seven or eight of them in several places were killed; I know not whether I should say murthered or not, because I cannot enter into the particular cases. It is true the watchmen were on their duty, and acting in the post where they were placed by a lawful authority; and killing any publick legal officer in the execution of his office is always, in the language of the law, called murther. But they were not authorized by the magistrates’ instructions, or by the power they acted under to be injurious or abusive, either to the people who were under their observation, or to any that concerned themselves for them, so when they did so, they might be said to act as private persons, not as persons employed; and consequently, if they brought mischief upon themselves by such an undue behaviour, that mischief was upon their own heads; and indeed they had so much the hearty curses of the people, nobody pitied them, and everybody was apt to say they deserved it, whatever it was. Nor do I remember that anybody was ever punished, at least to any considerable degree, for whatever was done to the watchmen that guarded their houses.

It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; they do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit.  They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; or to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton.” When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was certainly in the wrong; that these people were not murderers, in the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put whole troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw down their arms and submitted.  In the next place, it occurred to me that although the usage they gave one another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me: these people had done me no injury: that if they attempted, or I saw it necessary, for my immediate preservation, to fall upon them, something might be said for it: but that I was yet out of their power, and they really had no knowledge of me, and consequently no design upon me; and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon them; that this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were idolators and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind.

In Hiding - coming summer of 2020 WAYNE ANTHONY SEEKS REDEMPTION FROM A BAD DAY - Although warned about getting the stitches wet, he believed a hot shower was the only road to his redemption. Experienced taught him the best way to relieve the tightness in his lower back was by standing beneath the near-scalding water. Dropping the rest of his clothing, he turned the shower on full blast. The hot water rushed from the showerhead filling the tiny room with steam, instantly the small mirror on the medicine cabinet fogged up. The man quietly pulled the shower curtain back and entered the shower stall without a sound. Years of acting as another’s shadow had trained him to live soundlessly. The hot water cascaded over his body as the echo from the pounding water deadened slightly. Grabbing the sample sized soap, he pulled the paper off and tossed the wrapper over the curtain rail. Wayne rubbed the clean smelling block until his large hands disappeared beneath the lather. He ignored the folded washcloth, opting to use his hands across his body. Gently he cleaned the injury allowing the slime of bacterial soap to remove the residual of the rust-colored betadine. All that remained when he finished was the pale orange smear from the antiseptic. This scar was not the only mar to his body. The water cascaded down hard muscles making rivulets throughout the thatches of dark hair. He raised his arms gingerly as he washed beneath them; the tight muscles of his abdomen glistened beneath the torrent of water. Opening a bottle of shampoo-slash-conditioner, he applied a dab then ran his hands across his scalp. Finally, the tension in his square jaw had eased, making his handsome face more inviting. The cords of his neck stood out as he rinsed the shampoo from his hair. It coursed down his chest leading down to his groin where the scented wash caught in his pelvic hair. Wayne's body was one of perfection for any woman; if that was, she could ignore the mutilations. Knife injuries left their mark with jagged white lines. Most of these, he had doctored himself; his lack of skill resulted in crude scars. The deepest one, undulated along the left side of his abdomen, that one had required the art of a surgeon. Dropping his arms, he surrenders himself to the pelting deluge from the shower. The steamy water cascaded down his body, pulling the soap toward the drain. Across his back, it slid down several small indiscernible pockmarks left by gunshot wounds, the true extent of their damage far beneath his skin. Slowly the suds left his body, snaking down his muscular legs. It slithered down the scars on his left knee, the result of replacement surgery after a thug took a bat to it. Wayne stood until the hot water cooled, and ran translucent over his body. Finally, he washes the impact of the long day from his mind and spirit.

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

But the worshippers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man's property, than of that done to one's own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed. Let them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand whatever games they please, from or with their own worshippers; only let them secure that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague, or disaster of any kind. What sane man would compare a republic such as this, I will not say to the Roman empire, but to the palace of Sardanapalus, the ancient king who was so abandoned to pleasures, that he caused it to be inscribed on his tomb, that now that he was dead, he possessed only those things which he had swallowed and consumed by his appetites while alive? If these men had such a king as this, who, while self-indulgent, should lay no severe restraint on them, they would more enthusiastically consecrate to him a temple and a flamen than the ancient Romans did to Romulus.

 (2.) A severe penalty: The Lord will not hold him guiltless; magistrates, who punish other offences, may not think themselves concerned to take notice of this, because it does not immediately offer injury either to private property or the public peace; but God, who is jealous for his honour, will not thus connive at it.

