Strictly For Couples Quotes

There is in the soul a desire for not thinking. For being still. Coupled with this a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous. But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch, not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

We don’t want America thinking that the D/s lifestyle is strictly about how much pain you can give and receive, how many people you can control and manipulate, but it’s about two people exploring one another—a vanilla couple—and being fulfilled. And I don’t just mean sexually, but emotionally and mentally--

It was a still night, tinted with the promise of dawn. A crescent moon was just setting. Ankh-Morpork, largest city in the lands around the Circle Sea, slept. That statement is not really true On the one hand, those parts of the city which normally concerned themselves with, for example, selling vegetables, shoeing horses, carving exquisite small jade ornaments, changing money and making tables, on the whole, slept. Unless they had insomnia. Or had got up in the night, as it might be, to go to the lavatory. On the other hand, many of the less law-abiding citizens were wide awake and, for instance, climbing through windows that didn’t belong to them, slitting throats, mugging one another, listening to loud music in smoky cellars and generally having a lot more fun. But most of the animals were asleep, except for the rats. And the bats, too, of course. As far as the insects were concerned… The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.

For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite. Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, even on the hottest days of the summer months. This part of the state is demographically notable in other aspects, as well. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support--which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Not coincidentally, Utah County is a stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.

He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn’t. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn’t strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn’t.

one time when we were at the Friendly Lounge they introduced me to Skinny Razor, and I got started doing it on my route. It was easy money, no muscle, strictly providing a service for people who had no credit. This was before credit cards when the people had nowhere to go for a couple of bucks between paychecks.

Reacher looked at the books on the tables. He read when he could, mostly through the vast national library of lost and forgotten volumes. Battered paperbacks mostly, all curled and furry, found in waiting rooms or on buses, or on the porches of out-of-the-way motels, read and enjoyed and left somewhere else for the next guy. He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn’t. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn’t strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn’t. Chang

Irregular unions,” the term for couples who lived together without benefit of marriage or who carried on extramarital relationships, went against the strict regulations of the Peabody Buildings.

I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsom. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsom in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsom can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.

OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn’t anymore.

The village of Gretna Green lay in the county of Dumfriesshire, just north of the border between England and Scotland. In defiance of the strict marriage laws of England, hundreds of couples had traveled the coaching road from London, through Carlisle, to Gretna Green. They came on foot, by carriage or horseback, seeking an asylum, where they could say their marriage vows and return to England as man and wife.

Well I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual It's just that the moon is full And you happened to call And here I sit Hand on the telephone Hearing a voice I'd known A couple of light years ago Heading straight for a fall As I remember your eyes Were bluer than robin's eggs My poetry was lousy you said Where are you calling from? A booth in the midwest Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks You brought me something We both know what memories can bring They bring diamonds and rust Well you burst on the scene Already a legend The unwashed phenomenon The original vagabond You strayed into my arms And there you stayed Temporarily lost at sea The Madonna was yours for free Yes the girl on the half-shell Could keep you unharmed Now I see you standing With brown leaves falling all around And snow in your hair Now you're smiling out the window Of that crummy hotel Over Washington Square Our breath comes out white clouds Mingles and hangs in the air Speaking strictly for me We both could have died then and there Now you're telling me You're not nostalgic Then give me another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things vague 'Cause I need some of that vagueness now It's all come back too clearly Yes I loved you dearly And if you're offering me diamonds and rust I've already paid

We can now suggest an answer to the questions asked above. If conservatism is based on Strict Father morality, conservatives have the general metaphors of the Moral Order in their conceptual systems, with at least a couple of clauses, namely, God above human beings; human beings above animals and the natural world; adults above children; men above women. The Moral Order hierarchy used to have all the bigoted clauses in it; now it has many open slots available for such clauses. Let

I wished Adam weren’t jumping in for his turn. Because watching Adam wakeboard was not relaxing. He wasn’t careful when wakeboarding. Or in general. He was the opposite of careful. His life was one big episode of Jackass. He would do anything on a dare, so the older boys dared him a lot. My role in this game was to run and tell their mom. If I’d been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Adam from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites. Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Vader let us wakeboard for the marina. But we’d come to wakeboarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, Look at the very young children on water skis! How adorable. One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Adam waterskiing double, each of us holding up an American flag. It’s okay for you to gag now. I can take it. But Mr. Vader was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Adam broke his collarbone, Mr. Vader put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wakeboard and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Adam cleaned the boat a lot last summer.

