Taking A Stance Quotes

There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

I had a dream about you. I said green was blue and yellow, and you said green was yellow and blue. You were like that with everything I said, taking the exact opposite stance, yet completely agreeing with me. That’s how I knew you loved me.

Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.

The authors of a seminal paper on the symbiotic view of life take a clear stance on this point. “There have never been individuals,” they declare. “We are all lichens.

She loved him. But he didn’t know how to love. He could talk about love. He could see love and feel love. But he couldn’t give love. He could make love. But he couldn’t make promises. She had desperately wanted his promises. She wanted his heart, knew she couldn’t have it so she took what she could get. Temporary bliss. Passionate highs and lows. Withdrawal and manipulation. He only stayed long enough to take what he needed and keep moving. If he stopped moving, he would self-destruct. If he stopped wandering, he would have to face himself. He chose to stay in the dark where he couldn’t see. If he exposed himself and the sun came out, he’d see his shadow. He was deathly afraid of his shadow. She saw his shadow, loved it, understood it. Saw potential in it. She thought her love would change him. He pushed and he pulled, tested boundaries, thinking she would never leave. He knew he was hurting her, but didn’t know how to share anything but pain. He was only comfortable in chaos. Claiming souls before they could claim him. Her love, her body, she had given to him and he’d taken with such feigned sincerity, absorbing every drop of her. His dark heart concealed. She’d let him enter her spirit and stroke her soul where everything is love and sensation and surrender. Wide open, exposed to deception. It had never occurred to her that this desire was not love. It was blinding the way she wanted him. She couldn’t see what was really happening, only what she wanted to happen. She suspected that he would always seek to minimize the risk of being split open, his secrets revealed. He valued his soul’s privacy far more than he valued the intimacy of sincere connection so he kept his distance at any and all costs. Intimacy would lead to his undoing—in his mind, an irrational and indulgent mistake. When she discovered his indiscretions, she threw love in his face and beat him with it. Somewhere deep down, in her labyrinth, her intricacy, the darkest part of her soul, she relished the mayhem. She felt a sense of privilege for having such passion in her life. He stirred her core. The place she dared not enter. The place she could not stir for herself. But something wasn’t right. His eyes were cold and dark. His energy, unaffected. He laughed at her and her antics, told her she was a mess. Frantic, she looked for love hiding in his eyes, in his face, in his stance, and she found nothing but disdain. And her heart stopped.

Ok," he says. "First lesson." Noah broadens his stance, taking his place firmly on the embassy side of the threshold. "in the United States," he says. Then, with both feet, he leaps on to the sidewalk. "Out of the United States." Quickly, he jumps back toward me. "In the United States." Another jump across the threshold. "Out of the United States. In. Out. In --" "Is this the part where I hit you?

The field of honor is a painful field...(It) is not a place where children can play. Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person - a person without honor - might take. Such an instance may hurt, but that's why honor is a painful field.

It is not possible to be truly balanced in one’s views of an abuser and an abused woman. As Dr. Judith Herman explains eloquently in her masterwork Trauma and Recovery, “neutrality” actually serves the interests of the perpetrator much more than those of the victim and so is not neutral. Although an abuser prefers to have you wholeheartedly on his side, he will settle contentedly for your decision to take a middle stance. To him, that means you see the couple’s problems as partly her fault and partly his fault, which means it isn’t abuse.

Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

You're a freak. But I really can't accept these-' Were you raised in a barn? Don't be ruuuuuude, my boy. They're a gift.' Blay shook his head. 'Take them, John. You're just going to lose this argument, and it will save us from the theatrics.' Theatrics?' Qhuinn leaped up and assumed a Roman oratory pose. 'Whither thou knowest thy ass from thy elbow, young scribe?' Blay blushed. 'Come on-' Qhuinn threw himself at Blay, grasping onto the guy's shoulders and hanging his full weight off him. 'Hold me. Your insult has left me breathless. I'm agasp.' Blay grunted and scrambled to keep Qhuinn up off the floor. 'That's agape.' Agasp sounds better.' Blay was trying not to smile, trying not to be delighted, but his eyes were sparkling like sapphires and his cheeks were getting red. With a silent laugh, John sat on one of the locker room benches, shook out his pair of white socks, and pulled them on under his new old jeans. 'You sure, Qhuinn? 'Cause I have a feeling they're going to fit and you might change your mind. Qhuinn abruptly lifted himself off Blay and straightened his clothes with a sharp tug. 'And now you offend my honor.' Facing off at John, he flipped into a fencing stance. Touché.' Blay laughed. 'That's en garde, you damn fool.' Qhuinn shot a look over his shoulder. 'ça va, Brutus?' Et tu?' That would be tutu, I believe, and you can keep the cross-dressing to yourself, ya perv.' Qhuinn flashed a brilliant smile, all twelve kinds of proud for being such an ass. 'Now, put the fuckers on, John, and let's be done with this. Before we have to put Blay in an iron lung.' Try sanitarium.' No, thanks, I had a big lunch.

God's solution for "I can't live that way anymore" is basically, "Good! Don't live that way anymore. Set firm limits against evil behavior that are designed to promote change and redemption. Get the love and support you need from other places to take the kind of stance that I do to help redeem relationship. Suffer long, but suffer in the right way." And when done God's way, chances are much better for redemption.

When religious people take the stance that they don’t owe anyone that is hurting closure or answers then God is not winning. Conflict continues because of lack of communication, fear and indifference.

The true test of a warrior is how your 'stance' holds up after any 'circumstance'. Meaning, even after the stormiest weather, a true warrior will still reflect the brilliant rays of the magnificent sun through both his or her eyes. You may get hit by sudden lightning or take severe beatings from the cruel wind, but you will always get back up and stand strong on your feet again, soak in the sunlight, and be prepared to get hit by even the most merciless hail - time and time again.

This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit-no matter how often he's reminded of it-that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley.

What sound was that? I turn away, into the shaking room. What was that sound that came in on the dark? What is this maze of light it leaves us in? What is this stance we take, To turn away and then turn back? What did we hear? It was the breath we took when we first met. Listen. It is here.

Don’t follow any leader; don’t obey to anyone; crowds are slaves; take an independent stance; take orders only from your own mind!

...it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions—or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.

Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.

The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.

I once heard someone say that prayer is more than words. It's a stance you take, a position you claim. You throw your body against the door to keep the demons from advancing and stay put until they go away.

Arelene's middle name was tolerance, mostly because she was too easygoing to take a moral stance.

...there's no such thing as being apolitical. If we sit back and do nothing, leaving all the policy making to others, that is, in fact, a position of support for the status quo, which is a very political stance to take.

I take it you didn’t get the permits...again. (Brian) What was your first clue? (Geary) Oh, I don’t know. That stomping stance as you walked down the street, clenching and unclenching your fists like you’re already choking someone, or maybe it’s that way you’re looking at me like you could claw out my eyes when I haven’t done anything to piss you off. (Brian) Yes, you have. (Geary) And that is? (Brian) You don’t have a gun. (Geary)

The willingness to rebel from the expected norms, rules, and silent contracts of establishment comes out of knowing that one cannot afford to build resentment. Resentment, which comes from the decision to go against one's truth, embitters the self. It somaticizes in the body and takes on the burden of pain as if it were ours alone. The whistleblower, on the other hand, reveals a shared complicity. It says, "I expect more from myself and from you." And in that stance, the pain becomes, in a sense, communal.

He was stunning,incredible,unlike anything she had ever seen before.Around her,the crowd noise dissipated to a dull hum,but she barely noticed.Her gaze was slowly traveling the length of him,taking in his predatory stance and powerful muscle and tanned skin.

..English teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.

It does not take the striking pose of a high-fashion model or the strict stance of someone in uniform to earn respect and admiration.

Alexander. Here he is, before he was Tatiana’s, at the age of twenty, getting his medal of valor for bringing back Yuri Stepanov during the 1940 Winter War. Alexander is in his dress Soviet uniform, snug against his body, his stance at-ease and his hand up to his temple in teasing salute. There is a gleaming smile on his face, his eyes are carefree, his whole man-self full of breath-taking, aching youth. And yet, the war was on, and his men had already died and frozen and starved … and his mother and father were gone… and he was far away from home, and getting farther and farther, and every day was his last – one way or another, every day was his last. And yet, he smiles, he shines, he is happy.

Far be it from me to slow down two badass supermodels on a mission, but we have a problem," a male voice said wryly. I could see Christian out of the corner of my eye as we turned, his stance and movements almost synchronized to my own. We shared a look, our expressions almost identically similar, wit arched brows and half-smiles. "What's the problem?" I called out, scanning the faces to see who had spoken. "You're a badass supermodel," Christian muttered under his breath at the same time, taking the mature approach, as usual.

I explained to him - as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag - that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiously... I had behaved like this many times before: taking Canute's stance in the path of the great surge of ill-brewed tepid tea that was inundating England.

What is it that teaching kills? The juice, the sap - the substance of revelation: by making even the insoluble questions & multiple possible answers take on the granite assured stance of dogma. It does not kill this quick of life in students who come, each year, fresh, quick, to be awakened & pass on - but it kills the quick in me by forcing to formula the great visions, the great collocations and cadences of words and meanings. The good teacher, the proper teacher, must be everliving in faith and ever-renewed in creative energy to keep the sap packed in herself, himself, as well as the work. I do not have the energy, or will to use the energy I have, and it would take all, to keep this flame alive.

