Taken For Granted At Work Quotes

Breathing, for example, was never taken for granted, since, half the time, thanks to the many chemical works and refineries, it was nearly impossible.

A calling isn’t something new and shiny. Often it’s something old and predictable, a familiar face that’s easily taken for granted, an old habit or hobby that comes back into our lives.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him. Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women. The first is seen primarily as a matter of creating and maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations. [...] This makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as women’s work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care most about – our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions – are always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.

Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they.

Saint Bartleby's School for Young Gentlemen Annual Report Student: Artemis Fowl II Year: First Fees: Paid Tutor: Dr Po Language Arts As far as I can tell, Artemis has made absolutely no progress since the beginning of the year. This is because his abilities are beyond the scope of my experience. He memorizes and understands Shakespeare after a single reading. He finds mistakes in every exercise I administer, and has taken to chuckling gently when I attempt to explain some of the more complex texts. Next year I intend to grant his request and give him a library pass during my class. Mathematics Artemis is an infuriating boy. One day he answers all my questions correctly, and the next every answer is wrong. He calls this an example of the chaos theory, and says that he is only trying to prepare me for the real world. He says the notion of infinity is ridiculous. Frankly, I am not trained to deal with a boy like Artemis. Most of my pupils have trouble counting without the aid of their fingers. I am sorry to say, there is nothing I can teach Artemis about mathematics, but someone should teach him some manners. Social Studies Artemis distrusts all history texts, because he says history was written by the victors. He prefers living history, where survivors of certain events can actually be interviewed. Obviously this makes studying the Middle Ages somewhat difficult. Artemis has asked for permission to build a time machine next year during double periods so that the entire class may view Medieval Ireland for ourselves. I have granted his wish and would not be at all surprised if he succeeded in his goal. Science Artemis does not see himself as a student, rather as a foil for the theories of science. He insists that the periodic table is a few elements short and that the theory of relativity is all very well on paper but would not hold up in the real world, because space will disintegrate before lime. I made the mistake of arguing once, and young Artemis reduced me to near tears in seconds. Artemis has asked for permission to conduct failure analysis tests on the school next term. I must grant his request, as I fear there is nothing he can learn from me. Social & Personal Development Artemis is quite perceptive and extremely intellectual. He can answer the questions on any psychological profile perfectly, but this is only because he knows the perfect answer. I fear that Artemis feels that the other boys are too childish. He refuses to socialize, preferring to work on his various projects during free periods. The more he works alone, the more isolated he becomes, and if he does not change his habits soon, he may isolate himself completely from anyone wishing to be his friend, and, ultimately, his family. Must try harder.

No creed must be accepted upon authority of a "divine" nature. Religions must be put to the question. no moral dogma must be taken for granted- no standard of measurement deified. There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the wooden idols of long ago, they are the work of human hands, and what man has made, man can destroy!

Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you're wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted," like having a Snitch in Quidditch, "and every time you change your mind, you change yourself.

The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions and, starting from that re-problemitisation (where he plays his specific role as intellectual) to take part in the formation of a political will (where he has his role to play as citizen).

I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any direct apologetic work…. We can make people often attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted…. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way around. Our faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.

Writing a complete novel is time consuming, frustrating, nerve wrecking, and most of the time your work is under valued, under appreciated, and taken for granted. So why do authors do it? Because not writing at all, feels far worse.

Don't become the enemy trying to fix people. People will always love their old ways, that may just work for them. If they accept your instructions when you are around them and do otherwise when you are absent - they fear you not respect you. Let them be the architects of their own doom without blaming it on you.

I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of man's attention and care... [My father] insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing--and saying again and again--that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education.

Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media’s treatment of news (that is, produce “flak”), to provide “experts” to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis. These structural factors that dominate media operations are not allcontrolling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results.

Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." "Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming: Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not--for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. (...) And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities, that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to See more, to Hear more, to Feel more.

I had always had mixed feelings about Narnia, mostly because of the heavy-handed lion-Jesus allegory. I suddenly had very strong feelings that C. S. Lewis had not spent nearly enough time on te sudden realization, when moving between worlds, that nothing could be taken for granted. Maybe fog hung around all day here, even when the sky was bright. Maybe there was no night, or maybe this was what night looked like. Maybe gravity stopped working here on Tusdays.

We are a very fortunate people, and we know it. That good fortune should not be taken for granted, and so we try to share and try to help. It is our way of saying that we welcome the friendship of those less fortunate, that we do not think ourselves entitled to that which we have, but rather, that we feel blessed beyond what we deserve. And so we share, and so we work, and in doing so, we become something larger than ourselves, and more fulfilled than one can become from idly enjoying good fortune!

For the working class, life was nasty, brutish and short. Hunger and hardship were expected. Men were old at forty, women worn out at thirty-five. The death of children was taken for granted. Poverty was frankly regarded as a moral defect. Social Darwinism (the strong adapt and survive, the weak are crushed) was borrowed and distorted from the Origin of Species (1858) and applied to human organisation.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary ‘working’ men. They are a race apart—outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men ‘work’, beggars do not ‘work’; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic ‘earns’ his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.

The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.

Sometimes I worry, for myself, that I’ve stopped being amazed at certain things, or I’ve taken for granted a set of ideas about how the world works, what people are doing with each other or alone, all the fundamental relationships in the world. I worry that I start taking it for granted and stop feeling the intensity of it because of language. Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world.

But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station–and there is occupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

I tried to bunked classes, I skipped lectures, I cheated in exams, I lied to my teachers and some stuff were taken for granted when I was a student before. I am not proud about it. Of course, I learned from that experience. I learned that everyone has a chance to change. It doesn't mean that if I am dumbass before and you call me the same thing now. Because now, I work hard, play the game well and strive for excellence. This is me now, a guy with a strong grit in my heart.

The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they. The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.

Note to self: You have to start forgiving yourself for the time you’ve waste on things that never mattered. Forgive yourself for giving second chances to people who have once taken you for granted. Forgive yourself for giving up on your dreams instead of working on them and making them come true. And you have to forgive yourself for every second you spent it not smiling, not laughing, and not living …

It feels bad to wade in the repercussions of our behavior, it feels good to apologize and disavow and consider oneself exempt moving forward. But being online, being white, being online as a white person, means never being exempt. Antiracist as a noun does not exist. There's only people doing the work, or not. The person genuinely invested in the work doesn't run from discomfort but accepts it as the price of personhood taken for granted.

Criticism is defined as the judgment of the merits and faults of the work or actions of one individual by another. Although “criticizing” does not necessarily mean “to imply fault,” the word is often taken to mean prejudice or disapproval.