Realism, on the contrary, affirms the existence of universals ante rem, and holds that general concepts exist in themselves after the manner of Platonic ideas. In spite of its ecclesiastical associations, nominalism is a sceptical tendency that denies the separate existence characteristic of abstractions. It is a kind of scientific scepticism coupled with the most rigid dogmatism. Its concept of reality necessarily coincides with the sensuous reality of things; their individuality represents the real as opposed to the abstract idea. Strict realism, on the contrary, transfers the accent on reality to the abstract, the idea, the universal, which it posits before the thing (ante rem).

This may be our only hope,” said Lillian. “Don’t think too long.” Lillian turned and left, the baggy back of her cardigan seeming to sweep behind her like a cape. “I wasn’t kidding. Someone really has to talk to her about her motivational speaking,” said Dad. “She’s meant to be the town leader, isn’t she?” “She’s the only adult sorcerer alive who isn’t strictly evil,” said Rusty. “So she wins the crown by default, I guess. Unless Henry wants it.” Kami supposed Henry was technically grown up, though he was only a couple of years older than Rusty. “Your town seems very nice,” said Henry, in the tones of one being very polite when offered a large unwanted present that was on fire. “But I only just got here. I don’t feel qualified to lead.” “Okay,” said Dad. “So she’s all we’ve got to work with, as Ash and Jared are both so extremely and tragically seventeen. Fine. So what we need to do now is get the town behind her. Worse politicians have been elected every day.” “I don’t think Lillian will be kissing any babies anytime soon,” Holly said doubtfully. “Since she probably hates babies. And kittens. And rainbows and sunshine,” said Angela, who sounded like she had a certain amount of sympathy for Lillian’s viewpoint.

He's got a cat tied to the seat of the toilet and a bubble bath all set for someone to jump in. I excused myself for a second and went over to the kitchenette and popped a couple of Valiums. I was already loaded on junk but I could see this was going to be strictly from fruit. When I got back in the john he was already naked and in the tub frosted in bubbles . . . the poor cat was still chained to the john seat, yelping away. The guy laid his plan on me. He wants me to whip the cat dead after I first piss on him in his bubble bath, then when the cat has had it I'm to jerk off into his mouth while he's still in the tub. Out from under the bubbles he hands me a whip, a tiny cat size whip with leather fringes laced with broken ends of razors. ... I untied the cat, he tried to get up and stop me, I punched his chump face, he landed back on his ass in the tub and I gave him the whip across the chest . . . a nasty wound. . . . I grabbed his hair, opened his mouth and pissed in it . . . he spit it out, the piss mixing with the blood oozing from his lip from the punch and he let out a slow motion yell at the sting of urine dripping into the cuts on his chest. He sank under water to cool the burn, I rifled his wallet for sixty bucks, picked up the kitty and split.

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.

The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it. And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it. However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid). Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment. So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions. So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.

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

This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking—in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. These have had an effect on our perceptions which seems to be strictly hypnotic. It is largely by talking that a hypnotist produces illusions and strange behavioral changes in his subjects—talking coupled with relaxed fixation of the subject’s conscious attention. The stage magician, too, performs most of his illusions by patter and misdirection of attention. Hypnotic illusions can be vividly sensuous and real to the subject, even after he has come out of the so-called “hypnotic trance.” It is, then, as if the human race had hypnotized or talked itself into the hoax of egocentricity. There is no one to blame but ourselves.

THEIR BELIEF. IT is a strange revelation to find that the natives believe in a common Creator, and that their race sprang from one man and woman. There is no mistake that this it; their belief. Their Creator's name is GNURKER. They allow that he has a wife, who gave birth to the first couple sent to populate the earth. When their God saw that this earth was fit for man, and that all animal life and fishes were plentiful, He caused an immense whirlwind, which reached from Heaven to earth, and sent down him son and daughter with full instructions in all manner of ceremonies. They were to name their children by four tribal names--Banaka, Boorung, Paljarri, Kymera--and thus observe the marriage laws. They were to strictly follow out His commands, and when they died, their and their children's spirits would be received into heaven. They were given control over the fishes of the waters, the birds of the air, all animals, insects, and every living thing--that