But, that’s probably why she didn’t tell you. And… I don’t want you to be mad at her.” I try to swallow past the lump forming in my throat. “I’m not mad at Sadie,” I tell him quietly. There’s a hesitancy to his stance, every line of his face, like he wants to say more but he doesn't know how. So, I take a guess. “I’m not gonna leave her, Oliver. Never, okay? She may ask me to go one day, but I will never leave her. Not her, or your brother or you. Tell me you understand that.

Being a good, innovative librarian means taking a humanistic stance toward policy, decision-making, and experimentation. It means focusing on the heart.

Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter "Jesus Christ!" and shake their heads.

To ignore the plight of those one might conceivably save is not wisdom—it is indolence. And such a passive stance will not, I fear, take us far upon the path to progress.

Now.” Taking a firm stance in front of my boyfriend’s sister, I planted my hands on my hips and arched a brow. “Which one of you thick fuckers has a death wish?

The earth will support anything that supports life. What I have found after a soul retrieval is that one cannot "numb out" anymore. Each and every one of us must make personal and planetary decisions to stop abusing life. Whether a person a has to give up an abusive relationship, take a more active political role, or increase awareness of how we continue to abuse our environment, we all now have to be responsible. Being responsible means responding to what is needed. We find a need to wake up and change our reality to a stance of power...

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence

Medusa reminds us that we must not take the female “monster” at face value; that we must not only weigh her beneficent against her maleficent attributes but also take into consideration the worldview and sociopolitical stance of the patriarchal cultures which create her, fashioning the demonic female as scapegoat for the benefit and comfort of the male members of their societies.

I’m not mad at Sadie,” I tell him quietly. There’s a hesitancy to his stance, every line of his face, like he wants to say more but he doesn't know how. So, I take a guess. “I’m not gonna leave her, Oliver. Never, okay? She may ask me to go one day, but I will never leave her. Not her, or your brother or you. Tell me you understand that.” His cheeks blush as he angles his eyes down to the ground. “I understand.

Burying and Planting The culmination of one love, one dream, one self, is the anonymous seed of the next. There is very little difference between burying and planting. For often, we need to put dead things to rest, so that new life can grow. And further, the thing put to rest—whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing—becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form. As the well-used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold. This is very helpful when considering the many forms of self we inhabit over a lifetime. One self carries us to the extent of its usefulness and dies. We are then forced to put that once beloved skin to rest, to join it with the ground of spirit from which it came, so it may fertilize the next skin of self that will carry us into tomorrow. There is always grief for what is lost and always surprise at what is to be born. But much of our pain in living comes from wearing a dead and useless skin, refusing to put it to rest, or from burying such things with the intent of hiding them rather than relinquishing them. For every new way of being, there is a failed attempt mulching beneath the tongue. For every sprig that breaks surface, there is an old stick stirring underground. For every moment of joy sprouting, there is a new moment of struggle taking root. We live, embrace, and put to rest our dearest things, including how we see ourselves, so we can resurrect our lives anew.

Actively self-reflecting on the approaches that you are taking fosters a strategic stance that is really important in life. Strategic thinking distinguishes between people of comparable ability and effort. This can make the difference between people who achieve and people who have the potential to achieve, but don’t.

Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. In my fiction I think this search sometimes turns out to be a cruel delusion. No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days or weeks, totally played out by the publishing industry and the broadcast industry. Nothing is too arcane to escape the treatment, the process. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail. Some people prefer to believe in conspiracy because they are made anxious by random acts. Believing in conspiracy is almost comforting because, in a sense, a conspiracy is a story we tell each other to ward off the dread of chaotic and random acts. Conspiracy offers coherence. I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfillment in America... I see this desperation against the backdrop of brightly colored packages and products and consumer happiness and every promise that American life makes day by day and minute by minute everywhere we go. Discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writer’s labor. Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. Every new novel stretches the term of the contract—let me live long enough to do one more book. You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

It takes rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion -- that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different than a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance -- is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling -- feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously. Love, Margaret implies in her letter to Sam, is never to be taken for granted -- it is to be met moment by moment, on its ever-changing terms.

Tessie and I lay in our chairs, listening to wax being violently removed. 'Oh my!' cried the large lady. 'Is nothing,' belittled Helga. 'I do it perfect.' 'Oweee!' yelped a bikini-liner. And Helga, taking an oddly femenist stance: 'See what you do for the mens? You suffer. Is not worth it.

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. ... The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.

In God’s economy, people don’t stand on opposing sides of the conflict scale. People stand on one side and Satan stands on the other. When we dump hurt into one another’s lives, we aren’t leveling the conflict scale. We are just weighing down the people side of the scale and elevating the Satan side of the scale. Satan loves it when we do his work for him by dumping on each other. The secret to healthy conflict resolution isn’t taking a you-against-me stance, but realizing it’s all of us against Satan—he’s the real enemy.

Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore's arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.

Fighting can be like champagne. It can go to the head of a coward as quickly as of a hero. Anyone has the ability to be brave on a battlefield; when you are forced with the choice of: Be brave or... be killed. You may not realize it, but most of us have the chance to be heroes off the battlefield. When we take a stance and find our inner courage, instead of looking the other direction when we encounter evilness or oppression.

The person of faith looks up to God, not at him or down on him. The servant assumes a certain posture, a stance. If he or she fails to take that posture, attentive responsiveness to the master's commands will be hard.

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who run a leadership consultancy, analyzed 3,492 participants in a manager development program and found that the most effective listeners do four things: 1. They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2. They take a helping, cooperative stance 3. They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4. They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths

Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.

The other man stood his ground, with an arrogant, insolent stance. Although it was hard to believe, clearly the idiot didn’t have a clue either who he had ogled, or who he had engaged in a pissing contest. Had he been living under a rock?

Protesting often times takes a stance of offense; a form of violence that may not always be physical but is a form of violence all the same. Everyone has the right to be heard, but only if they are willing to really listen to others in an attempt to understand.

They take in the full experience of great loves and great tragedies without backing down or crouching into some sort of defensive stance. If life is going to punch them in the face, they stick their chins out and savor the moment. That is living life to the fullest.

But I had this idea also that you don't take so wide a stance that it makes a human llife impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that destroy you, but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condidtion as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched.

If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.

The framing of women’s abuse narratives as quasi-legal testimony encourages the public, as interpreters, to take the stance of cross-examiners who categorize forgetting as memory failure and insist on completeness and consistency of memory detail through all repeated tellings. The condensed, summarized, or fragmentary nature of abuse memories will rarely withstand this aggressive testing. Few people’s memories can.

Every challenge we take on has the power to knock us to our knees. But what’s even more disconcerting than the jolt itself is our fear that we won’t withstand it. When we feel the ground beneath us shifting, we panic. We forget everything we know and allow fear to freeze us. Just the thought of what could happen is enough to throw us off balance. What I know for sure is that the only way to endure the quake is to adjust your stance. You can’t avoid the daily tremors. They come with being alive. But I believe these experiences are gifts that force us to step to the right or left in search of a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Let them help you adjust your footing.

Taking an abolitionist stance does not mean refusing to engage in incremental change, nor does it mean abandoning efforts to improve conditions inside prisons. Rather, abolitionists engage in 'abolitionist reforms' or 'non-reformist reforms.' These are reforms that either directly undermine the prison industrial complex or provide support to prisoners through strategies that weaken, rather than strengthen, the prison system itself. For example, rather than lobbying for bigger prison health budgets to care for elderly prisoners, an abolitionist reform strategy would aim to get elderly prisoners out on compassionate release to obtain healthcare in the community. --S. Lamble

We become anxious when we take a godlike stance, occupying ourselves with things too great for us.

Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections.

Give love a chance. Make magic, and dance. We are romance. At first glance - Take A Stance

With a sudden flash of anger, she blurted, "Lash wasn't impotent, all right? He wasn't ... impotent-" The temperature in the room plummeted so fast and so far, her breath came out in clouds. And what she saw in the mirror made her swing around and take a step back from John: His blue eyes glowed with an unholy light and his upper lip curled up to reveal fangs that were sharp and so long they looked like daggers. Objects all around the room began to vibrate: the lamps on the bed stands, the clothes on their hangers, the mirror on the wall. The collective rattling crescendoed to a dull roar and she had to steady herself on the bureau or run the risk of being knocked on her ass. The air was alive. Supercharged. Electric. Dangerous. And John was the center of the raging energy, his hands cranking into fists so tight his forearms trembled, his thighs grabbing onto his bones as he sank down into fighting stance. John's mouth stretched wide as his head shot forward on his spine... and he let out a war cry- Sound exploded all around her, so loud she had to cover her ears, so powerful she felt the blast against her face. For a moment, she thought he'd found his voice- except it wasn't vocal cords making that bellowing noise. The glass in the sliders blew out behind him, the sheets shattering into thousands of shards that blasted free of the house, the fragments bouncing on the slate and catching the light like raindrops... Or like tears.