Marriage can, should, and must evolve. Don't be alarmed, and don't resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it's the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter more than the extravagant gestures. Express gratitude, especially for work that tends to get taken for granted. Identify problems as they arise, remembering that anger is flammable. When we've behaved like a donkey, remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologizer. Wrong turns teach us the right way.

marriage can, should and must evolve. Don’t be alarmed, and don’t resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it’s the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter more than the extravagant gestures. Express gratitude, especially for work that tends to get taken for granted. Identify problems as they arise, remembering that anger is flammable. When you’ve behaved like a donkey, Peter,’ the groom smiles at his toes, ‘remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologiser. Wrong turns teach us the right way.

She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING.

Compared with the usual fate of humans, we who are engaged in preservation work, daily in contact with what we most like and admire, are fortunate indeed. As I write this, I have just returned from a gathering of men and women in the museum and historic-house field. What cheerful, rapt faces! What intensity of interest! What freedom of discussion, where difference of opinion about procedure was taken for granted and met with a smile. Do you really think this is common experience in the workaday world? Are you unaware of the fact that most people often feel that they are traveling the wrong road, and bitterly conclude that it is too late to return to a distant fork?

Mostly, this was the fault of white, Rust Belt, out-of-work Democrats. They had voted twice for Barack Obama, but now they were being told that they were racists or white supremacists for voting for Trump and giving him an Electoral College edge. The contrarian liberal genius Michael Moore had been a lonely prophet who had seen it coming, but the Clinton team had ignored him, just as they had ignored their own patriarch, Bill Clinton, who sounded the same warning. In a live performance, Moore had teased voters in Wilmington, Ohio, months before the election, telling them that he knew what they were planning to do. And they laughed with him, like guilty children caught in the act by a bemused cousin. He knew they were going to vote for Trump. He didn’t like it, but at least he was one person who could not be fooled. People who had been overlooked, despised, stomped on, used, taken for granted. This was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear, but in the privacy of their polling booths, they had struck a blow. This

Lou had confessed to Sloane his regrets on hurting Dex as he had and walking out on him. He’d been certain things wouldn’t have worked out, and Dex had agreed, but the longer he spent away from Dex, the more he realized the mistake he’d made. Lou admitted he had taken Dex for granted. He’d gotten scared and instead of turning to Dex, he bailed. He warned Sloane not to make the same mistake. It

And yet that mother is right. She has sacrificed herself for her family. The others have allowed themselves plenty of freedom. She has had no share of it. She has worked, slaved, given up every moment of her day. But there's something more serious, something which is the real cause of suffering. She hasn't been understood. They have taken her for granted; they haven't, for example, noticed her crying in silence.

Except for the two years he had lived with cowboys in North Dakota,and being the employer of a dozen or so servants,Roosevelt had never had to suffer any prolonged intimacy with the working class.From infancy,he had enjoyed the perquisites of money and social position.The money,through his own mismanagement,had often run short,and he was by no means wealthy even now, but he had always taken exclusivity for granted.

A wife complains to her husband, “Do you realize that since we were married two years ago you haven’t once taken me to the movies? It wasn’t that way when you were courting. I think you’re beginning to take me for granted.” When the penitent husband returns from work the following evening he says, “Darling, what about going to the movies after dinner?” And she replies, “You’re only suggesting it because I complained!

5 Too long right and wrong, good and evil have been inverted by false prophets! 6 No creed must be accepted upon authority of a 'divine' nature. Religions must be put to the question. No moral dogma must be taken for granted - no standard of measurement defied. There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the wooden idols of long ago, they are the work of human hands, and what man has made, man can destroy!

I imagined needing to put in extra work all the time, as though you were writing backwards when everyone around you was writing normally. Then showing someone what you’d worked so hard to achieve with your unsteady hand, only for it to be taken for granted and them to say, “I knew you could do it if you tried.” Having to write backwards your whole life, with no one even noticing—maybe this was your experience of the world.

Looks like it,’ she replied. ‘Are you just trying to show me you can manage on your own? This crazy idea is bound to fail.’ Now he was blustering. ‘You’re no businesswoman, Juliette – reading a few novels on vacation doesn’t qualify you to run a bookstore. And don’t expect me to bail you out when it all goes pear-shaped.’ She sensed the fear behind his words. He didn’t want her to succeed; her role had been to admire his achievements. And she did, genuinely. Kevin was hard-working and successful; he’d been the main bread-winner for years and given her a comfortable life, which she’d no doubt taken for granted. ‘I’ve signed an agreement to make sure our joint assets will be protected,’ she said. ‘But maybe we should think about getting a divorce, so we can both move on.’ He hung up without replying. Although the lease on the shop wasn’t due to start till the beginning of June, the landlord had given permission for Juliette to visit the premises with her

The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies. The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb. For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow. Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.

Still, self-giving is not always so simple in practice. People sometimes give generously of themselves, without experiencing the happiness promised by the Gospel. Instead they encounter sorrow, fatigue, and frustration. Their own needs are forgotten; they themselves are ignored. We have all heard a generous person explode with anger and exclaim. “I’m fed up with waiting on everyone else, with having to do all the dirty work, with being taken for granted and never so much as hearing ‘thank you’!” Self-giving can end like that when it is not freely chosen or when it is chosen out of some motive other than disinterested love—fear of saying no and not being accepted, emotional dependence, a perfectionist streak rooted in pride, a sense of indebtedness, the notion that to save others we need to please them, or else the desire to teach others a lesson by shaming them. There is even such a thing as calculated generosity that resembles a kind of unconscious bargaining: I will give myself to you, provided you give me the emotional gratification or the ego boost that I crave. It is important to examine our motives and rid ourselves of such imperfect ones, so that our self-giving can become truly free and disinterested.

More often than not, the people around me weren’t simply deciding to give up. They were living in a culture of dependency that had been passed down from birth. My mother and grandmother gave in to the culture. And they expected me to figure out the best way to live on that same track, to game the system and not even try to escape. My friend Ben agrees. 'Most of the time, what you see in the housing projects are generations of families,' he says. 'People accustomed to this lifestyle. It becomes comfortable, so they don’t move away, and even their children stay and raise kids in the same environment.' In neighborhoods like the ones where Ben and I grew up, there is no perceived incentive to advance. After all, the checks for housing and the food stamps and assistance arrive every month. This is why the system must be reformed. Welfare should exist only for a certain period of time, unless you’re disabled and can’t physically work. It should not last for a generation or more. There are millions of jobs open, without enough people to fill them or, rather, without enough people who have the necessary skills and training. This is where the government should come in, providing incentives for real-world training and educating recipients about a life beyond government dependence.