Just because you can’t see my injury doesn’t mean I don’t have one. Traumatic Brain Injuries take many forms, from the person who lives their life with few problems to those who live in a vegetative state. I’m thankful that my accident didn’t take my ability to walk and talk.  I pray for those whose injury is more severe than mine.  Still, my brain injury has taken a lot from me and I live with its affects everyday.

Dissociation and denial. Woody Allen said, “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” This quip is a fairly accurate description of the role played by dissociation. It protects us from being overwhelmed by escalating arousal, fear, and pain. It “softens” the pain of severe injury by secreting nature’s internal opium, the endorphins. In trauma, dissociation seems to be a favored means of enabling a person to endure experiences that are at the moment beyond endurance. Denial is probably a lower-level energy form of dissociation.

However, if a person bothers a shark it will fight back and will cause severe injuries, or even kill a person. It is best to leave this shark

Most of the unhappiness and the sometimes-severe depression I've dealt with throughout my life have come not from the losses and injuries I have suffered but rather from my incessant, bone-deep need to make sense of the suffering.

The body’s initial response to a noxious local insult is to produce a local inflammatory response with sequestration and activation of white blood cells and the release of a variety of mediators to deal with the primary ‘insult’ and prevent further damage either locally or in distant organs. Normally, a delicate balance is achieved between pro- and anti-inflammatory mediators. However, if the inflammatory response is excessive, local control is lost and a large array of mediators, including prostaglandins, leukotrienes, free oxygen radicals and particularly pro-inflammatory cytokines (p. 72), are released into the circulation. The inflammatory and coagulation cascades are intimately related. The process of blood clotting not only involves platelet activation and fibrin deposition but also causes activation of leucocytes and endothelial cells. Conversely, leucocyte activation induces tissue factor expression and initiates coagulation. Control of the coagulation cascade is achieved through the natural anticoagulants, antithrombin (AT III), activated protein C (APC) and tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI), which not only regulate the initiation and amplification of the coagulation cascade but also inhibit the pro-inflammatory cytokines. Deficiency of AT III and APC (features of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC)) facilitates thrombin generation and promotes further endothelial cell dysfunction. Systemic inflammation During a severe inflammatory response, systemic release of cytokines and other mediators triggers widespread interaction between the coagulation pathways, platelets, endothelial cells and white blood cells, particularly the polymorphonuclear cells (PMNs). These ‘activated’ PMNs express adhesion factors (selectins), causing them initially to adhere to and roll along the endothelium, then to adhere firmly and migrate through the damaged and disrupted endothelium into the extravascular, interstitial space together with fluid and proteins, resulting in tissue oedema and inflammation. A vicious circle of endothelial injury, intravascular coagulation, microvascular occlusion, tissue damage and further release of inflammatory mediators ensues. All organs may become involved. This manifests in the lungs as the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and in the kidneys as acute tubular necrosis (ATN), while widespread disruption of the coagulation system results in the clinical picture of DIC. The endothelium itself produces mediators that control blood vessel tone locally: endothelin 1, a potent vasoconstrictor, and prostacyclin and nitric oxide (NO, p. 82), which are systemic vasodilators. NO (which is also generated outside the endothelium) is implicated in both the myocardial depression and the profound vasodilatation of both arterioles and venules that causes the relative hypovolaemia and systemic hypotension found in septic/systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) shock. A major component of the tissue damage in septic/SIRS shock is the inability to take up and use oxygen at mitochondrial level, even if global oxygen delivery is supranormal. This effective bypassing of the tissues results in a reduced arteriovenous oxygen difference, a low oxygen extraction ratio, a raised plasma lactate and a paradoxically high mixed venous oxygen saturation (SvO2). Role of splanchnic ischaemia In shock, splanchnic hypoperfusion plays a major role in initiating and amplifying the inflammatory response, ultimately resulting in multiple organ failure (MOF). The processes involved include: • increased gut mucosal permeability • translocation of organisms from the gastrointestinal tract lumen into portal venous and lymphatic circulation • Kupffer cell activation with production and release of inflammatory mediators.

life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.