To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance," wrote the psychologist Jerome Bruner. Every story we tell, of marriage or life involves judgement about the salient facts, the details to amplify, the impression we wish to leave. The techniques that great storytellers use to draw us in are not unlike the ones that intimate partners use with each other to promote fruitful conversation. Both ease the listener into their story by speaking in terms of possibilities rather than certainties. When one partner wants to invite the other to consider his perspective, he signals his belief that he doesn't have sole access to the truth...In doing so he invites curiosity...Trouble couples insist their partner's meanings are unambiguous.

The very phrase "inference to the best explanation" should wave a red flag to us. What is good, better, best? What values are slipped in here, under a common name, and where do they come from? The appeal to explanation brings out into the open the glaring fact that we have a risk taking pursuit of truth. Science is brave and dares to enter dangerous waters. Empirical science goes for bold conjectures and audacious hypotheses, it offers them as basis for prediction and action while the iron is still hot and conclusive evidence still infinitely beyond reach.

We were convinced of the inherent madness of codified inequity. All cooperation involves some measure of surrender. And coercion. But the alternative, being anarchy, is itself no worthy virtue. It is but an excuse for selfish aggression, and all that seeks justification from taking that stance is, each and every time, cold-hearted. Anarchists live in fear and long for death, because they despair of seeing in others the very virtues they lack in themselves. In this manner, they take pleasure in sowing destruction, if only to match their inner landscape of ruin. [...] We rejected civilization, but so too we rejected anarchy for its petty belligerence and the weakness of thought it announced. By these decisions, we made ourselves lost and bereft of purpose.

Of all the homes I have known, yours has been a shining model of wisdom and kindness and honesty. For what you and your mother have done in the past, for me and for the child, I owe you a profound debt of honour. You have that claim on me. So has your mother. But if you press it too far; if you will accept no appeal and continue to press it, over and over; if you move into my life, both of you, and take your stance there and feel obliged to command and instruct me in how I should or should not behave, you will destroy our relationship. I shall walk away from you both; I shall deny you both; I shall repudiate all you have done for me. It will all be as if it had never happened … I don’t know what you fear for me, but that you should fear. For I cannot afford it.

I'll be right here. Good luck, or break a leg, or something.” As Jay and Gregory turned and headed into the crowd, my traitorous eyes returned to the corner and found another pair or eyes staring darkly back. I dropped my gaze for three full seconds, and then lifted my eyes again, hesitant. The drummer was still staring at me, oblivious to the three girls trying to win back his attention. He put up one finger at the girls and said something that looked like, “Excuse me.” Oh, my goodness. Was he...? Oh, no. Yes, he was walking this way. My nerves shot into high alert. I looked around, but nobody else was near. When I looked back up, there he was, standing right in front of me. Good gracious, he was sexy-a word that had not existed in my personal vocabulary until that moment. This guy was sexy like it was his job or something. He looked straight into my eyes, which threw me off guard, because nobody ever looked me in the eye like that. Maybe Patti and Jay, but they didn't hold my stare like he was doing now. He didn't look away, and I found that I couldn't take my gaze off those blue eyes. “Who are you?” he asked in a blunt, almost confrontational way. I blinked. It was the strangest greeting I'd ever received. “I'm...Anna.” “Right. Anna. How very nice.” I tried to focus on his words and not his luxuriously accented voice, which made everything sound lovely. He leaned in closer. “But who are you?” What did that mean? Did I need to have some sort of title or social standing to enter his presence? “I just came with my friend Jay?” Oh, I hated when I got nervous and started talking in questions. I pointed in the general direction of the guys, but he didn't take his eyes off me. I began rambling. “They just wrote some songs. Jay and Gregory. That they wanted you to hear. Your band, I mean. They're really...good?” His eyes roamed all around my body, stopping to evaluate my sad, meager chest. I crossed my arms. When his gaze landed on that stupid freckle above my lip, I was hit by the scent of oranges and limes and something earthy, like the forest floor. It was pleasant in a masculine way. “Uh-huh.” He was closer to my face now, growling in that deep voice, but looking into my eyes again. “Very cute. And where is your angel?” My what? Was that some kind of British slang for boyfriend? I didn't know how to answer without continuing to sound pitiful. He lifted his dark eyebrows, waiting. “If you mean Jay, he's over there talking to some man in a suit. But he's not my boyfriend or my angel or whatever.” My face flushed with heat and I tightened my arms over my chest. I'd never met anyone with an accent like his, and I was ashamed of the effect it had on me. He was obviously rude, and yet I wanted him to keep talking to me. It didn't make any sense. His stance softened and he took a step back, seeming confused, although I still couldn't read his emotions. Why didn't he show any colors? He didn't seem drunk or high. And that red thing...what was that? It was hard not to stare at it. He finally looked over at Jay, who was deep in conversation with the manager-type man. “Not your boyfriend, eh?” He was smirking at me now. I looked away, refusing to answer. “Are you certain he doesn't fancy you?” Kaidan asked. I looked at him again. His smirk was now a naughty smile. “Yes,” I assured him with confidence. “I am.” “How do you know?” I couldn't very well tell him that the only time Jay's color had shown mild attraction to me was when I accidentally flashed him one day as I was taking off my sweatshirt, and my undershirt got pulled up too high. And even then it lasted only a few seconds before our embarrassment set in.

One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures. We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying. Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, “a desire for a desire,” when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be—a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires. Acquiring the tastes of a serious person is what we call education. Does it have a future? The advent of engineered, hyperpalatable mental stimuli compels us to ask the question.

Take a breath, take a stance, don’t rush forward or hold back, close your eyes, and let the mind relax. As anxious feet retreat to the cuddle of melodies, begin the journey of dance and the sacred path.

The pessimist’s nostalgia, deteriorism goes far beyond simply whining that things used to be better and takes the bold stance that the world is actively and energetically going to hell in a handbasket. also

While most streams of Buddhism take a contemplative stance on passion, pleasure, and pain, Sufism encourages us to be open to our passions - to dive into the sea, to become at one with the beauty and power of the waves.

Let us be women who Love. Let us be women willing to lay down our sword words, our sharp looks, our ignorant silence and towering stance and fill the earth now with extravagant Love. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who make room. Let us be women who open our arms and invite others into an honest, spacious, glorious embrace. Let us be women who carry each other. Let us be women who give from what we have. Let us be women who leap to do the difficult things, the unexpected things and the necessary things. Let us be women who live for Peace. Let us be women who breathe Hope. Let us be women who create beauty. Let us be women who Love. Let us be a sanctuary where God may dwell. Let us be a garden for tender souls. Let us be a table where others may feast on the goodness of God. Let us be a womb for Life to grow. Let us be women who Love. Let us rise to the questions of our time. Let us speak to the injustices in our world. Let us move the mountains of fear and intimidation Let us shout down the walls that separate and divide. Let us fill the earth with the fragrance of Love. Let us be women who Love. Let us listen for those who have been silenced. Let us honor those who have been devalued. Let us say, Enough! with abuse, abandonment, diminishing and hiding. Let us not rest until every person is free and equal. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who are savvy, smart and wise. Let us be women who shine with the light of God in us. Let us be women who take courage and sing the song in our hearts. Let us be women who say, Yes, to the beautiful, unique purpose seeded in our souls. Let us be women who call out the song in another’s heart. Let us be women who teach our children to do the same. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who Love, in spite of fear. Let us be women who Love, in spite of our stories. Let us be women who Love loudly, beautifully, Divinely. Let us be women who Love.

The winning electoral strategy with phishable voters is threefold: 1. Publicly, proclaim policies that will appeal to the typical voter on issues that are salient to her, and where she will be well informed. 2. But on other issues, where the typical voter is ill informed, but where potential campaign donors are well informed, take the stance that appeals to donors. Publicize this stance to would-be contributors, without broadcasting it widely to the general public. 3. Use the contributions from these “special-interest groups” for campaigning that increases popularity among the regular run of voters, who are more likely to vote for someone who “mows their lawn on TV.

it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the abuses of official enemies: a fine activity, but not the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.

It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, “A bit early to say.” (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, “I seem to have cancer today.”) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask... It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body. But it’s not really possible to adopt a stance of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don’t really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five. Quite rightly, some take me up on it. I recently had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my niece’s wedding, in my old hometown and former university in Oxford. This depressed me for more than one reason, and an especially close friend inquired, “Is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?” As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too. And yet I had absolutely invited the question. Telling someone else, with deliberate realism, that once I’d had a few more scans and treatments I might be told by the doctors that things from now on could be mainly a matter of “management,” I again had the wind knocked out of me when she said, “Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.” How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said myself. But again there was the unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self–centered and even solipsistic.

Conflict becomes sinful when our responses to it are destructive, hurtful, abusive, or violent. There are good ways to disagree & there are also unhealthy ways. Even people who are right sometimes...about the issue... can deal with it in a way that is very unloving. Being faithful to Christ involves more than taking the right stance or being on the right side of an issue. It also requires engaging those with whom we disagree in positive respectful dialogue.

One, I was an asshole in eleventh grade. Ask literally anyone…. Two is still that I was an asshole. I hadn’t given any serious thought to geopolitical realities. I was just talking big- and taking the stance that matched my outfits.

No matter how powerful a waterfall is, it cannot be heard from far away because all waterfalls are local! If you want the whole world to hear you, take a universal position where all can see you, just like the Moon, just like the Sun!