There,he reminds me of you." Shelby indicated a black panther stretched in a path of sunlight, calmly watching the river of people who passed by. "Is that so?" Alan studied the cat. "Indolent? Subdued?" Shelby let out her smoke-edged laugh. "Oh,no, Senator.Patient, brooding. And arrogant enough to believe this confinement is nothing he can't work with." Turning, she leaned back against the barrier to consider Alan as she had considered the panther. "He's taken stock of the situation,and decided he can pretty much have his own way as things are.I wonder..." Her brows drew together inn concentration. "I wonder just what he'd do if he were really crossed.He doesn't appear to have a temper. Cats usually don't until they're pushed too far just that one time, and then-they're deadly." Alan gave her an odd smile before he took her hand to draw her toward the path again. "He normally sees that he's not often crossed." Shelby tossed her head and met the smile with a bland look. "Let's go look at the monkeys.It always makes me think I'm sitting in the Senate Gallery." "Nasty," he commented and tugged on her hair. "I know.I couldn't help it." Briefly she rested her head on his shoulder as they walked. "I'm often not a nice person. Grant and I both seem to have inherited a streak of sarcasm-or maybe it's cynicism.

I can take one individual note out of the music I am trying to write at the moment, and ti could belong anywhere. Yet where it sits, where I have placed it, it follows what came before and leads to what comes after. Without it the whole would not be as it is. As the composer I must know each individual note in order to make the whole. Like the colors on an artist's palette, on their own the notes are absolute, yet when they are placed in a particular work, their individuality becomes one with the whole. They have to be chosen for what they are - red, yellow, blue - but with the effect of their combined potential in mind. It is necessary to know the parts in order to make up the whole. It applies to music, to art, and to life itself, I think. When you listen to the finished composition, or when you go about living your life, the individual components join to make a whole that can so easily be taken for granted. But it is not until you become aware of the parts that you can begin to understand the miracle. It took me almost a lifetime to start searching for the sounds, the notes that make my life's music. And it required a sacrifice so enormous that it did away with all that had made my life meaningful. But in the total silence that came afterward, I finally heard a first single note, and others slowly followed. (5)

And so I ask you now, dear friend: was this world worth saving to begin with? Were we worth saving? This endeavor was launched with that great assumption taken for granted. Now I ask myself for the first time. And while I view the cleansing of the world as our defining achievement, this business of saving humanity may have been our gravest mistake. The world may be better off without us. I have not the will to decide. I leave that to you. The final shift, my friend, is yours, for I have worked my last. I do not envy you the choice you will have to make. The pact we formed so long ago haunts me as never before. And I feel that what I’m about to do … that this is the easy way.

Black women have long been the backbone of our political progressive past: the strategists and protesters and organizers and volunteers, the women who've gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions. Yet they've been only barely represented in leadership of the political parties they've bolstered, their policy priorities have often gone unaddressed and unrecognized; their participation has long been taken for granted. And when white women have caught up to where black women have been for a long time, the work of the black women has often been appropriated, ignored, and uncredited by those with greater economic, cultural, and racial advantage.

Making a home, she realized immediately, was much more than having the dust cleared and the lawn trimmed. For years—decades, even—she and her brothers had taken for granted the way their mother tucked extra blankets around them on nights that turned especially cold or how their father set down his tools and bent over to look them in the eyes when they spoke. Or better yet, handed them a tool and let them work alongside him. As children, they had been oblivious to all their parents did—perfectly, contentedly oblivious. But she wasn’t anymore. She felt it all. Like a forehead kiss when thought to be sleeping, the love was there whether noticed or not. All give, no take. However, the thing about abundant love is that it needs somewhere to go.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it.

You will wait until Ernest returns, and he will accompany you to market." "That won't be until midmorning," she said indignantly. "I can't wait that long- all the best goods will be gone by then. In fact, the stalls are being picked over right now." "That is a pity," Ross said without a shred of remorse. "Because you're not going alone. That is my final word on the subject." Sophia leaned over his desk. For the first time in two days, she met his gaze directly. Ross was conscious of a deep delight curling through him as he saw the sparks of challenge in her blue eyes. "Sir Ross, when we first met, I wondered if you had any flaws. Now I have discovered that you do." "Oh?" He arched one brow. "What are my flaws?" "You are overbearing, and you are unreasonably stubborn." Morgan interrupted with a snicker. "It has taken you a full month of working here to reach that conclusion, Miss Sydney?

I know they don’t respect the lives of others…” “Mortals,” he specified, “who exist for a brief moment and then die off.” Her voice rose as she argued with him. “I speak of people with very valued lives, Edgar. It may seem like a moment to you, but to me it is eternity.” “That makes no sense.” “It makes perfect sense, Edgar! Life is valuable—period. And because mine can be easily taken away, it becomes even more valuable and precious. Yours, you take for granted because you’ll never lose it. Mine, I cherish because it’s fleeting. For that reason alone I can argue that my life is of the greatest worth.” His eyebrows pulled together over a tangled scowl. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to understand her reasoning or if she had merely managed to upset him. “Never mind,” she mumbled. “I don’t think you can appreciate what you’ve never experienced. “That works both ways, Amora.” “Whatever.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

They don’t rely on memorized conversational scripts, and they don’t have to carefully parse every single piece of data they encounter to make sense of it. They can wing it. Autistic people, on the flip side, don’t rely on knee-jerk assumptions or quick mental shortcuts to make our decisions. We process each element of our environment separately, and intentionally, taking very little for granted. If we’ve never been in a particular restaurant before, we may be slow to make sense of its layout or figure out how ordering works. We’ll need really clear-cut indications of whether it’s the kind of place where you sit down and get table service, or if you’re supposed to go to a counter to ask for what you like. (Many of us try to camouflage this fact by doing extensive research on a restaurant before setting foot inside.) Every single light, laugh, and smell in the place is taken in individually by our sensory system, rather than blended into a cohesive whole.

Did you bring money with you, or shall we play for markers?" She flipped the stack of cards to the table with a professional twist of her wrist. "I don't play for less than a guinea a hand." His lips twitched. "The question is not if I have money. The question is, do you?" "I don't need funds, as I don't plan on losing," she said, her gaze mocking. For a moment, he thought he'd heard her incorrectly. Slowly, he said, "I beg your pardon, but are you saying you could beat me at a game of chance?" A dismissive smile rested on her lips. "Please, Dougal, let's speak frankly," she drawled softly. "Naturally, I expect to win; I was taught by a master." Dougal was entranced. He'd been challenged to many things before, but no one had so blatantly dismissed his chances of winning. "A giunea a hand?" "At least." "I didn't realize I'd need a note from my banker, or I'd have brought one with me." Her eyes sparkled with pure mischief, which inflamed him more. "If you've no money with you, then perhaps there are other things we can play for." The words hung in the room, as thick as the smoke that seeped from the fireplace. Like a blinding bolt of light from a storm-black sky, everything fell into place. This was why she and her minions had worked so hard to convince him that the house was worthless. If he thought it of low value, he'd be eager to wager the deed. Of all the devious plots! Yet Dougal found himself fighting a grin. He'd been feted and petted, fawned upon and sought out, but until now, no one had gone to such lengths to fleece him. Dugal couldn't look away from Sophia. He knew his own worth; women had paid attention to him for so long that he took it for granted. He'd dallied and toyed, taken and enjoyed. But never, in all of his years, had he so desired any woman as he did this one. The irony of it was that she desired him,too-but only for the contents of his pocket. Dougal didn't know whether to laugh or fume. He should be insulted, but instead he found himself watching her with new appreciation.