The night of the theatrical, Jane and Mr. Nobley secreted themselves behind the house for the final brush-up. The mood of late had let a bit of Bohemia into Regency England, the usual strict social observances bending, the rehearsals allowing the couples to slip away alone and enjoy the exhilarating intimacy of the unobserved. Mr. Nobley sat on the gravel path, leaning back on his elbow in a reluctant recline. “Oh, to die here, alone and unloved…” “That was pretty good,” Jane said. “You genuinely sounded in pain as you said it, but I think you could add a groan or two.” Mr. Nobley groaned, though perhaps not as part of the theatrical. “Perfect!” said Jane. Mr. Nobley rested his head on his knee and laughed. “I cannot believe I let you railroad me into this. I have always avoided doing a theatrical.” “Oh, you don’t seem that sorry. I mean, you certainly are sorry, just not regretful…” “Just do your part, please, Miss Erstwhile.” “Oh, yes, of course, forgive me. I can’t imagine why I’m taking so long, it’s just that there’s something so appealing about you there on the ground, at my feet--” He tackled her. He actually leaped up, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her to the ground. She screeched as she thudded down on top of him. His hands stiffened. “Whoops,” he said. “You did not just do that.” He looked around for witnesses. “You are right, I did not just do that. But if I had, I was driven to it; no jury in the world would convict me. We had better keep rehearsing, someone might come by.” “I would, but you’re still holding me.” His hands were on her waist. They were gorgeous, thick-fingered, large. She liked them there. “So they are,” he said. Then he looked at her. He breathed in. His forehead tensed as if he were trying to think of words for his thoughts, as if he were engaged in some gorgeous inner battle that was provoked by how perfectly beautiful she was. (That last part was purely Jane’s romantic speculation and can’t be taken as literal.) Nevertheless, they were on the ground, touching, frozen, staring at each other, and even the trees were holding their breath. “I--” Jane started to say, but Mr. Nobley shook his head. He apologized and helped her to her feet, then plopped back onto the ground, as his character was still in the throes of death. “Shall we resume?” “Right, okay,” she said, shaking gravel from her skirt, “we were near the end…Oh, Antonio!” She knelt carefully beside him to keep her skirt from wrinkling and patted his chest. “You are gravely wounded. And groaning so impressively! Let me hold you and you can die in my arms, because traditionally, death and unrequited love are a romantic pairing.” “Those aren’t the lines,” he said through his teeth, as though an actual audience might overhear their practice. “They’re better than. It’s hardly Shakespeare.” “Right. So, your love revives my soul, my wounds heal…etcetera, etcetera, and I stand up and we exclaim our love dramatically. I cherish you more than farms love rain, than night loves the moon, and so on…” He pulled her upright and they stood facing each other, her hands in his. Again with the held breaths, the locked gazes. Twice in a row. It was almost too much! And Jane wanted to stay in that moment with him so much, her belly ached with the desire. “Your hands are cold,” he said, looking at her fingers. She waited. They had never practiced this part and the flimsy play gave no directions, such as, Kiss the girl, you fool. She leaned in a tiny bit. He warmed her hands. “So…” she said. “I suppose we know our scene, more or less,” he said. Was he going to kiss her? No, it seemed nobody ever kissed in Regency England. So what was happening? And what did it mean to fall in love in Austenland anyway? Jane stepped back, the weird anxiety of his nearness suddenly making her heart beat so hard it hurt.

anything at all on the kid we found out on the dock Sunday?” “Not much. I asked down at the youth center, and a couple guys admitted to knowing him. He hung out at the Dragon’s Den a lot. My take is that he was bringing in ecstasy and selling it to the kids during the weekend dances.” “I thought the Dragon’s Den was a no-drug/no-alcohol zone.” Callen wasn’t a big fan of places like that. They had to be well supervised with strict rules in order to work. Even then, kids seemed