In the last week of April 2004, a handful of the Abu Ghraib photographs were broadcast on 60 minutes and published in The New Yorker, and within a couple of days they had been rebroadcast and republished pretty much everywhere on earth. Overnight, the human pyramid, the hooded man on the box, the young woman soldier with a prisoner on a leash, and the corpse packed in ice had become the defining images of the Iraq war...Never before had such primal dungeon scenes been so baldly captured on camera...But above all, it was the posing soldiers, mugging for their buddies' cameras while dominating the prisoners in trophy stances, that gave the photographs the sense of unruly and unmediated reality. The staging was part of the reality they documented. And the grins, the thumbs-up, the arms crossed over puffed-out chests—all this unseemly swagger and self-regard was the height of amateurism. These soldier-photographers stood, at once, inside and outside the events they recorded, watching themselves take part in the spectacle, and their decision not to conceal but to reveal what they were doing indicated that they were not just amateur photographers, but amateur torturers. So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq War that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had held up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine—not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideals had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing.

This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls “relentlessly pleasant.”22 This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance.23 Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused … and smile.

Far be it from me to slow down two badass supermodels on a mission, but we have a problem," a male voice said wryly. I could see Christian out of the corner of my eye as we turned, his stance and movements almost synchronized to my own. We shared a look, our expressions almost identically similar, with arched brows and half-smiles. "What's the problem?" I called out, scanning the faces to see who had spoken. "You're a badass supermodel," Christian muttered under his breath at the same time, taking the mature approach, as usual.

some seem to get trapped in the compulsion to succeed, others take a rebellious stance. Pointing to the blatant cruelties and limitations involved in a cultural pattern which tends to value only the winner and ignore even the positive qualities of the mediocre, they vehemently criticize competition. Among the most vocal are youth who have suffered under competitive pressures imposed on them by parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by making no effort to win

she believed that people’s IQ scores told the whole story of who they were. We were seated around the room in IQ order, and only the highest-IQ students could be trusted to carry the flag, clap the erasers, or take a note to the principal. Aside from the daily stomachaches she provoked with her judgmental stance, she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class had one consuming goal—look smart, don’t look dumb. Who cared about or enjoyed learning when our whole being was at stake every time she gave us a test or called on us in class?

Likewise, the source of Christian nationalism’s influence in the political realm is not “religious” in essence, since personal religiosity often tends to influence Americans to hold more progressive stances on political issues, once Christian nationalism is taken into account.

The idea that he’d be entering this world involuntarily—the enhancers’ realm, the political imbroglio—disturbed him. That he’d have to claim a stance, take a side, defend the technological advances by virtue of their medical purpose. Be grouped with the believers by default. He

Adventure begins with you, personally. It is in the way you look at things. It is the mental stance you take as you face your day. It is finding magic in things. It is talking with people and discovering their inner goodness. It is the thrill of feeling a part of the life around you. The attitude of adventure will open things up for you. The world will become alive with new zest and meaning. You’ll become more aware of the beauty everywhere. Nothing will seem unimportant. Everything will be revealed as having pattern and purpose.” — Wilferd Peterson —

To speak of Jesus’s divinity without speaking of his kingdom coming on earth as in heaven is to take a large step toward the detached spirituality—almost a form of Gnosticism—that the first two centuries of the church firmly rejected. Only recently did the awful realization dawn on me that a certain stance was not only possible, but actually occurring: people were affirming the divinity of Jesus—which I also fully and gladly affirm—and then using it as a shelter behind which to hide from the radical story the gospels were telling about what this embodied God was actually up to.

Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play.

It takes a rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion—that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different from a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance—is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling—feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.

We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching, but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity -- and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.

This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit—no matter how often he’s reminded of it—that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley

In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being. During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle - the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.

path of descent becomes our own liberation. We are freed from the exhausting stance of defense. We are no longer compelled to be right and are thus relieved from the burden of maintaining some reputation. We are released from the idols of greed, control, and status. The pressure to protect the house of cards is alleviated when we take the lowest place.

for our personal safety and, indeed, for the well-being of the planet we live on, we must abandon our mistaken beliefs—our “sociopathy blindness”—and take a useful stance grounded in knowledge and competence. We must learn that, despite their trademark lack of emotion, sociopaths are “emotion-eaters.” They have an intense desire to witness their control over us by inciting our confusion, anger, and fear. They feed off the negative emotions of others. Knowing when and how not to display emotion—how to remain calm in the presence of a sociopath rather than feeding him with our immediate feelings—is a vital skill. He is playing a terrible game with you, but I will show you how to change the rules of the game.

Part of the beauty of motivational interviewing is that it generates more openness in both directions. Listening can encourage others to reconsider their stance toward us, but it also gives us information that can lead us to question our own views about them. If we take the practices of motivational interviewing seriously, we might become the ones who think again.

the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. They didn’t see this conclusion as depressing, though. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what ‘happiness’ really means. These

One of the consequences of taking this inner perspective is that the idea of magic transforms from an impossible fantasy into an aspect of Nature that we can begin to study. From this stance, terms such as paranormal and supernatural are seen as quaint and antediluvian, similar to how modern medicine no longer needs the concept of “bad humors” when discussing the origins of disease.

Protesting often times takes a stance of offense; a form of violence that may not always be physical but is a form of violence all the same. Everyone has the right to be heard, but only if they are willing to really listen to others in an attempt to understand. As an atheist, I have never stood outside a church and disrupted their gathering, although I am willing to have a conversation about how my journey brought me here and how you have come to this point. For me to enter a gathering and protest is an offensive move that would cause the people involved to put up walls. It would not be welcomed and I would not do it. It would be a hindrance to us actually knowing and understanding each other. The only way to truly know someone is by being with them, by conversation.

In fact, when we examine anxiety closely, it’s really a passive state—a distractor that allows us to fill our head with busy thoughts that appear to be active responses to our situation but in reality are powerless. Though we seek to impose control through the stance we take on an issue, by means of our thoughts, or by seeking to impose our will on others, we rarely take the action required to alter things.

For several months they'd been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can't afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs. [10] It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teenage gangs and racial tensions. The Hell's Angels' massive publicity -- coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley -- was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels' aggressive, antisocial stance -- their alienation, as it were -- had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell's Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully bucking authority, and to the frustrated student radical this was a powerful image indeed. The Angels didn't masturbate, they raped. They didn't come on with theories and songs and quotations, but with noise and muscle and sheer balls.

Capitalism is one of those words with a highly contested definition: how you define it is a function of your stance toward it. So even venturing a definition requires navigating tricky political terrain. For my analysis, I’ll take as a starting point a straightforward definition: a mode of production in which actors are driven by the accumulation of capital, which is made possible through private ownership of the means of production.

Are you afraid of me, Kalea?” Arms akimbo, she widened her stance to eye him like a tough little mouse. “Am I supposed to be?” “No. Are you?” She twisted up her mouth and studied him carefully. “You look very strange. Are your eyes supposed to glow red like that?” “They are.” “And your teeth? Are they supposed to be so long and sharp?” “I’m Andarion. We all have those teeth.” “Dancer…” Fain said in warning. “We’ve got company. We need to go. Fast.” He held his hand up to his brother before he turned back to the girl. “I’m your father, Kalea, and I’ve come to take you home.” All the defiant fire went out of her as her jaw dropped. Her lips quivered. “I really have a daddy?” He nodded. Tears filled her eyes, making them glisten. “You definitely have a father. And both your mother and I love you very much.” “I have a mommy, too?” she breathed in disbelief. “Yes.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I hate this place, Daddy. Please take me home.” She threw herself into his arms. Closing his eyes, Hauk held her close to his chest. While he loved and adored every child his friends had, it was nothing compared to what went through him as those little arms encircled his neck and she placed her head on his shoulder. Not even what he felt for Darice compared to this. She’s my little girl. All he wanted was to hold on to her forever. But

The stars have spoken about your day. Today, you may find yourself on a collision course with a Sagittarius. Though this altercation may bring you peace of mind for a while, try not to forget the true obstacles in your way. Today could well send you spiralling down various paths so be sure that each decision you make is one you want to stick with. Whatever stance you choose to take today will set the dice rolling and take the control out of your hands.

The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands . . . In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the "inner critic" that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves. A large part of our initial transformational work centers on becoming more aware of the superego's "voice" in its many guises, both positive and negative. Its voices continually draw us back into identifying with our personality and acting out in self-defeating ways. When we are present, we are able to hear our superego voices without identifying with them; we are able to see the stances and positions of the superego as if they were characters in a play waiting in the wings, ready to jump in and control or attack us once again. When we are present, we hear the superego's voice but we do not give it any energy; the "all-powerful" voice then becomes just another aspect of the moment. However, we must also be on the lookout for the formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work . . . In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superego's tendency to take over our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more we will recognize the irrelevance of these voices and successfully resist giving them energy. Eventually, they lose their power, and we can regain the space and quiet we need to be receptive to other, more life-giving forces within us. . . . If we feel anxious, depressed, lost, hopeless, fearful, wretched, or weak, we can be sure that our superego is on duty.

But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that’s why honor is a painful field.