Hardly any worker today engages in the kind of backbreaking labor that was common a century or so ago and that is still common over most of the globe. Working conditions are better; hours of work are shorter; vacations and other fringe benefits are taken for granted. Earnings are far higher, enabling the ordinary family to achieve a level of living that only the affluent few could earlier enjoy. If Gallup were to conduct a poll asking: "What accounts for the improvement in the lot of the worker?" the most popular answer would very likely be "labor unions," and the next, "government"—though perhaps "no one" or "don't know" or "no opinion" would beat both. Yet the history of the United States and other Western countries over the past two centuries demonstrates that these answers are wrong. During most of the period, unions were of little importance in the United States. As late as 1900, only 3 percent of all workers were members of unions. Even today fewer than one worker in four is a member of a union. Unions were clearly not a major reason for the improvement in the lot of the worker in the United States. Similarly, until the New Deal, regulation of and intervention in economic arrangements by government, and especially central government, were minimal. Government played an essential role by providing a framework for a free market. But direct government action was clearly not the reason for the improvement in the lot of the worker.

It was a tough journey, though, and I realize that some people don’t have the endurance, or the faith, to continue in the face of such great resistance. But not a day goes by when I don’t meet someone who’s also put it all on the line and is working their butt off to achieve their professional and personal dreams. Many millennials, in particular, are willing to take a chance and do something outside the box, without the “right” degree or experience or any guarantee of future success. They’re willing to start a business—a tech company, a nonprofit—with a couple of friends or alone in their apartment. They’ve rejected the narrative that most boomers lived by—that you should go to school, get a job, work for the same company for thirty years, trust that the company will take care of you after retirement with a pension and possibly stock options. They’ve rejected that narrative because it doesn’t exist anymore in most cases. Most of the millennials who expect that path are, in my opinion, the ones still living at home. Getting angry at “the man” for keeping them down. Waiting for someone else, the government most likely, to come in and save the day. These are the ones who reject or don’t take personal responsibility. Who get out of college, get their first job, and want to be the boss of the company the very same day. They’re twenty-five, have no experience beyond that one semester as an intern, but they want that corner office and $100K in year one.

From what I just heard, my greatest fault is that I dare to take pride in my work, in knowing I'm excellent at it." The brown paper crumpled tighter in her hands. "How is that snobbery?" "Of course being excellent at your work and knowing it isn't snobbery. But believing that you are somehow unique in excelling at your work while looking down on what others do- that's the snobbish part. Especially given the life you were born into." She paled at that. "I'm not going to apologize for the life I was born into. Which, by the way, I have never taken for granted or misused for one moment. Tell me, if I were a man, would you see my confidence in my work and my pride in where I come from as arrogance?" "This gets better and better. As you pointed out, so disdainfully, I cook for a living. Nurturing people, nourishing them holds incredible meaning to me. You cannot pull the gender-role card on me. Plus, I have a vested interest in you being good at your work. My issue is with how you think it absolves you from treating those around you with consideration and respect. Cooking for a living is something I happen to be incredibly proud of." "As you should be. You're amazing at it." That of all things made her voice crack. She threw a look of such longing at the two empty bowls on the table that despite his anger, pride swelled inside him. It was followed by a sense of hypocrisy that he pushed away. "Yes, I am, and I don't appreciate when someone treats me like a servant for doing it.

All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view from which are noted a corresponding number of contacts between the new object under consideration and others believed to be already known. In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is condemned to turn, analysis multiplies endlessly the points of view in order to complete the ever incomplete representation, varies interminably the symbols with the hope of perfecting the always imperfect translation. It is analysis ad infinitum. But intuition, if it is possible, is a simple act. This being granted, it would be easy to see that for positive science analysis is its habitual function. It works above all with symbols. Even the most concrete of the sciences of nature, the sciences of life, confine themselves to the visible form of living beings, their organs, their anatomical elements. They compare these forms with one another, reduce the more complex to the more simple, in fact they study the functioning of life in what is, so to speak, its visual symbol. If there exists a means of possessing a reality absolutely, instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view toward it, of having the intuition of it instead of making the analysis of it, in short, of grasping it over and above all expression, translation or symbolical representation, metaphysics is that very means. Metaphysics is therefore the science which claims to dispense with symbols.

Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.

Universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grant...so if you get a million dollar grant, half or more will go to your university, right? So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. So the university has an incentive to get as many people to file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small. So this, for example, is one of the reasons that science has taken up arms against theory –that is to say, proper scientific theoreticians like me – and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments: Because big expensive experiments have big grants, and those big grants bring in money. But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, then what you would want to do is...you would want to free those people from teaching, and you would want to get people who weren't so expensive to do the work of the university...and the way you do that is: you bring them on as graduate students; and you pay them an appalling wage; you claim that they are not actually workers, that they are students; and they do most of the teaching, and they do a lot of the work of the university, for incredibly low amounts of money; they live under poor conditions; and increasingly they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense. But this means that we overproduce PhDs. We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university, in order that people who are capable of getting the grants spend almost full time doing that job. And it's a racket. The person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother. So...what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep this system running...that effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market, to drive the wages down.

With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothingness.

With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothningness.

If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is usually perceived as a commodity bought and sold nearly like all others. The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet the introduction of wage-labour involved conflict, resistance, and bloodshed. The separation of the worker from the means of production, now an accepted fact of life, took a long time and was accomplished by force. In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labour code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labour in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange… such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process. By means of its school system and its ideological and political life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this situation rests. It conceals both its origin and the mechanism which enables it to function. Everything appears as a free contract in which the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the shop or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an obvious and natural phenomenon, and the periodic major and minor disasters it causes are often regarded as quasi-natural calamities. Goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are left to rot, while elementary needs remain unfulfilled. Yet the main thing that the system hides is not the existence of exploitation or class (that is not too hard to see), nor its horrors (modern society is quite good at turning them into media show). It is not even that the wage labour/capital relationship causes unrest and rebellion (that also is fairly plain to see). The main thing it conceals is that insubordination and revolt could be large and deep enough to do away with this relationship and make another world possible.

If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, "fascism is an ideology." The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or "worldview," an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world. Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed. A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology - an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project... It would seem to follow that we should "start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes." Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an "ism" like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing. The other "isms" were created in an era when politics was a gentleman's business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other's reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them. Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville. In a way utterly unlike the classical "isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this. "We [Fascists] don't think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearances? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities." The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.