Quoting from page 308: The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization. Quoting page 86: The Exclusion Principle in biology plays a role similar to that of the Newtonian laws of motion in physics. It is a prime guide to the discovery of facts. We use the principle coupled with an axiom that is equally fundamental but which is almost never explicitly stated. We may call this the Inequality Axiom, and it states: If two populations are distinguishable, they are competitively unequal. Quoting page 87: Because of the compound-interest effect, no difference between competing populations is trivial. The slightest difference--and our acceptance of the Inequality Axiom asserts that a difference always exists--will result in the eventual extinction of one population by another. Put in another way, the Exclusion Principle tells us that two distinguishable populations can coexist in the same geographical region only if they live in different ecological worlds (thus avoiding complete competition and strict coexistence). Quoting page 88-89: Recall now the sequence of development in the process of speciation. Initially, the freshly isolated populations are nearly the same genetically; as time goes on, they diverge more and more. When they are distinguishably different, but still capable of interbreeding (if put together), we may speak of them as races. Ultimately, if the physical isolation endures long enough, they become so different from each other that interbreeding is impossible; we then say that the two populations are reproductively isolated from each other, and we speak of them as distinct species. ... What are the various possible outcomes of the speciation process, and what their relative frequencies? In the light of our assumption, it is clear that, most often, the speciation process will go no further than the formation of races before the physical isolation comes to an end and the germ plasm of the two races is melded into one by interbreeding. If, however, the speciation process continues until separate species are formed before the physical barrier breaks down, then what happens? The outcome is plainly dependent on the extent to which ecological differentiation has occurred: Do the two species occupy the same ecological niche, or not--that is, are they completely competitive? It seems probable that the degree of ecological differentiation will also increase with time spent in physical isolation. On this assumption, we would predict that, more often than not, "sister species" will be incapable of coexistence: when the physical isolation is at an end, one sister species will extinguish the other. Quoting page 253: The example illustrates the general rule that as a species becomes increasingly "successful," its struggle for existence ceases to be one of struggle with the physical environment or with other species and come to be almost exclusively competition with its own kind. We call that species most successful that has made its own kind its worst enemy. Man enjoys this kind of success.

Well, your choice is to spit out what's wrong, or I'm going to start guessing. I'm not going to stop until you tell me I've got it, and I'll warn you—I'm a shitty guesser, so this could take a while." I leaned back in my chair and glared at him. “Have it your way,” he said. William started to pace around the room while stroking his chin theatrically. “You were actually born to a convent of nuns, but you had a sex change and escaped years ago. Now they’ve found you, and they’re coming for your penis? Pun intended,” he added with a wiggle of his eyebrows. “That’s…” I closed my mouth and shook my head. “What kind of person even comes up with something like that?” “No? Okay, I got it. Hold on. You witnessed an alien abduction when you were a kid. Up until yesterday, you thought it was all just some weird dream induced by the aggressive case of chronic diarrhea you suffered from—and still suffer from to this day. But yesterday, those little green men came back, and now your world is shaken. Why? Because you’ve secretly harbored romantic feelings for them this whole time, and now you’ll have to face your budding sexuality for the first time.” “Are you seriously going to keep this up unless I tell you?” "Hmm. Not right, either? Okay, this time I really have it. It all started in the African jungles seven years ago when you found yourself trapped deep in the wrinkly clutches of an elephant's rectum. With no hope of escape, you realized the only choice you had was to go deeper. Only you went too deep. You dreamed too big, and now you can't—" “I give up,” I said. “I’ll tell you because I don’t think I can survive much more of this. I’ve been in a little bit of a dating rut for the past couple years, and—” “Let me stop you there, partner.” William held up his left hand and pointed to his wedding band. “I’m flattered. Really. But one, I have a strict no sword crossing rule. And two? I’m spoken for.

The Kehoes also enjoyed playing cards with other couples at evening get-togethers, held every two weeks or so during the winter months. The pleasant evenings of progressive euchre were marred only occasionally by Andrew’s tendency to chew out other players who didn’t stick strictly to the rules or who committed inadvertent errors. “The people didn’t get angry at him,” reports Monty Ellsworth, “but they didn’t like his severity at a social party.”5 What Ellsworth calls Kehoe’s “severity”—his scorn for those who failed to meet his own exacting standards—was consistent with other aspects of his behavior. Priding himself on his time at Michigan State Agricultural College, Andrew regarded himself as a man of exceptional education and knowledge and cultivated a corresponding air of superiority—a distinguished image that was at odds with his occupation as a farmer.

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter's public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club's organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their "mission field" and our children as "the harvest." ... As I researched the group behind these kindergarten missionaries, I saw that they were part of a national network of clubs. I soon discovered that this network was itself just one of many initiatives to insert reactionary religion into public schools across the country. Then I realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort not merely to convert other people's children in the classroom but to undermine public education altogether. Belatedly, I understood that the conflict they provoked in our local community- -I was hardly the only parent who found their presence in the public school alarming was not an unintended consequence of their activity. It was of a piece with their plan to destroy confidence in our system of education and make way for a system of religious education more to their liking.