Graegar told me that any power expended to Change What Was could alert the enemy to my presence, so I held that in reserve and tried a different tactic. I didn't know I could do it until I was forced to do it, either. I placed Kathleen Rome in a short, temporary stasis too many times to count so the surgeon and his staff could save her life. I had to do it remotely, too, as my physical body sat in a cold waiting room, seemingly anticipating an update on Kathleen's condition. The poor girl who got burned was dying, too. Should I save her if I could? It was her fault she'd been injured, but then people make dumb mistakes all the time. I learned that I could juggle several balls at once. Between Kathleen's stasis treatment, I bent power similar to that of a Larentii toward a burned girl in another hospital, repairing charred and damaged tissue. I did what I considered the important things first, lessening the injury and giving her a fighting chance before going back to Kathleen and what she needed to survive. Yes, I'd expended power to save four million people. I was still weary and in need of rest from that. Graegar had said it would take weeks to recuperate; I'd taken only a few days. By the time I knew the burned girl would live and Kathleen would survive and have no lasting damage to her heart, I was worn out. The sun dipped below the horizon when I rose to lean against the window frame and stare out at the Pacific in the distance.

An axe delivers a huge amount of force to a small area of strong, very sharp metal. It is a weapon for attack rather than defence, and good at cleaving through armour. It can break enemy shields and kill a charging horse. Since they require intense training, the users are mostly highly skilled elite soldiers, often aristocrats, e.g. the Saxon huscarls. Type of fight scene: gritty, brutal, battles, attack, historical fiction, fantasy fiction, cutting through armour Typical user: tall brawny male with broad shoulders and bulging biceps, courageous, elite soldier, Viking, Saxon Mostly used in: European Dark Ages to Middle Ages Main action: cleave, hack, chop, cut, split Main motion: downwards Typical injury: severed large limbs, split skulls, cleaved torsos Strategy for lethal fight: severe the arm which holds the sword or the shield, or cleave torso from top to bottom, or cut off a leg then split the skull Disadvantages: big and heavy Watch battle axes in action Here are three connected videos about Viking and Saxon warriors with axes:

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. —Psalm 147:3 (NIV) It had been more than a year since our son Paul was in a car accident, an accident so brutal it severely injured all involved—and killed a passenger in the other car. Paul’s physical recovery was amazing, given the extent of his neck injuries. Within three months, he was back at the office, driving two hours round-trip to work, and working out in the gym. However, Elba and I wondered how he was doing emotionally. We were constantly praying, “Lord, help our son express his emotions from the accident. Heal him on the inside as well.” One evening, I inquired how the civil case was going. “Paul, did you call the lawyer?” “No,” he replied. I pressed on: “You know, it is important that you call him and stay up to date on this matter.” I sensed his lack of interest in the topic. I persisted: “Paul, you need to be responsible and reach out to him.” The look in his eyes told me that I had crossed the line. Standing tall with tears in his eyes and anger in his voice, he said, “I just want this thing to be over with.” His mom quickly responded, “Paul, we know that you are struggling and want to put all of this behind you. How can we help you?” There was a long pause. He finally answered, sharing his feelings for the first time since the accident, grieving for everyone affected—particularly the deceased. Our prayers were answered: We now knew how much Paul had been hurting. This was the beginning of his emotional healing. Lord, heal my hurts, especially those deep within me, unknown to those around me. —Pablo Diaz Digging Deeper: Ps 103:2–4; Jer 17:14

I looked down at the distorted appendage that was attached to my right arm. “Oh. That’s my masturbating hand. We need to fix this fast. And I forgot to give you your blow job in the middle of the bush. Remind me when we get home, okay, babe?” Shawn told me later that several people were walking through the car park and heard my comment, but I was beyond noticing them.

Somehow Frank got word to the dingo enclosure. “You’d better get to the compound,” came the message. “Graham grabbed Wes.” I felt cold chills go down my arms into my fingers. Graham was a large enough crocodile that he could easily kill prey the size of a man. I struggled through the water toward the compound. This is a nightmare, I thought. It felt like a bad dream, trying desperately to run in the waist-deep water, and yet feeling like I was in slow motion, struggling my way forward. When I got to the compound, I was shocked. Wes was conscious and standing up. I had a look at his wounds. The gaping holes torn out of his bottom and the back of his leg were horrifying. Both wounds were bigger than my fist. He was badly torn up. We discussed whether or not to call an ambulance, and then decided we would take Wes to the hospital ourselves. Wes was fluctuating between feeling euphorically happy to be alive and lashing out in anger. He was going into shock and had lost a lot of blood. Steve drove. A trip that would normally have taken half an hour took less than twenty minutes. The emergency room was having a busy night. By now Wes’s face was somewhere between pale and gray--the pain was well and truly setting in. We explained to a nurse that he needed help immediately, but because we had a blanket over him to keep him warm, the severity of his injuries didn’t really hit home. Finally the nurse peeked under the blanket. She gasped. Wes was so terribly injured, I was worried that he would still bleed out. Steve and I were both very emotional. So many thoughts went through our heads. Why Wes? Why hadn’t Steve been grabbed? What kind of chance was it that Graham had grabbed Wes in probably the only manner that would not have killed him instantly? We realized again how much we loved Wes. The thought that we almost lost him terrified us. It was a horrible, emotional Friday night. Over the course of the weekend we learned that Wes would probably make a full recovery. He would keep his leg and probably regain most movement. There was still some doubt as to whether he was going to need skin grafts. Steve laid his life on the line to defend Wes. And as severely injured as Wes was, he stopped at the top of the fence to turn back and help Steve. That was mateship; that was love. It made me think of the line from scripture: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Steve and Wes were lucky, for they were truly friends.