And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that math- ematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacri ces his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to nd it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be noth- ing for him to look for. When workmen have nished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station—and there is oc- cupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is a er all, something insu erable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo bar- ring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes ve is sometimes a very charming thing too. And why are you so rmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man? Notes from the Underground Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of su ering? Perhaps su ering is just as great a bene t to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraor- dinarily, passionately, in love with su ering, and that is a fact. ere is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for su ering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaran- teed to me when necessary. Su ering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the ‘Palace of Crystal’ it is unthinkable; su ering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a ‘palace of crystal’ if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real su ering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, su ering is the sole origin of consciousness. ough I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the great- est misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for in- stance, is in nitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing le to do or to understand. ere will be nothing le but to bottle up your ve senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least og yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

Third places remain upbeat because of the limited way in which the participants are related. Most of the regulars in a third place have a unique and special status with regard to one another. It is special in that such people have neither the blandness of strangers nor that other kind of blandness, which takes zest out of relationships between even the most favorably matched people when too much time is spent together, when too much is known, too many problems are shared, and too much is taken for granted. Many among the regulars of a third place are like Emerson's "commended stranger" who represents humanity anew, who offers a new mirror in which to view ourselves, and who thus breathes life into our conversation. In the presence of the commended stranger, wrote Emerson, "We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, our dumb devil has taken leave for a time. For long hours, we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that those who sit by, of our kinsfolk, and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual power.: The magic of commended strangers fades as one comes to know them better. They are fallible. They have problems and weaknesses like everyone else and, as their luster fades, so does their ability to inspire our wit, memory, and imagination. The third place, however, retards that fading process, and it does so by keeping the lives of most of its regulars disentangled. One individual may enjoy the company of others at a mutual haunt for years without ever having seen their spouses; never having visited their homes or the places where they work; never having seen them against the duller backdrop of their existence on the "outside." Many a third place regular represents conversationally and socially what the mistress represents sexually. Much of the lure and continuing allure of the mistress rests in the fact that only pleasure is involved. There is no rising from bed to face the myriad problems that husband and wife must share and that contaminates their lives and their regard for one another. Third places surely contain many of these "mistresses of conversation," people who meet one another only to share good times and scintillating activities and with whom good times and scintillation thus come to be associated. Out of tacit agreement not to share too much, the excitement attaching the commended stranger is preserved among third place regulars. What, after all, are such incidentals as home and family and job when the nature of life itself, the course of the world in modern times, or the booted ball that cost a victory in last night's game are on the agenda?

Friction-Free Economies Why is it necessary to turn to a cultural characteristic like spontaneous sociability to explain the existence of large-scale corporations in an economy, or prosperity more generally? Wasn’t the modern system of contract and commercial law invented precisely to get around the need for business associates to trust one another as family members do? Advanced industrialized societies have created comprehensive legal frameworks for economic organization and a wide variety of juridical forms, from individual proprietorships to large, publicly traded multinational enterprises. Most economists would add rational individual self-interest to this stew to explain how modern organizations arise. Don’t businesses based on strong family ties and unstated moral obligations degenerate into nepotism, cronyism, and generally bad business decision making? Indeed, isn’t the very essence of modern economic life the replacement of informal moral obligations with formal, transparent legal ones?1 The answer to these questions is that although property rights and other modern economic institutions were necessary for the creation of modern businesses, we are often unaware that the latter rest on a bedrock of social and cultural habits that are too often taken for granted. Modern institutions are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for modern prosperity and the social well-being that it undergirds; they have to be combined with certain traditional social and ethical habits if they are to work properly. Contracts allow strangers with no basis for trust to work with one another, but the process works far more efficiently when the trust exists. Legal forms like joint-stock companies may allow unrelated people to collaborate, but how easily they do so depends on their cooperativeness when dealing with nonkin.

Assessment is one of the most important tools in personalizing instruction, and one-to-one devices provide opportunities to enhance all forms of assessment. Many large-scale standardized assessments can now be taken with mobile devices, while summative assessments are frequently given online. When teachers and students work together, using mobile devices to conduct formative and benchmark assessments, they can use that information to set personalized goals and strategies, thus planning the most effective, adaptive learning programs.

Browder told a Russian lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, who worked for a Moscow-based law firm called Firestone and Duncan, to follow the trail. It turned out the investment companies were being illegally signed over by the cops to petty criminals, who would then ask for tax rebates on the companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which were then granted by corrupt tax officials, signed off on by the same cops who had taken the documents in the first place, and wired to two banks owned by a convicted fraudster, an old friend of the aforementioned cops and tax officials. Officially the tax officials and cops only earned a few thousand a year, but they had property worth hundreds of thousands, drove Porsches, and went on shopping trips to Harrods in London. And this was happening year after year. The biggest tax fraud scheme in history. Magnitsky thought he had caught a few bad apples.

She’d been in the hotel’s lobby at least a dozen times a day while working in its restaurant as the head chef. She’d taken her simple life for granted. She’d taken Vern for granted. Now everything had changed.

Particularly galling was the way the Homestead Act was abused. Passed during the Civil War, it was supposed to make a reality out of Lincoln’s version of the free labor, free soil dream. But fewer than half a million people actually set up viable farms over nearly half a century. Most public lands were taken over by the railroads, thanks to the government’s beneficent land-grant policy (another form of primitive accumulation); by land speculators backed by eastern bankers, who sometimes hired pretend “homesteaders” in acts of outright fraud; or by giant cattle ranches and timber companies and the like who worked hand in glove with government land agents. As early as 1862 two-thirds of Iowa (or ten million acres) was owned by speculators. Railroads closed off one-third of Kansas to homesteading and that was the best land available. Mushrooming cities back east became, in a kind of historical inversion, the safety valve for overpopulated areas in the west. At least the city held out the prospect of remunerative wage labor if no longer a life of propertied independence. Few city workers had the capital to migrate west anyway; when one Pennsylvania legislator suggested that the state subsidize such moves, he was denounced as “the Pennsylvania Communist” for his trouble. During the last land boom of the nineteenth century (from about 1883 to 1887), 16 million acres underwent that conversion every year. Railroads doubled down by selling off or mortgaging portions of the public domain they had just been gifted to finance construction or to speculate with. But land-grant roads were built at costs 100 percent greater than warranted and badly built at that, needing to be rebuilt just fifteen years later.