Good morning to Karen’s fertile and barren friends. I thought I’d send over the plan for the completely unnecessary, mawkish, and expensive non-tradition borrowed from America that is our friend Karen’s baby shower. Karen thinks it’s always good to demand money and time from people to celebrate her own personal life choices and we felt you haven’t given her quite enough in recent history, what, with the $1500 pound hen do in Ibiza, wedding in Majorca with a strict dress code, and gift registry at Selfridges. (NB: ladies-- if you get a new job or buy or flat on your own, you get a card and that’s it! We want to make sure there’s no prprecedent set. We’re not made of money!!) The good news is, after Karen gives birth she won’t see any of her childless friends unless all they want to do is talk about her baby and nothing else. So you can treat this as her farewell party as well as her baby shower. And save those pennies for a couple of years, that is of course until she comes back to you when she’s stopped breast feeding and is bored out of her mind, demands you all go out to drink, dance, and take loads of drugs, then sends you an offish text the following week saying she can’t really have a night out like that again because “I’M A MOTHER NOW.

The half dozen parents I spoke with said their first knowledge of this new wrinkle in the drug world was when they found their children dead. Among them were Roy and Wendy Plunk, who had driven from Arizona. Their son, Zach, a star high school running back, died the previous summer from a fentanyl-laced bogus Percocet sold to him by a dealer he found on Snapchat. The dealer delivered the pill at 3 a.m. The family’s Ring camera captured Zach sneaking from the house. He was in rehab and struggling with his drug use, the couple said, and they divided the day into twelve-hour shifts to watch him. His father found him dead on the front lawn at dawn. The company responded to the protest with a statement: “At Snap we strictly prohibit drug-related activity on our platform, aggressively enforce against these violations, and support law enforcement in their investigations,” it read in part. “We wouldn’t be standing here if the (company’s) statement were true,” one father told reporter Sam Blake of dot.LA, a tech news site. That day a protestor carried a sign: “Fentanyl changes everything.” Indeed. Dealers selling

I started to organize the procurement process from Denmark, which was good and not good. Good because I had experienced procurement people and engineers close by, and not good because I discovered quickly that we were required to put contracts out to tender under strict EU rules that would thwart our ability to launch on time. That, in turn, would mean that we could risk high penalties and/ or lose the license. After issuing the Request for Proposal and one round of intense negotiations with a couple of network suppliers, we decided to move the procurement team to Hungary. There were two suppliers left, a newcomer called Nokia and the old Ericsson, Finns and Swedes. The final negotiations could start.

The loss of faith in marriage explains why my generation may be so zealous about making sure their marriages are so equal: A modern couple's desire to keep their arrangement strictly balanced, at all levels, is actually a way of protecting each partner's self-interest in the event that the marriage dissolves. The compromises a couple is willing to make for each other, the responsibilities the partners are willing to shoulder for their family, are bearable only if they can be assured that their marriage is going to last and that the society around them considers an enduring marriage important - indeed, worthwhile and admirable. A man stays in a marriage not simply because he loves his wife and children, but because he could not respect himself - or expect others to respect him - if he casually up and left, or had an affair, or brought harm to those who so deeply loved and trusted him. Likewise for a woman. She stays in a marriage and takes risks like leaving her job when the babies are born not because she finds changing diapers so intrinsically interesting or doing the laundry so fulfilling but because she feels it is right for her family. If a couple is uncertain that their marriage will last - or even that it's important for it to last - and each partner does not respect the sacrifices the other is making, then it will be difficult for them to make any compromises at all. They will cling to their individuality out of self-protection, constantly thinking about their own long-term self-interest, unable to think or act in terms of what is good for the family as a whole. A couple who enters marriage with this attitude is doomed, no matter what hopeful sentiments they may express for each other at the altar.

People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the consistuent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustraphobic confines of rhe nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern tradition. .[...] Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. [...] We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, or your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are noting." "Now, with the cold war over and the first experiments of global order completed, we cannot help but recognize the planet as a sick body and the global crisis of democracy as a symptom of corruption and disorder.