In fact these statistics record an astonishingly low rate of gun-related violence in the late nineteenth century. The Home Office reported the results of three separate inquiries: hospital figures throughout England for fatal and nonfatal wounds arising from handguns in 189o-92; coroners' inquests on such accidents; and the number of burglars found carrying firearms over five years ending with December 31, 1892.121 In the course of three years, according to hospital reports, there were only 59 fatalities from handguns in a population of nearly 30 million people. Of these, 19 were accidents, 35 were suicides, and only 3 were homicides-an average of one a year. The report noted that in the 189o pistol homicide both the murderer and the victim had been foreigners.122 The number of injuries treated in hospitals for revolver or pistol wounds over the three years was 226.123 The coroners' inquests relative to the use of both pistols and other firearms for the same three years was 536, of which 443 were suicides, 49 were accidents, 32 were homicidal, and 12 not known. As for armed burglaries, no policeman had been shot dead, although several had been wounded by gunfire. Over the five-year period only 31 burglars had been found carrying arms, and only 18 had escaped by the use of guns.124 On the basis of these modest figures the bill was objected to as "absolutely unnecessary ... and that it attacked the natural right of everybody who desired to arm himself for his own protection and not to harm anybody else." Hopwood suggested that the government legislate with regard to knives and daggers, since the number of murders and suicides committed by them was "infinitely greater ... than those committed by means of revolvers." As with the 1870 licence statute, this bill was attacked as class legislation. Mr. Conybeare thought it would be better to drop it "so that the efforts of the Government might be devoted to some more worthy measure."121 The debate was adjourned until the next day, but in light of its reception it was prudently withdrawn. Behind the scenes, however, a House of Lords standing committee was at work during 1894 to produce a more acceptable bill.

Then the heavy lifting began. For the next six months, our employees rarely saw their families. We worked deep into the night, seven days a week. Despite two hit movies, we were conscious of the need to prove ourselves, and everyone gave everything they had. With several months still to go, the staff was exhausted and starting to fray. One morning in June, an overtired artist drove to work with his infant child strapped into the backseat, intending to deliver the baby to day care on the way. Some time later, after he’d been at work for a few hours, his wife (also a Pixar employee) happened to ask him how drop-off had gone—which is when he realized that he’d left their child in the car in the broiling Pixar parking lot. They rushed out to find the baby unconscious and poured cold water over him immediately. Thankfully, the child was okay, but the trauma of this moment—the what-could-have-been—was imprinted deeply on my brain. Asking this much of our people, even when they wanted to give it, was not acceptable. I had expected the road to be rough, but I had to admit that we were coming apart. By the time the film was complete, a full third of the staff would have some kind of repetitive stress injury. In the end, we would meet our deadline—and release our third hit film. Critics raved that Toy Story 2 was one of the only sequels ever to outshine the original, and the total box office would eventually top $500 million. Everyone was fried to the core, yet there was also a feeling that despite all the pain, we had pulled off something important, something that would define Pixar for years to come. As Lee Unkrich says, “We had done the impossible. We had done the thing that everyone told us we couldn’t do. And we had done it spectacularly well. It was the fuel that has continued to burn in all of us.” T

Seventeen years ago a fiery car crash in Seattle, Washington claimed the lives of David Stranson and his two-year-old daughter. The mother, Camilla, survived with severe injuries. Attached to the police

Hours earlier, before the ISIS raid, Fares’s Media Center broadcast a radio program featuring Syrian women discussing their recent divorces. All too much for the takfiris, who abducted six of Fares’s employees (they were released two hours later) and stole or smashed the center’s computers and broadcasting equipment. “The reason Kafranbel became important is because it’s been persistently and consistently supporting the revolution in all of its aspects—whether it’s the nonviolent revolution or the armed revolution or the humanitarian and civil society work,” Fares told us. “The regime, when we would say something in opposition to them, they’d shell us. ISIS, when we made a drawing against them—the first in June of this year—they wanted to attack us, so they came and raided the Media Center. At the end of the day, they’re both the same. They’re both tyrants.” (Not long after this interview, which took place as Fares was touring the United States, ISIS tried to assassinate him in Idlib. He was shot several times but recovered from his injuries.)