You and I have spent much of our adult lives scheming to save the world. Several adult lives, in fact. That deed now done, I ponder a different question, one that I fear I cannot answer and that we were never brave nor bold enough to pose. And so I ask you now, dear friend: was this world worth saving to begin with? Were we worth saving? This endeavor was launched with that great assumption taken for granted. Now I ask myself for the first time. And while I view the cleansing of the world as our defining achievement, this business of saving humanity may have been our gravest mistake. The world may be better off without us. I have not the will to decide. I leave that to you. The final shift, my friend, is yours, for I have worked my last. I do not envy you the choice you will have to make. The pact we formed so long ago haunts me as never before. And I feel that what I’m about to do … that this is the easy way. —Vincent Wayne DiMarco Donald

issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they. The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before. • 

The Democrats did play a role in Reconstruction—they worked to block it. The party struck out against Reconstruction in two ways. The first was to form a network of terrorist organizations with names like the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The second was to institute state-sponsored segregation throughout the South. Let us consider these two approaches one by one. The Democrats started numerous terror groups, but the most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in 1866, the Klan was initially led by a former Confederate army officer, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served two years later as a Democratic delegate to the party’s 1868 national convention. Forrest’s role in the Klan is controversial; he later disputed that he was ever involved, insisting he was active in attempting to disband the organization. Initially the Klan’s main targets weren’t blacks but rather white people who were believed to be in cahoots with blacks. The Klan unleashed its violence against northern Republicans who were accused of being “carpetbaggers” and unwarrantedly interfering in southern life, as well as southern “scalawags” and “white niggers” who the Klan considered to be in league with the northern Republicans. The Klan’s goal was to repress blacks by getting rid of these perceived allies of the black cause. Once again Republicans moved into action, passing a series of measures collectively termed the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1871. These acts came to be known as the Force Bill, signed into law by a Republican President, Ulysses Grant. They restricted northern Democratic inflows of money and weapons to the Klan, and also empowered federal officials to crack down on the Klan’s organized violence. The Force Bill was implemented by military governors appointed by Grant. These anti-Klan measures seem modest in attempting to arrest what Grant described as an “invisible empire throughout the South.” But historian Eric Foner says the Force Bill did markedly reduce lawless violence by the Democrats. The measures taken by Republicans actually helped shut down the Ku Klux Klan. By 1873, the Klan was defunct, until it was revived a quarter-century later by a new group of racist Democrats.

In the course of this book I will be setting out a case, developed from my experience as a manager and consultant, that many of the management approaches that are taken for granted in organisations, and which are taught on management courses and replicated by management consultants, actually get in the way of doing good work and hinder rather than help. They promise what they cannot deliver because they are predicated on ideas of predictability and control and imply powers of intervention on the part of managers and consultants which they cannot possess. People in organisations do not fit into two-by-two grids, and are not parts of wholes. The interweaving of intentions, hopes, aspirations and behaviour of people who are both inside and outside organisations, who behave both rationally and irrationally, will bring about outcomes which no one has predicted and which no one has planned.

So here is a principal difference that I am offering between my understanding of what happens in organisations and many of the conventional books on management. I am suggesting that what happens between people every day at work, whether it is perceived to have gone well or badly, is more important for thinking about how to work better together than trying to develop a new tool or framework. I am encouraging managers and consultants to pay attention to the kinds of interaction in which they find themselves caught, including noticing the strong feelings that often get evoked at work including in themselves as managers, as a helpful way of thinking about how they might continue to participate. In doing so, they will be uncovering of some taken for granted ideas about the management of organisation as a means of opening them up to further questioning. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, this is a method to encourage managers and consultants to think about what they are doing, to become reflexive about how they interact with others. I am doing so in the belief that it offers an understanding and methods more appropriate for coming to terms with the complexity of situations that face managers and staff in the day-to-day practice of their work. In other words, instead of encouraging managers and consultants to think of an organisation as a thing that they can act upon and change from one state to another, rather they think of themselves as co-participants, perhaps powerful ones, in the ongoing web of relationships to which they are contributing. To reflect upon how they are contributing, and how their contribution is reflected back to them by the reactions of others, and what happens as a result is important data to take into account when deciding what to do next.

Your Success Path I have a 3 part plan for you to be successful... Believe in your value Position yourself in value Communicate your value Go to TheForeverWomanFormula.com, watch the video on the page, and sign up for my free course, The Forever Woman Program. If you get The Forever Woman and use the principles in it... You’ll attract a man who loves and cherishes you He’ll pursue you for a committed, lasting relationship You’ll do less work and feel more appreciated and valued by your man. If you don't get it... You’ll stay stuck in your problems and challenges with men. You’ll feel like you’re doing everything in a relationship only to be taken for granted, have guys pull away, and eventually disappear on you You’ll wonder if you’re ever going to get into the relationship you want. Go to TheForeverWomanFormula.com and check it out for free... if you decide you want to stay a part of our community, you can learn about how to do that as well there.

5.2. Copyright and Disclaimer Copyright 2014 Metin Bektas. All Rights Reserved. This book is designed to provide information about the topics covered. It is sold with the understanding that the author is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. The author shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information covered in this book. The book is for personal use of the original buyer only. It is exclusive property of the author and protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from and distribute any of the content of this book, in whole or in part. The author grants permission to the buyer to use examples and reasonably sized excerpts taken from this book for educational purposes in schools, tutoring lessons and further training courses under the condition, that the material used is not sold or given away and is properly cited.

The GOP, I discovered, was a religious, pro-Christian party. It held 'conservative' values and views regarding faith, family, and culture. It championed self-reliance and hard work. It believed that capitalism and the free market had quickly created the largest middle class in the history of civilization. It believed in individual freedoms and God-given rights over mob rule and intrusive government. It believed in the sanctity of law.

You wouldn't leave me?" he'd asked her honestly afraid. ...In answer, Miri had taken her time before sharing a kind of warning. "I can tell you I'd never leave you. I can also tell you that what makes any marriage work is the knowledge that no relationship should be taken for granted. That there is always a line where the one who'd never leave you is suddenly gone.

Life was good, and none of it would have happened without Andrew. Without him, I would never have mastered the world of music piracy and lived a life of endless McDonald's. What he did, on a small scale, showed me how important it is to empower the dispossessed and the disenfranchised in the wake of oppression. Andrew was white. His family had access to education, resources, computers. For generations, while his people were preparing to go to university, my people were crowded into thatched huts singing, "Two times to is four. Three times two is six. La la la la la." My family had been denied the things his family had taken for granted. I had a natural talent for selling to people, but without knowledge and resources, where was that going to get me? People always lecture the poor: "Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!" But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." What they don't say is, "And it would be nice if you give him a fishing rod." That's the part of the analogy that's missing. Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, "Okay, here's what you need, and here's how it works." Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer. People say, "Oh, that's a handout." No. I still have to work to profit by it. But I don't stand a chance without it.

Permission to take this dumpster fire of a wardrobe, which represents your dumpster fire of a love life, to an actual dumpster and set it on fire.” “Permission not granted. These are very work appropriate. Seven-year-olds like and respect me when I wear these clothes.” “Right, well, my grown man penis literally started shrivelling as soon as I saw these cardigans.” “It’s taken me years to assemble this collection of fun cardigans.” “That is the saddest sentence I have ever heard, and there is no such thing as a fun cardigan.