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter’s public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club’s organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted

Founded in 1889 by a Civil War veteran in what had been a summer resort hotel, the academy modeled its strict code of conduct and turreted academic building after West Point, located five miles south along the Hudson. About 450 students were enrolled, all of them white except for a couple of dozen Latin Americans. The school did not admit blacks until Donald’s senior year. Women would not arrive for another decade. The military academy was a place where, as the school’s slogan put it, the boys were “set apart for excellence”; the idea was to inject discipline and direction into boys who arrived on campus unformed and untamed. That involved breaking them down to build them up.

I presume this is part of your erotic art collection?" she mused out loud. "It is most beautifully done; only look at the masterful brushwork and the lush, luminous colors. Curiously enough, it reminds me of Boucher, though I suppose it was done by a less well-known artist." He lifted a brow. "I am impressed, madam, since Boucher is exactly who painted the work. You do indeed know your art. The provenance says he did this painting as a private commission for a wealthy, anonymous patron. I acquired it at an equally private auction a few years ago and have enjoyed viewing it ever since." "Well, if this painting is representative of your collection, I would guess that all the works must have scandalous, clandestine origins due to the lurid nature of the subject matter." "Actually, this is one of the less provocative pieces," he informed her. "The majority of my collection is housed in a separate gallery devoted strictly to erotic art and literature. A couple of the maids won't even go inside to clean." Esme turned her gaze on him. "Is it really that bad?" "Or that good, depending on your point of view." He grinned. "I'll show it to you sometime, if you'd like. After all, you are an art lover. Come to think, perhaps I should frame the naked sketch you did of me and add it to the collection. Or would you prefer to keep it and hang it on your bedroom wall?" "I believe I will leave it exactly where it is, else the entire house know what you look like without clothing. Although knowing you, you'd likely be as proud as Bacchus here and every bit as shameless." His grin widened. "Yes, but only because certain parts of me actually do rival the gods.

Just as a child has to learn the language of the group to which it belongs, a couple must adopt the relationship prescribed by the group. Depending upon the strictness and closed nature of the group, it may or may not be possible to combine this with individual choice. However, just as it is possible to be creative with your mother tongue, you can always make your own contributions. This comparison goes much further: the creation of an individual sexual relationship and the creation of one’s own language come together in poetry as the ultimate attempt to express what is missing.

Without a sensible approach to the undocumented immigrants already in this country, all the fences in the world will not stop them. We already tried amnesty in the 1980s. Perhaps we should try enforcement, deportation and criminal charges for repeat offenders, coupled with strict employer sanctions. Allowing lawbreakers to step to the head of the line encourages more lawlessness.

Every December, my dear friend Myra throws an all-girls cookie swap (with strict instructions to leave the kids and husbands at home!), and we all gather at her house for an afternoon of great company, glasses of bubbly and, of course, way too many sweets! It’s a holiday tradition that all her guests have come to look forward to each holiday season, and this year, I decided to host my own sugar-fueled version. Here’s the way my cookie swap works: each guest brings a big batch of their favorite homemade holiday cookies with recipe cards to pass around, and at the party, are given a “to-go” box in which they collect a sampling of everyone else’s signature treats. After a couple hours of mixing and mingling, the ladies leave with a box of two dozen or so different kinds of cookies to sample, and (if they’re feeling generous) share with family and friends! It’s a delicious, and slightly dangerous, way to kick off the holidays, and guests are guaranteed to discover a few new recipes that are destined to become family traditions.

Those were years when novels were helping to form those literary myths which still dominate European minds today; but in Sicily, partly because of its traditional impermeability to anything new, partly because of the general ignorance of any language whatsoever, partly also, it must be said, because of a nagging and strict Bourbon censorship which worked through the Customs, no one had heard of Dickens, Eliot, Sand, Flaubert, or even Dumas. A couple of Balzac’s volumes had, through various subterfuges, it is true, reached the hands of Don Fabrizio, who had appointed himself family censor; he had read them and then lent them, in disgust, to a friend he didn’t like, saying that they were by a writer with a talent undoubtedly vigorous but also extravagant and “obsessed” (today he would have said “monomaniacal”): a hasty judgment, obviously, but not without a certain acuteness.