And so, nearly in sight of the capital of Ruthgar, they boarded the odd new skimmer that Ben-hadad had dubbed the Mighty Thruster. Kip had shaken his head. Tisis had muttered, "Boys." Ferkudi had guffawed. Winsen had grinned. Cruxer had blushed and said, "you can't call it that." "We're the Mighty," Ben-hadad said. "The propulsion units are thrusters, that's all". The damn liar. "i guess you'll be the first man to ride the Mighty Thruster?", tisis asked. His brown wrinkled. "That makes it sound..." "Make sure you take a good wide stance, legs apart, or he'll thrown you." "He? i didn't..." "Do you need more instruction? Because I'm getting quite adept at riding a mighty thruster myself," she said. Ben-hadad blanched. "You'll want to make sure you have a good grip, and loosen up your hips a--" "All right! All right!" Hours later, they sped into the mouth of the Great River -- on the good skimmer Blue Falcon

Neutrality always swallows all things mighty. The path of least resistance ensures all forks in the road are made comfortable descents into a mediocre valley of oblivion, an oblivion where nothing of note happens, where the audacity of uncomfortable choice is checked by the rank vanilla stank of stagnant stasis. In God's heaven, taking a hard stance is the heinous act of a heretic. Abandon all autonomy ye who enter here. Days of remembrance are reserved only for those who take a stand.

Being nonreactive to destructive or hostile behaviour does not imply passive acceptance of it. Rather, it means we need to deal with it, take off our blinders and see the unacceptable. To redirect the destructive enery, we must dance with the shadow, not kill it. When we can achieve this stance, we learn to confront maladaptive or nonproductive behaviour matter-of-factly, without becoming embroiled in the heat of our own emotions. This nonreflexive style of being in the world is potent.

We were always looking for the perfect man. Even those of us who were not signed up for the traditional, heteronormative experience were nevertheless fascinated with the anthropological, unicorn-like search for one. Married or single, we were either searching for him or trying to mold him from one we already had. This perfect specimen would consist of the following essential attributes: He shared his food and always ordered dessert. When we recommended a book, he bought it without needing a friend to second our suggestion first. He knew how to pack a diaper bag without being told. He was a Southern gentleman with a mother from the East Coast who fostered his quietly progressive sensibilities. He said “I love you” after 2.5 months. He didn’t get drunk. He knew how to do taxes. He never questioned our feminist ideals when we refused to squish bugs or change oil. He didn’t sit down to put on his shoes. He had enough money for retirement. He wished vehemently for male-hormonal birth control. He had a slight unease with the concept of women’s shaved vaginas, but not enough to take a stance one way or another. He thought Mindy Kaling was funny. He liked throw pillows. He didn’t care if we made more money than him. He liked women his own age. We were reasonable and irrational, cynical and naïve, but always, always on the hunt. Of course, this story isn’t about perfect men, but Ardie Valdez unfortunately didn’t know that yet when, the day after Desmond’s untimely death, Ardie’s phone lit up: a notification from her dating app.

Josef waylays me outside the museum and announces I have driven him to despair: because of the way I’ve treated him, he is leaving Toronto forever. He does not fool me: he was planning to do this anyway. My mean mouth takes over. “Good,” I say. He gives me a pained, reproachful stare, drawing himself up into the proud, theatrical, poker-up-the-bum stance of a matador. I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this act of walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit—no matter how often he’s reminded of it—that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley. Most Angels understand where they are, but not why, and they are well enough grounded in the eternal verities to know that very few of the toads in this world are Charming Princes in disguise. Most are simply toads, and no

We’re not evenly matched.” I pointed to his tie then put my hands on my hips and mimicked his stance. I hoped bravado and wine-haze would prop up my resolve. So far so good. He glared at me, looking resentful, and his voice was steely as he asked, “What, specifically, makes you think so?” I lifted my chin and indicated his tie again, “Your tie, Quinn. I have on nine pieces of clothing and, assuming you’re wearing underwear of some sort, you have on ten. Now I can either put on my hat or you can take off your tie.” His glare morphed into a perplexed frown as I spoke but then, when I reached the end of the last sentence, his features transitioned into something like petulant yet amused understanding and most of the rigidity left his shoulders and neck. We stared at each other, again almost for a half minute, before I broke the silence. “Or, you could take off your jacket…?” Quinn’s mouth hooked to the side and he smoothly removed his jacket; he tossed it to the pile created by my discarded clothes. He began unfastening his cufflinks at his sleeves and the breath he released while pinning me with an irritated stare sounded relieved.

Groupthink members see themselves as part of an in-group working against an outgroup opposed to their goals. You can tell if a group suffers from groupthink if it: overestimates its invulnerability or high moral stance, collectively rationalizes the decisions it makes, demonizes or stereotypes outgroups and their leaders, has a culture of uniformity where individuals censor themselves and others so that the facade of group unanimity is maintained, and contains members who take it upon themselves to protect the group leader by keeping information, theirs or other group members’, from the leader.

Negative stereotypes about aging, as we have seen, may directly and indirectly prime diminished capacity for older adults. Similarly, the absence of these cues may prime improved health. The general hypothesis examined here was that if we are in contexts that prime older age, we will age more quickly. We examined the effect that our clothes may have on us given the age-appropriate stance we take on clothing. Imagine a sixty-year-old woman trying on a miniskirt. In most cases, she’d be well advised not to make the purchase, but we would think nothing of a sixteen-year-old wearing the same skirt.

The simple answer is that I have changed my techniques in order to avoid the relentless sameness of my material, but I have probably only found new costumes, not new creatures entirely. In the past, if I wanted to sound a note on a piano (in prose), I didn’t just have to purchase and install the piano, I had to build it. But before I built it I had to grow the trees whose wood would yield the piano, and probably I had to create the soil and landscape through which those trees would burst. Then there was the problem of the fucking seeds. Where did they come from? I had to source them. With such mania I was either onto something or I completely misunderstood what a fiction writer was supposed to do. Simple things, even entirely undramatic ones, could not occur unless I created them from whole cloth. I was superstitious about taking anything for granted, but it also locked me into a kind of fanatical object fondling that could, on a bad day, preclude any exploration of the human (even though the process of trying to remake the world on the page is fairly, pathetically, human). This set of interests kept me away from what is usually called narrative. It wasn’t some ideological position, or an artistic stance, it was just one set of obsessions winning out over another. On the other hand, I think that I have always tried to create feeling, and then to pulse it into the reader with language. It’s very difficult to figure out how to do this. Storytelling is one way — conventional narrative or whatever you want to call it — but are there other methods worth exploring? The ground shifts, and I change my mind about what might work. How to create immense, unforgettable feeling from language? This ambition hasn’t really changed, it’s just that I want to cultivate new approaches, to try to circle in on a more vivid way to accomplish it.

Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy. All this I am fully aware of. I know too, however, that of the four great gifts that the fairies may or may not bring to the christening – Brains, Birth, Beauty and Money – it is Beauty that makes locked doors spring open at a touch. Whether it is for a job interview, a place at a dining table, a brilliant promotion or a lift on the motorway, everyone, regardless of their sex or their sexual proclivity, would always rather deal with a good-looking face. And no one is more aware of this than the Beauties themselves. They have a power they simultaneously respect and take for granted. Despite the moralists who tut about its transience, it is generally a power that is never completely lost. One can usually trace in the wrinkled lines of a nonagenarian, stooped and leaning on a stick, the style and confidence that turned heads in a ballroom in 1929.

I think a marvelous stunt would be to have your best friend (or the most critical acquaintance) take some candid color snapshots of you from all angles, dressed just as you usually appear at, say, six in the evening. The same hairdo, the same makeup, and if possible the same expression on your face. Be honest! Be sure to have her take the rear views, too. There ought to be some other shots of you wearing your best going-out-to-dinner dress, or your favorite bridge-with-the-girls costume — hat, gloves, bag, and costume jewelry. Everything. Then have that roll of film developed and BLOWN UP. You can’t see much in a tiny snapshot. An eight-by-ten will show you the works — and you probably won’t be very happy with it. Sit down and take a long look at that strange woman. Is she today’s with-it person — elegant, poised, groomed, glowing with health? Or is she a plump copy of Miss 1950? Is she sleek, or bumpy in the wrong places? How is her posture? Does she look better from the front than from the back? Does she stand gracefully? […] Feet together or one slightly in front of the other, is the most graceful stance. […] I always pin my bad notices on my mirror. How about keeping those eight-by-ten candid shots around your dressing room for a while as you dress?

I think it’s helpful to take an organized approach to what I call the “twin risks.” What I’m talking about here is the fact that investors have to deal daily with two possible sources of error. The first is obvious: the risk of losing money. The second is a bit more subtle: the risk of missing opportunity. Investors can eliminate either one, but doing so will expose them entirely to the other. So most people balance the two. What should an investor’s normal stance be regarding the two risks: evenly balanced, or favoring one or the other? The answer depends mostly on one’s goals, circumstances, personality and ability to withstand risk (and on the same things with regard to one’s clients, if any). And separate and apart from his normal posture, should the investor alter the balance from time to time? And if so, how? I think investors should try to appropriately adjust their stance if they (a) feel they have the requisite insight and (b) are willing to expend effort and bear the risk of being wrong. They should do this based on where the market is in its cycle. In short, when the market is high in its cycle, they should emphasize limiting the potential for losing money, and when the market is low in its cycle, they should emphasize reducing the risk of missing opportunity.