Doing nothing never works to present opportunities and suggestions for the following steps. That first step must be taken

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not. The birdcage metaphor helps us understand why racism can be so hard to see and recognize: we have a limited view. Without recognizing how our position in relation to the bird defines how much of the cage we can see, we rely on single situations, exceptions, and anecdotal evidence for our understanding, rather than on broader, interlocking patterns. Although there are always exceptions, the patterns are consistent and well documented: People of color are confined and shaped by forces and barriers that are not accidental, occasional, or avoidable. These forces are systematically related to each other in ways that restrict their movement. Individual whites may be “against” racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group. David Wellman succinctly summarizes racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”17 These advantages are referred to as white privilege, a sociological concept referring to advantages that are taken for granted by whites and that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context (government, community, workplace, schools, etc.).18 But let me be clear: stating that racism privileges whites does not mean that individual white people do not struggle or face barriers. It does mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.

Still, every day, I meet millennials (and Gen Xers and Gen Zers) who are working hard, creating jobs, making their own way in the free market. Which makes infinite sense. Millennials pride themselves on being individuals. In most cases, we don’t fit into the standards of our parents. We don’t like to be told what to do. We’d like to create our own futures. Most of us are a bit more free-spirited and individualistic than our parents. What more is conservatism than individual thought and freedom? The ability to have government stay out of our way and not tell us what to do. Not necessarily to have a boss, but to be the boss.

Whether we are Republicans or Democrats, the ultimate goal should be holding our leaders to the positions and objectives that best fit our aims for a better society. People are dug into their own corners. Right and left. Blue and red. We’re more separated now than ever before, and the gap only continues to widen as technology allows us to create more and more ponds where only like-minded fish can swim: the cable news we watch, the websites we gravitate to, the people and groups we follow (and block!) on social media. The idea of a Democrat and a Republican sitting across from each other for a balanced, or even civil, discussion almost sounds impossible anymore. Perhaps the first step in that direction is to start holding our own party accountable. We may demonize the other side a little less once we start looking at our own team with a more honest eye and realize we’re not perfect either. Before I could admit (shudder) that the other side had any good ideas that might advance my core values, I first had to accept the fact that my side sometimes has some bad ones. That alone could be a big step toward both sides truly working together and unraveling some of the issues that both want resolved. Issues that are at the core of who we truly are beyond classifications and political tags.

There were times in my teens I was told not to work because it could jeopardize the government assistance our family was receiving. Even then, the idea was astonishing to me. Poverty and government dependence don’t just affect your bank account. Eventually, they come to affect your mind. You make decisions you normally wouldn’t make because you’re trying to survive. Your mental state can become extremely limiting. You see nothing but what’s in front of you. And when what’s in front of you is a politician with another handout, watch out.

Imagine a novel from the sixties whose author had somehow fully envisioned cellular telephony circa 2004, and had worked it, exactly as we know it today, into the fabric of her imaginary future. Such a book would have seemed highly peculiar in the sixties, even though innumerable novels had already been written in which small personal wireless communications devices were taken for granted. A genuinely prescient cell-phone novel would have moved in a most unsettling way, its characters acting, out of an unprecedented degree of connectivity, in ways that would quickly overwhelm the narrative.

It was a tough journey, though, and I realize that some people don’t have the endurance, or the faith, to continue in the face of such great resistance. But not a day goes by when I don’t meet someone who’s also put it all on the line and is working their butt off to achieve their professional and personal dreams.

Many millennials, in particular, are willing to take a chance and do something outside the box, without the “right” degree or experience or any guarantee of future success. They’re willing to start a business—a tech company, a nonprofit—with a couple of friends—or alone in their apartment. They’ve rejected the narrative that most boomers lived by—that you should go to school, get a job, work for the same company for thirty years, trust that the company will take care of you after retirement with a pension and possibly stock options. They’ve rejected that narrative because it doesn’t exist anymore, in most cases. Most of the millennials who expect that path are, in my opinion, the ones still living at home. Getting angry at “the man” for keeping them down. Waiting for someone else, the government most likely, to come in and save the day.

This is why the system must be reformed. Welfare should exist only for a certain period of time, unless you’re disabled and can’t physically work. It should not last for a generation or more. There are millions of jobs open, without enough people to fill them or, rather, without enough people who have the necessary skills and training. This is where the government should come in, providing incentives for real-world training and educating recipients about a life beyond government dependence.

impostor thoughts can motivate us to work smarter. When we don’t believe we’re going to win, we have nothing to lose by rethinking our strategy. Remember that total beginners don’t fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Feeling like an impostor puts us in a beginner’s mindset, leading us to question assumptions that others have taken for granted.

There were dozens of theories about what it was, that dome. Every scientist in the world, it seemed, had made a pilgrimage to the site. Tests had been conducted, measurements taken. They had tried drilling through it. Under it. Had flown over it. Had dug beneath it. Had approached it by submarine. Nothing worked. Every species of doomsayer from Luddite to End Times nut had had his say. It was a judgment. On America’s technological obsession, on America’s moral failure. This. That. Something else. Then the twins had popped out. Just like that. First Emma. Then, a few minutes later, Anna. Alive and well at the exact moment of their fifteenth birthday. They told tales of life inside the bowl. What they called the FAYZ. Connie Temple’s heart had swelled with pride for what she had learned of her son, Sam. And crashed into despair with tales of her other son, her unacknowledged child, Caine. Then, nothing. No other kids arrived for a while. Black despair settled over the families as they realized that it would be only these two. Months passed. Many lost faith. How could kids survive alone? But then, the Prophetess had reached into their dreams. One night Connie Temple had a lurid, incredible dream. She’d never had such a detailed dream. It was terrifying. The power of it took her breath away. There was a girl in that dream. This girl spoke to her in the dream. It’s a dream, the girl said. Yes, just a dream, Connie had answered. Not just a dream. Never say “just” a dream, the girl had corrected. A dream is a window to another reality. Who are you? Connie had asked. My name is Orsay. I know your son. Connie had been about to say, Which one? But some instinct stopped her. The girl did not look dangerous. She looked hungry. Do you have a message for Sam? the girl asked. Yes, Connie said. Tell him to let them go. Let them go. Let them go off into the red sunset.