If you’re in your bedroom with your friend and your live-in partner is sleepy and wants to go to bed, you’ve got a problem. Crashing on a narrow couch in one’s own apartment while one’s partner disports with someone else in one’s bed may be beyond the limits of even the most advanced slut. When you share your bedroom or other play space with a partner or lover(s), we suggest making clear agreements well in advance of any date and sticking strictly to them. This problem may be solved by separate bedrooms or personal spaces if you can afford them. One couple we interviewed said, “Having separate bedrooms is a nonnegotiable need for us; we wouldn’t be able to maintain this lifestyle without them.

In families in which parents are overbearing, rigid, and strict, children grow up with fear and anxiety. The threat of guilt, punishment, the withdrawal of love and approval, and, in some cases, abandonment, force children to suppress their own needs to try things out and to make their own mistakes. Instead, they are left with constant doubts about themselves, insecurities, and unwillingness to trust their own feelings. They feel they have no choice and as we have shown, for many, they incorporate the standards and values of their parents and become little parental copies. They follow the prescribed behavior suppressing their individuality and their own creative potentials. After all, criticism is the enemy of creativity. It is a long, hard road away from such repressive and repetitive behavior. The problem is that many of us obtain more gains out of main- taining the status quo than out of changing. We know, we feel, we want to change. We don’t like the way things are, but the prospect of upsetting the stable and the familiar is too frightening. We ob- tain “secondary gains” to our pain and we cannot risk giving them up. I am reminded of a conference I attended on hypnosis. An el- derly couple was presented. The woman walked with a walker and her husband of many years held her arm as she walked. There was nothing physically wrong with her legs or her body to explain her in- ability to walk. The teacher, an experienced expert in psychiatry and hypnosis, attempted to hypnotize her. She entered a trance state and he offered his suggestions that she would be able to walk. But to no avail. When she emerged from the trance, she still could not, would not, walk. The explanation was that there were too many gains to be had by having her husband cater to her, take care of her, do her bidding. Many people use infirmities to perpetuate relationships even at the expense of freedom and autonomy. Satisfactions are derived by being limited and crippled physically or psychologically. This is often one of the greatest deterrents to progress in psychotherapy. It is unconscious, but more gratification is derived by perpetuating this state of affairs than by giving them up. Beatrice, for all of her unhappiness, was fearful of relinquishing her place in the family. She felt needed, and she felt threatened by the thought of achieving anything 30 The Self-Sabotage Cycle that would have contributed to a greater sense of independence and self. The risks were too great, the loss of the known and familiar was too frightening. Residing in all of us is a child who wants to experiment with the new and the different, a child who has a healthy curiosity about the world around him, who wants to learn and to create. In all of us are needs for security, certainty, and stability. Ideally, there develops a balance between the two types of needs. The base of security is present and serves as a foundation which allows the exploration of new ideas and new learning and experimenting. But all too often, the security and dependency needs outweigh the freedom to explore and we stifle, even snuff out, the creative urges, the fantasy, the child in us. We seek the sources that fill our dependency and security needs at the expense of the curious, imaginative child. There are those who take too many risks, who take too many chances and lose, to the detriment of all concerned. But there are others who are risk-averse and do little with their talents and abilities for fear of having to change their view of themselves as being the child, the dependent one, the protected one. Autonomy, independence, success are scary because they mean we can no longer justify our needs to be protected. Success to these people does not breed success. Suc- cess breeds more work, more dependence, more reason to give up the rationales for moving on, away from, and exploring the new and the different.

Gay and lesbian couples simply do not fit the Strict Father model of the family. Homosexuality challenges the monolithic authority of the father. And above all, it challenges the natural order, which presupposes that sex is heterosexual sex in which men are dominant over women and that, in a family, this natural order carries over to the moral order. But