When we’re outside, I hear Brittany take a deep breath. I swear it sounds as if she’s holding herself together by a thin thread. Not the way it’s supposed to go down: bring girl home, kiss girl, mom insults girl, girl leaves crying. “Don’t sweat it. She’s just not used to me bringin’ girls in the house.” Brittany’s expressive blue eyes appear remote and cold. “That shouldn’t have happened,” she says, throwing back her shoulders in a stance as stiff as a statue’s. “What? The kiss or you likin’ it so much?” “I have a boyfriend,” she says as she fidgets with the strap on her designer book bag. “You tryin’ to convince me, or yourself?” I ask her.

The focus on “need fulfillment” that so often accompanies an emphasis on empathy leaves out the possibility that what another may really “need” (in order to become more responsible) is not to have their needs fulfilled. Indeed, it is not even clear that feeling for others is a more caring stance (or even a more ethical stance) than challenging them to take responsibility for themselves. As mentioned earlier, increasing one’s threshold for another’s pain (which is necessary before one can challenge them) is often the only way the other will become motivated to increase their own threshold, thus becoming better equipped to face the challenges of life. Ultimately,

Toning down the inner alarm, or the “No, you’re stupid!” impulse that leads to ideological entrenchment is possible, as Gillien Todd tells her students, when you remind yourself to take a calm, open, and curious stance rather than an angry, aggravated, or alarmed stance. It’s far more useful to listen to find out how other people arrived at their conclusions and what you can learn from them—whether it changes or shores up your own thinking. At the moment you feel you are going to react with hostility toward those who disagree with you, take a breath and ask them a question, not to expose flawed logic but to truly expand your understanding of where they are coming from.

Neurobiological differences have been demonstrated between dissociative identities within patients with DID and between patients with DID and controls. Given the current evidence, DID as a diagnostic entity cannot be explained as a phenomenon created by iatrogenic influences, suggestibility, malingering, or social role-taking. On the contrary, DID is an empirically robust chronic psychiatric disorder based on neurobiological, cognitive, and interpersonal non-integration as a response to unbearable stress. While current evidence is sufficient to firmly establish this etiological stance, given the wide opportunities for innovative research, the disorder is still understudied.

To the surprise of many sceptics, the results revealed the following associations: Full-fetal: People adopting this position tend to be anxious, emotional, indecisive, and overly sensitive to criticism. Dunkell interpreted the ‘closed’ nature of this position as indicative of a person who does not want to open themselves up to life. Semi-fetal: This position is associated with people who are well adjusted, conciliatory in nature, amenable to compromises, and unlikely to take extreme stances. Royal: This sleeping position is associated with being self-confident, open, expansive, and sensation-seeking. Prone: Those sleeping face down tend to show a tendency for rigidity and perfectionism. Dunkell thought that these sleepers disliked the unexpected, demand strong evidence for any assertion, and always arrive on time for meetings. The research also showed that those who have no preferred sleeping position have a strong need for being active, enjoy challenging work, and find it difficult to relax. However, please don’t be too upset or worried if your sleeping position suggests that you have a less-than-perfect personality. The associations between people’s sleeping positions and their personalities are fairly weak and many scientists would take them with a pinch of salt. I suspect that this is especially true of those researchers who tend to sleep in a prone position.

Just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls "relentlessly pleasant." This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance. Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused... and smile. No wonder women don't negotiate as much as men. It's like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels. So what should we do? Should we play by the rules that others created? Should we figure out a way to put on a friendly expression while not being too nice, displaying the right levels of loyalty and using "we" language? I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end. It is also true, as any good negotiator knows, that having a better understanding of the other side leads to a superior outcome. So at the very least, women can enter these negotiations with the knowledge that showing concern for the common good, even as they negotiate for themselves, will strengthen their position.

Someone--a man--came up behind her and snaked an arm around her waist. Not flirtation. Aggression. Kestrel sidestepped and spun, pulling her dagger from its sheath. Irex. His dagger was drawn, too. “A fight, dear Kestrel?” His stance was easy. He didn’t know how to play Bite and Sting, but his skill at weapons outmatched hers. “Not here,” she said stiffly. “No, not here.” His voice was soft. “But anywhere, if you want it.” “Exactly what do you think you are doing, Irex?” “You mean, a moment ago? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to pick your pocket.” His tone hinted at a coarse double meaning. Kestrel slid her dagger into its sheath. “Theft is the only way you will get my gold.” She walked from the cover of trees and saw, with shaky gratitude, that the party was still there, that the sound of porcelain and spoons still tinkled over low talk, and that no one had noticed anything. No one, except perhaps Arin. He was waiting for her. She felt a flash of something unpleasant--embarrassment, perhaps, as she wondered how much of this afternoon he had overheard. Dismay to think that he might have witnessed that last exchange with Irex, and misunderstood it. Or was she troubled by something else? Maybe it was the thought that Arin knew perfectly well what had been taking place behind the trees and had made no move to interfere, to help. It was not his place to interfere, she reminded herself. She had not needed his help. “We are leaving,” she told him.

Always taking an adversative stance can result in avoiding situations one might really enjoy. And always accommodating can result in accepting situations one would really rather avoid. One man described to me what he and his former wife called the I-like-chicken-backs phenomenon. When his family ate a chicken for dinner, someone had to eat the back, and in his family it was always his wife, who assured the others, 'I like chicken backs.' But, as this man commented to me, nobody really likes chicken backs. She had convinced herself that she liked chicken backs—and broken egg yolks and burned toast—to be accommodating. But years of accommodating built up to mounting frustration that they both believed had contributed to their eventual divorce.

Besides, nothing good comes from living, anyway. You’ll be happy or fortunate sometimes, but that’s just a momentary thing. Every happiness will fade with time, and you can’t experience it all that often, either. Or you grow accustomed to it. Like drugs. You feel good when you use them, but then you develop resistance. If you just up the dose and take more, and more, and more each time, you eventually wreck your body, or you overdose and bite it that way. It’s nothing but boredom, stupidity, suffering, pain, and loneliness. That’s all living is. What is this “life is wonderful” stuff? Anyone singing humanity’s praises can eat shit. If living doesn’t bring you to despair, you’re blind, or an idiot without the mental capacity for proper thought. The clever ones, they use all sort of tricks to distract themselves from the abject lack of hope. They forget it’s all meaningless, and focus on the pleasure in front of them. Working little by little toward some goal, fulfilling their curiosity, moving their bodies, trying to move up in the world, playing around, having sex. It’s because if they don’t do those things, they can’t bear it. There is no meaning in life. We were just born as a result of sexual reproduction. Whether we live or die, nothing changes. Nothing is gained, nothing lost. The total amount of mass in the universe is the same. When entropy increases, even the things we’ve worked so desperately to leave behind will be unable to maintain their forms. Nihilism isn’t a belief, a stance, or an attitude. It’s the plain truth.

Proactive people show you what they love, what they want, what they purpose, and what they stand for. These people are very different from those who are known by what they hate, what they don’t like, what they stand against, and what they will not do. While reactive victims are primarily known by their “against” stances, proactive people do not demand rights; they live them. Power is not something you demand or deserve; it is something you express. The ultimate expression of power is love; it is the ability not to express power, but to restrain it. Proactive people are able to “love others as themselves.” They have mutual respect. They are able to “die to self” and not “return evil for evil.” They have gotten past the reactive stance of the law and are able to love and not react.

The Republican Party is slightly ahead of Democrats when it come to devaluing any traditional understanding of foreign and national security policy. This is not surprising, because in all other matter of public policy, the GOP has strictly subordinated practical governance and problem solving to the emotional thematics of an endless political campaign. Whether the topic is Iran, Russia, or the proper level of defense spending at a time of high deficits, the GOP's stance has little to do with the merits of the situation; it is a projection of domestic political sloganeering. Taking a position on anything, whcther it be Ukraine or the efficacy of drones, boils down to a talking-point projection of focus groups-tested emotional themes: strength versus weakness, standing tall versus cutting and running, acting versus thinking." pp. 157-158

Scared?" he asked a few minutes later. Willow glanced up in surprise. "Scared of what?" "Me." "Should I be?" "You're an attractive woman practically alone with a man who's reputation is questionable." When she didn't repsond, he moved out of the shadows to stand over her. He restated his question. "Are you worried?" His stance and narrow-eyed expression were almost menacing. Was his move meant to intimidate her? The thought miffed her. She abruptly stood and moved closer, staring up at him defiantly. "I don't scare easy. 'Sides, I can take care of myself." His smile was rueful. "Against a man my size?" "My brothers taught me tricks to make up for my smaller size-if you'll remember correctly." Rider scowled. "I was caught off guard that day. What you did wasn't a very ladylike thing to do, you know." Willow's ire flared. "You got a real thing about this ladylike stuff, don't you, mister?" She punctuated each word with a jab of her finger against his chest. "Well,let me tell you something. When a gentleman forgets to be a gentleman, I reckon a lady can forget to be a lady." Rider captured her finger in his hand, surprising her with his smile. "You know, you're absolutely right. I can't argue with the truth; it would't be gentlemanly. Shall we call a truce and agree to be friends?"" Willow tried to tug her finger out of his grasp but he held it tight. "Well?" he prodded. "We can call a truce, but I ain't ready to call you friend." He retained his hold on her finger. "Friendly acquaintances, perhaps?" His grin was infuriating, but her finger was going numb. "Maybe," she relented. "Well,that's better than nothing, I suppose." He released her stiff finger, and she shook it behind her back to restore the circulation.