Dr. Margaret Naeser and colleagues from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University, including Harvard professor Michael Hamblin, a world leader in understanding how light therapy works at the cellular level. Hamblin, at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Wellman Center for Photomedicine, specializes in the use of light to activate the immune system in treating cancer and cardiac disease; he was now branching out into its use for brain injuries. Building on lab work that applied laser therapy to the top of the head (transcranial laser therapy), the Boston group had studied its use in traumatic brain injury and found laser treatment helpful. Naeser, a research professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, had done studies using lasers for stroke and paralysis and was one of several pioneers using “laser acupuncture” by placing light on acupuncture points.

The neurosurgeon removed the right half of my skull. The swelling from the injury was so severe, it was causing enormous pressure on my brain, which if left uncontrolled would have killed me.

DEFENDING A RAPIST What is the character of a person who becomes a sexual enabler? We get an early glimpse into this question from 1975, when Hillary Clinton defended a man, Thomas Alfred Taylor, who was accused of beating and raping a twelve-year-old girl. A virgin prior to the attack, she spent five days in a coma, several months recovering from her injuries, and years in therapy. Even people who are accused of heinous crimes deserve criminal representation. Hillary’s strategy in defending Taylor, however, was to blame the teenage victim. According to an affidavit filed by Hillary, children who come from “disorganized families such as the complainant” sometimes “exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences.” Hillary suggested the girl was “emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing.” Here Hillary seems to be echoing what Bernie Sanders wrote in his rape fantasy essay. In this case, however, the girl certainly didn’t dream up the assault and rape. There was physical evidence that showed she had been violated, and she was beaten so badly she was in a coma. Prosecutors had in their possession a bloodied pair of Taylor’s underwear. But fortunately for Hillary and her client, the forensic lab mishandled the way that evidence was preserved. At the time of trial, the state merely had a pair of Taylor’s underwear with a hole cut in it. Hillary plea bargained on behalf of Taylor and got him released without having to do any additional time. A tape unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon has Hillary celebrating the outcome. “Got him off with time served in the county jail,” she says. Did Hillary believe that, in this case, justice was done? Certainly not. On the tape, Hillary admits she never trusted her client. “Course he claimed he didn’t, and all this stuff.” So she decided to verify his story. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” Clearly Hillary knows her client is guilty, and this fact doesn’t bother her. The most chilling aspect of Hillary’s voice is her indifference—even bemusement—at getting a man off after he raped a twelve-year-old. The episode is a revealing look into the soul of an enabler. In fact, it reminds me of Alinsky protesting to Frank Nitti about the wasted expense of importing an out-of-town-killer. Hillary, like Alinsky, seems to be a woman without a conscience.9

Whether considering action of the United States abroad or on its home front, I presume two closely related spheres of meaning for this notion of “terror.” This word means to put in a state of fright (Latin terror, from terrere, “to frighten,” “built on the root,” tres-, “to tremble”). The mix of fear and trembling usually immobilizes, works severe injury, or creates lasting disintegration or death on targeted bodies.