It is illegal to portal anyone while they are under duress,I could lose my license if I were to do so." "You're going to lose a lot more than that if you don't tell me where my twin went," I said in a low, mean voice. "Mayling, please. I must insist that you allow me to be the bad cop," Gabriel said as I slid the dagger at my ankle out of its sheath. "I have never subscribed to the sexist belief that women have to be good cop," I said, twirling the dagger around one finger. "Nonetheless, you are far more suited to the good cop role," Gabriel insisted. "I'm going to have to go against popular opinion and side with Mei Ling on this," Savian said, watching us with a delighted twinkle in his eye. "She looks like she knows how to use that blade. What is that, a stiletto?" "Sicilian castrating knife," I said with a smile at the portal man. "She wins," Savian told Gabriel. "Er..." Jarilith said, his expression starting to slide into worry. "I am a wyvern! I can do far more to this man than merely remove his genitalia," Gabriel answered in an outraged tone, a little tendril of smoke emerging from between his lips as he spoke. "Eh..." Jarilith said, taking a step backward. "Hmm. He's a weaver," Savian said thoughtfully as he examined the portalist. "Those are immortal, aren't they? So he could survive a castration, but the question is would a dragon barbeque be enough to finish him off?" "Absolutely," Gabriel said. He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "Threatening a weaver is strictly prohibited by law," Jarilith said indignantly, but the fight had gone out of him. His gaze was flickering back and forth from Gabriel to Savian to the dagger I held casually. "I could have the watch on you for what you're saying!" "Oh, please," I said with a dramatic roll of my eyes. "Just about every thief taker in this hemisphere is after me. I've already been sentenced to banishment to the Akasha. You think one little murder is going to make that any worse? Not likely." Jarilith's eyes widened. "It's true," Savian said. "The price on her head has already gone over six figures." The color washed out of the portalist's face. "Erm..." "Mate," Gabriel said sternly. "I must insist that you refrain from slicing and dicing this man." Jarilith nodded quickly. "Listen to the dragon." "It is my place to destroy those who stand in your way," Gabriel continued, the pupils in his eyes narrowing as he turned to the now hastily backing away Jarilith. "Let's not lose our heads, here," the latter said in a rush. "I don't think it's your head the lady has in mind," Savian said as he looked pointedly at the portalist's crotch. Jarilith's hands hovered protectively over his fly. "Such an atrocity would constitute torture. You wouldn't do that to an innocent man, would you?" "What makes you think I'd stop at the castration?" I twirled the knife around my fingers again. "This little jobby fillets, as well." "She went to Paris," Jarilith said quickly as he dashed for a door to a back room. "Your portal is ready in room number three. Have a pleasant journey..." His voice trailed off as he bolted. I turned a frown on Gabriel. "You really wouldn't have let me be bad cop? I'm very good at it, as you can see." "I'm sorry," he said, his dimples belying the grave look he was trying to maintain.."Wyverns have some standards to maintain with their mates, and one of them is always being the bad cop.Although I do admit that you have a particularly effective manner. Would you really have castrated him to get the information about your twin?" "Would you really have burnt him to acrisp for not answering?" "Such a bloodthirsty little bird," he said fondly, giving my butt a little pinch. Savian stood still for a moment, giving us an odddisbelieving look before shaking his head and following. "You two are the strangest couple I've ever met. And I have to tell you-I've met some real weirdos

As the evening progressed the band began to play. Couples were filing onto the dance floor, arm in arm. Males and females mixed openly, as this was a private function at a private mansion; strict Islamic regulations were thrown to the wind. Liquor flowed freely.

I was an okay looking guy when I cleaned up, but I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and my clothes were strictly bargain basement — Salvation Army hand-me-downs. She was either the nicest girl in the entire world, or the loopiest

Spock turns back to the small transponder in his hands, the one that is supposedly next to indestructible. It's currently in three pieces. "Nice one," Jim drawls. "What happened?" "Disruptor fire coupled with an impact of approximately nine hundred and eighty newtons caused the shatterproof casing to...shatter." "How'd you get hit with something weighing one hundred kilograms? I don't remember seeing that." Jim is slightly awestruck. "And why aren't you, you know, crushed?" "I was not struck by any external force," Spock explains, placing the inner components of the device carefully on the bordered workspace before him. "Vulcan physiology has a higher density than that of humans. It was my own mass that caused the damage to the transponder." A slow grin spreads across Jim's face. "You fell on your transponder?" "I did not fall," Spock shoots him a vaguely irritated look. "I believe I mentioned that armed Romulans were involved." Jim smiles to himself, because the pissiness is Spock's way of relaxing the strict politeness between them. "Uh-huh." "Pass the hydraulic aspirator.

It was Gibson who gave the Shadow his everyday name, Lamont Cranston. Nothing was said in those early days about invisibility: Cranston was known as the Shadow because of his elusive capabilities, coupled with his habit of stepping out of the shadows to capture a culprit. Also conspicuous by her absence was Margo Lane, strictly a radio creation and still several years away. But even then the character captured the imagination: on radio, and especially in the pulps, the Shadow thrived. That chilling laugh was audio magic.