The field of honor is a painful field,” Olive went on at last, as though Peg had not spoken. “That’s what my father taught me when I was young. He taught me that the field of honor is not a place where children can play. Children don’t have any honor, you see, and they aren’t expected to, because it’s too difficult for them. It’s too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that’s why honor is a painful field. Do you understand?” I nodded. The words, I understood. What this had to

I’ve learned that even people who are — who see the world differently from you, they love something. And if we take the time to share what we love with one another, we can see each other’s humanity, and we can feel each other’s value. And if we can connect in a real way, that’s what we need to accompany each other, because some of what is going to be asked is that you just let me be. You know. As relocation and all of this stuff happens, some people are going to choose something other than what you would choose. And to accompany them is to just understand what they love, and respect it. So I think let’s take the time to connect through love, and stick with each other as we practice our own liberation, our own liberated stance on this thing, which will not always be the answer we want to hear, but it’ll be someone practicing freedom. And that’s the part we have to respect.

We also have to consider the many different kinds of rape we have learned about over the past few years as conservative politicians blunder through trying to explain their stances on sexual violence and abortion. For instance, Indiana treasurer Richard Mourdock, running for the US Senate in 2012, said, in a debate, "I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins int hat horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen." I've been obsessing over these words, and trying to understand how someone who purports to believe in God can also believe that anything born of rape is God-intended. Just as there are many different kinds of rape, there are many different kinds of God. I am also reminded that women, more often than not, are the recipient of God's intentions and must also bear the burdens of these intentions. Mourdock is certainly not alone in offering up opinions about rape. Former Missouri representative Todd Akin believes in "legitimate rape" and the oxymoronic "forcible rape," not to be confused with all that illegitimate rape going on. Ron Paul believes in the existence of "honest rape," but turns a blind eye to the dishonest rapes out there. Former Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard believes some girls, "they rape so easy." Lest you think these new definitions of rape are only the purview of men, failed Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut has introduced us to the idea of "emergency rape." Given this bizarre array of new rape definitions, it is hard to reconcile the belief that women are rising when there is still so much in our cultural climate working to hold women down. We can, I suppose, take comfort in knowing that none of these people is in a position of power anymore.

Sindari sprang close and roared at the the kobold, The kobold, eyes widening even further, stopped screaming… and wet himself. I groaned and held him out at arm’s length. “Gross, Sindari.” My apologies. I didn’t anticipate that result. “What usually happens when you roar at people?” Stupefied acquiescence. “This probably qualifies. He got my hip. ” Perhaps you can roll in the fertilizer on the way out. I don’t see how that would help. It would mask the odor. So I’d smell like blood and fish instead? Yes. Those are far more appealing scents. If you say so. What’s the plan? Sindari asked as the kobold scurried away. We’re going to optimistically hope for the best. I marched resolutely through the grass. Sindari glided past me to take the lead. An interesting stance from someone with pee on her hip. I’m not sure I believe that you didn’t anticipate that result. His look back was not convincingly innocent.

Every challenge we take on has the power to knock us to our knees. But what’s even more disconcerting than the jolt itself is our fear that we won’t withstand it. When we feel the ground beneath us shifting, we panic. We forget everything we know and allow fear to freeze us. Just the thought of what could happen is enough to throw us off balance. What I know for sure is that the only way to endure the quake is to adjust your stance. You can’t avoid the daily tremors. They come with being alive. But I believe these experiences are gifts that force us to step to the right or left in search of a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Let them help you adjust your footing. Balance lives in the present. When you feel the earth moving, bring yourself back to the now. You’ll handle whatever shake-up the next moment brings when you get to it. In this moment, you’re still breathing. In this moment, you’ve survived. In this moment, you’re finding a way to step onto higher ground.

The Last Smoke (By Dishebh Bhayana) 'Tis was a fierce and growling night Mind and cigarettes, both were running tight. Thy packed up and called it a day Whilst an asian man showed up, in all his hazy gay. With all the pleads and all the prays Thy let the man with the big hat to have his ways. Eventually, the storm in the antheneum passed out And along with all the clues and all the proofs, they both sailed out. "For what it takes, we must catch the culprit", said the man with the pink skin "I will quit the cigarettes. For whatever it takes, we must catch the culprit", smoked the reporter with a blonde grim. The gentlemen nerves got tight When the castle came in sight. 'Tis was there chance, the only chance They barged in all along with a careful stance. "Say something! You can't be...you can't...", Sobbed the asian man Whilst the blood gushed out with the scream of the blonde, Wolfgang. "Finally, I can see it. The landscape of the end. Ahh! Can I...can I have one last smoke, To cherish this beautiful en...

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

Legasov had his faults, but fundamentally he was a good, conscientious man who pushed against, and felt guilty about, both his own inaction before the disaster and the official, half-honest approach he was forced to adopt afterwards. It was too late. Both the pretence and his willingness to criticise a Soviet system that had gestated a belief in invulnerability had damaged his reputation. While reporting to his peers at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in October 1986, he stated, “I did not lie in Vienna; but I did not tell the whole truth.”256 Legasov decided to take a firm stance against the official explanation and penned several papers on the subject. In them, he criticised the underlying problems with the RBMK, the poor quality of training for nuclear operators, the complacency entrenched within the Soviet scientific community and nuclear industry in particular (one plant director was quoted as saying that a nuclear reactor is like a kettle, “and much simpler than a conventional plant”), and proposed further research into safer reactor types.257

Your life's greatest heartbreaks are so often your friends: dating isn't always built for permanence, but friendship often is. You lose a lot of friends after university, more if you take an active stance against someone who used to be in the group. Worse is when those friendships are the ones you make when you move somewhere new and try on a new identity for a while, something that you think will fit better, will make people like you, and it still doesn't work. After you shoot out into the world and build a community, and people leave, you feel the loneliest you've ever been in your life. The formula doesn't work, and the people you think you'll love forever when you're eighteen and when you've had too much to drink are rarely around when you need them. The University Friend exists in only one ecosystem, a relationship that requires the confines of a school, of a space in time where you are lost and digging for belonging, where your identity is so scattered you're just happy to be loved. Drinking is fun, but it's also the glue that holds you and your most tenuous connections together.

I’ll give you some new wards as well.” “No, save your strength. I can take care of myself.” Eragon insisted, but Roran kept refusing. Finally, Eragon said, “Blast it! Listen to me. We’re about to go into battle against Galbatorix’s men. You have to have some protection, if only against magic. I’m going to give you wards whether you like it or not, so you might as well smile and thank me for them!” Roran glowered at him, then he grunted and raised his hands. “Fine, as you wish. You never did know when it was sensible to give up.” “Oh, and you do?” A chuckle came from within the depths of Roran’s beard. “I suppose not. I guess it runs in the family.” “Mmh. Between Brom and Garrow, I don’t know who was the more stubborn.” “Father was,” said Roran. “Eh…Brom was as--No, you’re right. It was Garrow.” They exchanged grins, remembering their life on the farm. Then Roran shifted his stance and gave Eragon an odd, sideways look. “You seem different than before.” “Do I?” “Yes, you do. You seem more sure of yourself.” “Perhaps it’s because I understand myself better than I once did.” To that, Roran had no answer.

TAKING A STANCE Normally the mind isn’t willing to stop and look, to stop and know itself, which is why we have to keep training it continually so that it will settle down from its restlessness and grow still. Let your desires and thought processes settle down. Let the mind take its stance in a state of normalcy, not liking or disliking anything. To reach a basic level of emptiness and freedom, you first have to take a stance. If you don’t have a stance against which to measure things, progress will be very difficult. If your practice is hit or miss—a bit of this, a little of that—you won’t get any results. So the mind first has to take a stance. When you take a stance that the mind can maintain in a state of normalcy, don’t go slipping off into the future. Have the mind know itself in the stance of the present: “Right now it’s in a state of normalcy. No likes or dislikes have arisen yet. It hasn’t created any issues. It’s not being disturbed by a desire for this or that.” Then look into the basic level of the mind to see if it’s as normal and empty. If you’re really looking inside, really aware inside, then that which is looking and knowing is mindfulness and discernment in and of itself. You don’t need to search for anything anywhere else to come and do your looking for you. As soon as you stop to see whether the mind is in a state of normalcy, then if it’s normal, you’ll know immediately that it’s normal. If it’s not, you’ll know immediately that it’s not. Take care to keep this awareness going. If you can keep knowing like this continuously, the mind will be able to keep its stance continuously as well. As soon as the thought occurs to you to check things out, you’ll immediately stop and look, without any need to go searching for knowledge anywhere else. You look, you know, right there at the mind, and you can tell whether or not it’s empty and still. Once you see that it is, then you investigate to see how it’s empty, how it’s still. It’s not the case that once it’s empty and still, that’s the end of the matter. That’s not the case at all. You have to keep watch; you have to investigate at all times. Only then will you see the changing—the arising and disbanding—occurring in that emptiness, that stillness, that state of normalcy.