The door to the captain’s office was open, the room vacant but for the memories it held, and I staggered forward to sink into a chair. I closed my eyes, filled with a dreadful, yearning sorrow. Cannan had been such a powerful presence in the palace--in our lives--for so many years that it felt as though the heart of our kingdom had been taken from us. He had been Captain of the Guard for thirty years, and had not failed once in his duties; he had saved more lives than he had ever taken in war; and he had raised Steldor to be the man he was today--a bold, brave, sacrificing man. The son was his father in many, many ways. I was startled out of my thoughts by a knock, and turned to see Steldor standing in the doorway. He glanced around the office, his expression composed, and yet it held a deep and immutable sorrow. “I was told I would find you here,” he said. “How are you?” I asked, nervously twining my hands. “As good as can be expected, I suppose.” “And Galen?” “He has Tiersia.” I nodded, averting my gaze. I knew his answer had been an honest one, and had not been meant to hurt me, but sadness filled me. I wanted him to have someone--he deserved to have someone. Only that someone could not be me. “Let’s go to my drawing room,” I suggested, for Cannan’s office was not a place that would allow us to talk about the future, and that was what we needed to do. Steldor stepped aside, allowing me to exit first. He spent one last moment absorbing the look and feel of his father’s office, then respectfully closed the door. When we reached the Queen’s Drawing Room at the front of the palace, we walked over to the bay window that granted a view of the Eastern Courtyard to talk, much as we had when he had told me of his plan to annul our marriage. But this time, I was the one who needed to speak. I slipped my hand into his, and he glanced at me in mild surprise. “I’m sorry about your father’s passing. I know how close you were to him. His strength and guidance will be missed by all. Despite our kingdom’s glory, Hytanica is less without him.” Steldor did not respond, but gazed stoically out the window. Then he nodded twice and took a deep breath, reining in his emotions. Even now, with me, he was proud, not knowing that I wanted to hold him and let him cry, and that if he did, I would not, even for an instant, find him weak. He ran a hand through his dark hair and turned to face me, silently begging me to change the subject, and I obliged. “”And how is the rest of your family?” “Amid our losses, there is also some good news. Shaselle has a suitor.” “Do you approve of her choice? After all, you are the man of the family now.” “There’s no accounting for taste.” He smirked, seeming thankful for my attempt at normalcy. “Actually, Lord Grayden is a good man--a man who met my father’s approval and, I believe, would have met Baelic’s. When the time is right, I expect a betrothal.” Again a smile played across his features. “Now I just have to worry about the other three girls in the family.” I laughed, lacing my fingers through his when I felt he might pull away. I did not know how he would react to my coming proposal--and whether he would admit it or not, he needed some comfort now. “Steldor,” I said, my tone and demeanor once more serious, “when I see Galen, I will reinstate him as Sergeant at Arms.” “An excellent decision.” I nodded, then continued. “But our military needs to be reformed. It needs a strong and passionate leader, someone who will do Cannan and all of his work justice. I cannot think of anyone more suited to taking over the position of Captain of the Guard than you.” He did not immediately reply, but his eyes went to our hands, and he raised mine to his lips as he had so often done before.

am incredibly thankful to call America home. I have been privileged to travel the world and visit all of its major societies, but to be born in a land of opportunity for anyone willing to work hard is an unfathomable blessing that should never be taken for granted.

I am incredibly thankful to call America home. I have been privileged to travel the world and visit all of its major societies, but to be born in a land of opportunity for anyone willing to work hard is an unfathomable blessing that should never be taken for granted.

If we are to make the ordinary man aware of the spiritual uity out of which asll the separate activities of our civilization have arisen, it is necessary in the first place to look at Western civilization as a whole and to treat it wit the same objective appreciation and respect which the humanists of the past devoted to the civilization of antiquity. This does not seem much to ask; yet there have always been a number of reasons which stood in the way of its fulfillment. In the first place, there has been the influence of modern nationalism, which has led every European people to insist on what distinguished it from the rest, instead of what united it with them. It is not necessary to seek for examples in the extremism of German racial nationalists and their crazy theories, proving that everything good in the world comes from men with Germanic blood. Leaving all these extravagances out of account, we still have the basic fact that modern education in general teaches men the history of their country and the literature of their own tongue, as though these were complete wholes and not part of a greater unity. In the second place, there has been the separation between religion and culture, which arose partly from the bitterness of the internal divisions of Christendom and partly from a fear lest the transcendent divine values of Christianity should be endangered by any identification or association of them with the relative human values of culture. Both these factors have been at work, long before our civilization was actually secularized. They had their origins in the Reformation period, and it was Martin Luther in particular who stated the theological dualism of faith and works in such a drastic form as to leave no room for any positive conception of a Christian culture, such as had hitherto been taken for granted. And in the third place, the vast expansion of Western civilization in modern times has led to a loss of any standard of comparison or any recognition of its limits in time and space. Western civilization has ceased to be one civilization amongst others: it became civilization in the absolute sense. It is the disappearance or decline of this naive absolutism and the reappearance of a sense of the relative and limited character of Western civilization as a particular historic culture, which are the characteristic features of the present epoch.

This fundamental dimension of being itself, of the actual existence of what they are studying, is taken for granted by all other branches of knowledge, which then go on to study what it is and how it works. But just because something is taken for granted does not mean that it is unimportant.

Her country had never been aggressive, had never espoused violence, had never taken sides in the squabbles of others. She wondered how people could sleep if they knew that somebody, in their name, was dropping bombs on other people or breaking into their homes and taking them away somewhere. Why did they do it? Why was it necessary to kill and maim other people when the other people would be just the same as yourself--people who wanted to live with their families and go to work in the morning and have enough to eat a the end of the day? That was not much to ask of the world, even if for many the world could not grant even that small request.

as the power of the keys is not limited to this world, 5 an indulgence is more than a mere remission of canonical works of penance; it is a valid abso lution, before God, from the punishments of sin which would otherwise have to be redeemed either by voluntary acts of penance here on earth or by compulsory suffering in purgatory. In other words, an indulgence is valid not only in the external forum of the Church, but likewise in foro divino, that is, before God. This simple explanation incidentally removes the mis taken notion that indulgences neutralize the penal effects of sin (concupiscence, disease, death) or that they can free a person from secular obligations towards others. /?) Where does the Church get the merits by which she blots out the punishments of sin ? She 2 Cfr. 2 Cor. II, 7, 20: x a pt~ * V ' su P ra > Sect - T - 5 Cfr. Matt. XVI, 19; XVIII, 18. 3 Cfr. Is. LXI, i. draws them from a thesaurus of which our Lord Jesus Christ has constituted her the dispenser, and out of which she grants to each individual beneficiary as much as is needed to satisfy the justice of God. This thesaurus consists of the superabundant merits of Jesus Christ and His saints. In dispensing these merits to the faithful whenever there is a iusta causa, the Church acts in accordance with the justice as well as the mercy of God. He who gains an indulgence does not approach God empty-handed, but enriched with the merits of Christ and the saints, and thereby satisfies divine justice. God, on the other hand, in freely accepting these vicarious merits instead of the personal satisfaction due Him from the sinner, manifests His grace and mercy, i. e. His in dulgence in a subjective sense.