Everything happened too fast for Daisy to comprehend. She gripped the ribbons as Hubert jerked forward with a panicked whinny, the cart rattling and bouncing as if it were a child’s toy. Daisy tried in vain to keep her seat, but as the cart hit a deep rut she was thrown clear of the vehicle. Hubert continued racing pell-mell down the lane while Daisy landed on the hard-packed earth with stunning force. The breath was knocked from her, and she choked and wheezed. She had the impression of a massive creature, a monster rushing toward her, but the sound of a gunshot rent the air and caused her ears to ring. A bone-chilling animal squeal… then nothing. Daisy tried to sit up, then flopped weakly on her stomach as her lungs spasmed. Her chest felt as if it had been caught in a vise. There was a good chance she was going to cast up her crumpets, but the thought of how much that would hurt was enough to keep her gorge down. In a moment the thundering of hooves— several sets— vibrated the ground beneath Daisy’s cheek. Finally able to draw a shallow breath, she pushed up on her elbows and lifted her chin. Three riders— no, four— were galloping toward her, hooves thrasing up clouds of dust in the lane. One of the men swung off his horse before it had even stopped and rushed to her in a few ground-eating strides. Daisy blinked in surprise as he dropped to his knees and gathered her up in the same motion. Her head fell back on his arm, and she found herself staring hazily up into Matthew Swift’s dark face. “Daisy.” It was a tone she had never heard from him before, rough and urgent. Cradling her in one arm, he ran his free hand over her body in a rapid search for injuries. “Are you hurt?” Daisy tried to explain that she’d just gotten the wind knocked out of her, and he seemed to understand her incoherent sounds. “All right,” he said. “Don’t try to talk. Breathe slowly.” Feeling her stir against him, he resettled her in his arms. “Rest against me.” His hand passed over her hair, smoothing it back from her face. Tiny shivers of reaction ran through her limbs, and he gathered her closer. “Slowly, sweetheart. Easy. You’re safe now.” Daisy closed her eyes to hide her astonishment. Matthew Swift was murmuring endearments and holding her in hard, strong arms, and her bones seemed to have melted like boiling sugar. Years of uncivilized rough-and-tumble with her siblings had taught Daisy to recover quickly from a fall. In any other circumstances she would have sprung up and dusted herself off by now. But every pleasure-saturated cell in her body sought to preserve the moment for as long as possible.

You must think me the veriest ninny,” she said, “not knowing how to dance.” “I think you’re very brave, actually, for admitting it.” His free hand found hers and slowly lifted it into the air. “Most women of my acquaintance would have feigned an injury or disinterest.” She looked up into his eyes even though she knew it would leave her breathless. “I haven’t the acting skills to feign disinterest,” she admitted. The hand at the small of her back tightened. “Listen to the music,” he instructed, his voice oddly hoarse. “Do you feel it rising and falling?” She shook her head. “Listen harder,” he whispered, his lips drawing closer to her ear. “One, two, three; one, two, three.” Sophie closed her eyes and somehow filtered out the endless chatter of the guests below them until all she heard was the soft swell of the music. Her breathing slowed, and she found herself swaying in time with the orchestra, her head rocking back and forth with Benedict’s softly uttered numerical instructions. “One, two, three; one two three.” “I feel it,” she whispered. He smiled. She wasn’t sure how she knew that; her eyes were still closed. But she felt the smile, heard it in the tenor of his breath. “Good,” he said. “Now watch my feet and allow me to lead you.” Sophie opened her eyes and looked down. “One, two, three; one, two, three.” Hesitantly, she stepped along with him— right onto his foot. “Oh! I’m sorry!” she blurted out. “My sisters have done far worse,” he assured her. “Don’t give up.” She tried again, and suddenly her feet knew what to do. “Oh!” she breathed in surprise. “This is wonderful!” “Look up,” he ordered gently. “But I’ll stumble.” “You won’t,” he promised. “I won’t let you. Look into my eyes.” Sophie did as he asked, and the moment her eyes touched his, something inside her seemed to lock into place, and she could not look away. He twirled her in circles and spirals around the terrace, slowly at first, then picking up speed, until she was breathless and giddy. And all the while, her eyes remained locked on his. “What do you feel?” he asked. “Everything!” she said, laughing. “What do you hear?” “The music.” Her eyes widened with excitement. “I hear the music as I’ve never heard it before.” His hands tightened, and the space between them diminished by several inches. “What do you see?” he asked. Sophie stumbled, but she never took her eyes off his. “My soul,” she whispered. “I see my very soul.” He stopped dancing. “What did you say?” he whispered. She held silent. The moment seemed too charged, too meaningful, and she was afraid she’d spoil it. No, that wasn’t true. She was afraid she’d make it even better, and that would make it hurt all the more when she returned to reality at midnight. How on earth was she going to go back to polishing Araminta’s shoes after this? “I know what you said,” Benedict said hoarsely. “I heard you, and—” “Don’t say anything,” Sophie cut in. She didn’t want him to tell her that he felt the same way, didn’t want to hear anything that would leave her pining for this man forever. But it was probably already too late for that. He stared at her for an agonizingly long moment, then murmured, “I won’t speak. I won’t say a word.” And then, before she even had a second to breathe, his lips were on hers, exquisitely gentle and achingly tender. -Sophie & Benedict