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics. Some of us are trained in this mindset from an early age. Even as a child, I was focused on being smart, but the fixed mindset was really stamped in by Mrs. Wilson, my sixth-grade teacher. Unlike Alfred Binet, she believed that people’s IQ scores told the whole story of who they were. We were seated around the room in IQ order, and only the highest-IQ students could be trusted to carry the flag, clap the erasers, or take a note to the principal. Aside from the daily stomachaches she provoked with her judgmental stance, she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class had one consuming goal—look smart, don’t look dumb. Who cared about or enjoyed learning when our whole being was at stake every time she gave us a test or called on us in class?

It is interesting, really: The Old Testament fits far more easily with Christian nationalism but is so problematic to defend that they often retreat from it when pressed. For example, you might have noticed in Leviticus that the wording for the verse condemning homosexuality is almost identical to those condemning cursing or attacking one's parents and adultery. The wages of those sins are death, and the sinner is held responsible for that outcome. But a significant number of Christians commit these sins, including many clergy members (at least, it would seem, when it comes to adultery), so it is very difficult to hide the hypocrisy inherent in strongly enforcing one rule while taking a relatively understanding stance on the others. In some cases, the rules are deemed historical artifacts to sidestep troublesome challenges. The Bible is the literal Word of God… but Christians see no problem in wearing clothing woven of two materials, wearing gold, pearls, and expensive clothing, cutting their hair and beards, and getting tattoos. Those commands are deemed no longer relevant, while, inexplicably, other very similar proscriptions are still thought to apply to modern life.

The fundamentalist Christian stance has sometimes taken shape as an overreaction against a skeptical climate. In the face of intellectual and other challenges, the fundamentalist impulse is to preserve faith at any and all costs. Fundamentalism takes the form of a worry that on some level reason or science will undermine Christianity—which seems to mean ignoring them altogether. In such an environment, “faith” takes the form of holding on to a particular stance as a certainty, such that the possibility of questioning is immediately foreclosed. Such an impulse is often tied to particular views of Scripture or Genesis, but it shouldn’t be. As we have seen play out in culture, the most permissive approaches to Scripture’s teaching about sex sometimes lead to a rigid fundamentalism that endorses a liberal creed. The paradox is that while the fundamentalist’s faith is frequently loud and comes off as very certain, it lacks the prudential confidence to wisely, but truly, face up to the questions that confront it. It is driven by a vague sense of threats that it does not know how to respond to effectively and so ends up being reduced to shouting its answers while running away.7

With regard to complex trauma survivors, self-determination and autonomy require that the therapist treat each client as the "authority" in determining the meaning and interpretation of his or her personal life history, including (but not limited to) traumatic experiences (Harvey, 1996). Therapists can inadvertently misappropriate the client's authority over the meaning and significance of her or his memories (and associated symptoms, such as intrusive reexperiencing or dissociative flashbacks) by suggesting specific "expert" interpretations of the memories or symptoms. Clients who feel profoundly abandoned by key caregivers may appear deeply grateful for such interpretations and pronouncements by their therapists, because they can fulfill a deep longing for a substitute parent who makes sense of the world or takes care of them. However, this delegation of authority to the therapist can backfire if the client cannot, or does not, take ownership of her or his own memories or life story by determining their personal meaning.Moreover, the client can be trapped in a stance of avoidance because trauma memories are never experienced, processed, and put to rest. Helping a client to develop a core sense of relational security and the capacity to regulate (and recover from) extreme hyper- or hypoarousal is essential if the client is to achieve a self-determined and autonomous approach to defining the meaning and impact of trauma memories, a crucial goal of posttraumatic therapy.

I turned and there he stood, wearing a loose T-shirt and sweatpants. A modest shapechanger, how refreshing. You wouldn’t even know that he had changed, save for the glistening sheen of dampness on his skin. He looked me over slowly, judging, taking my measure. I could blush demurely or I could do the same to him. I chose not to blush. A couple of inches taller than me, the Beast Lord gave an impression of coiled power. Easy, balanced stance. Blond hair, cut too short to grab. At first glance he looked to be in his early to mid-twenties, but his build betrayed him. His shoulders strained his T-shirt. His back was broad and corded with muscle, showing the power and strength a man developed in his early thirties. “What kind of a woman greets the Beast Lord with ‘here, kitty, kitty’?” he asked. “One of a kind.” I murmured the obvious reply. Eventually I had to look him in the eye. Better sooner than later. The Beast Lord had a strong square jaw. His nose was narrow with a misshapen bridge, as though it had been broken more than once and hadn’t healed right. Considering the regenerative powers of the shapechangers, someone must’ve pounded his face with a sledgehammer. Our stares met. Little golden sparks danced in his gray eyes. His gaze made me want to bow my head and look away. He regarded me as if I was an interesting new snack. “I’m the lord of the Free Beasts,” he said. “I figured.” Perhaps he expected me to curtsy. He leaned forward a little, puzzling over me as if I were an odd-looking insect. “Why would a knight-protector hire a no-name merc to investigate the death of his diviner?” I gave him my best cryptic smile.

Kung Fu's process of individualization similarly takes part in this backlash as the representation of the social ills experienced by racial minorities is routinely disciplined and rechanneled to make the show palatable for mass consumption. Under this rubric, it is assumed that changing the hearts of individuals will automatically lead to changing society. To a post-1960s liberal audience who obviously felt sympathy toward the plight of racial minorities but who nevertheless were wary of certain measures taken by these groups toward self-determination and weary from extended conflict, this simple adage proved seductive. Indeed, for a great many Americans, post-Civil Rights race relations has transformed the United States into an unruly site with different groups vying for cultural, economic, and political resources. In this way, Kung Fu's Wild West setting—the uneven hand of justice, the social free-for-all, the generally inhospitable natural landscape—seemed to reflect the audience's view of their contemporary social environment. It also mirrored the overall impotence that Americans felt toward ameliorating the situation. Given such a scenario, individualizing racial oppression and other social inequities may have seemed like a final alternative. While this process of individualization is key in deciphering the show's political stance, the types of identifications the series forged between character and audience more substantively reveal its ideological commitments. Although Kung Fu's psychospiritualized vision was available to all of its audience members, one could argue that it was primarily framed as a commentary toward racial minorities and women who sought social change through means other than or in addition to inner transformation. It achieved this through a formulaic pattern of identifications.

[comrades] are ashes, entrails, dung, stove smoke, clay, and they’ll all return to clay. They’re full of dirt, candle oil, droppings, dust. You, O Book, my pure, shining precious, my golden singing promise, my dream, a distant call— O tender specter, happy chance, Again I heed the ancient lore, Again with beauty rare in stance, You beckon from the distant shore!” You, Book! You are the only one who won't deceive, won't attack, won't insult, won't abandon! You're quiet--but you laugh, shout, and sing; you're obedient--but you amaze, tease and entice; you're small but you contain countless peoples. Nothing but a handful of letters, that's all, but if you feel like it, you can turn heads, confuse, spin, cloud, make tears spring to the eye, take away the breath, the entire soul will stir in the wind like a canvas, will rise in the waves and flap its wings! Sometimes a kind of wordless feeling tosses and turns in the chest, pounds its fists on the door, the walls: I'm suffocating! Let me out! How can you let that feeling out, all fuzzy and naked? What words ca you dress it in? We don't have any words, we don't know! Just like wild animals, or a blindlie bird, or a mermaid--no words, just a bellowing. But you open a book--and there they are, fabulous, flying words: O city! O wind! O snowstorms and blizzards! O azure abyss all raveled and tattered! Here am I! I'm blameless! I'm with you forever... ...Or there's bile and sadness and bitterness. The emptiness dries your eyes out and you search for the words, and here they are: But is the world not all alike? From the Cabbala of Chaldaic signs Throughout the ages, now and ever more, To the sky where the even star shines. The same old wisdom--born of ashes, And in that wisdom, like our twin, The face of longing, frailty, fear, and sin, Stares straight across the ages at us.

Good to know,” Reacher said. “Tell your uncle no laws have been broken. Tell him he’s been paid for the room. Tell him I’ll see him later.” The guy on the right uncrossed his arms. The guy on the left said, “Are you going to be a problem?” “I’m already a problem,” Reacher said. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?” There was a pause, hot and lonely in the middle of nowhere, and then the two guys answered by brushing aside their coats, in tandem, casually, right-handed, both thereby showing black semi-automatic pistols, in pancake holsters, mounted on their belts. Which was a mistake, and Reacher could have told them why. He could have launched into a long and impatient classroom lecture, about sealing their fates by forcing a decisive battle too early, about short-circuiting a grander strategy by moving the endgame to the beginning. Threats had to be answered, which meant he was going to have to take their guns away, because probing pawns had to be sent back beaten, and because folks in Mother’s Rest needed to know for sure the next time he came to town he would be armed. He wanted to tell them it was their own fault. He wanted to tell them they had brought it on themselves. But he didn’t tell them anything. Instead he ducked his own hand under his own coat, grabbing at nothing but air, but the two guys didn’t know that, and like the good range-trained shooters they were they went for their guns and dropped into solid shooting stances all at once, which braced their feet a yard apart for stability, so Reacher stepped in and kicked the left-hand guy full in the groin, before the guy’s gun was even halfway out of its holster, which meant the right-hand guy had time to get his all the way out, but to no avail, because the next event in his life was the arrival of Reacher’s elbow, scything backhand against his cheekbone, shattering it and causing a general lights-out everywhere.

Wondering if Westcliff was going to reprimand the boys for allowing her and Daisy to play, Lillian said uneasily, “Arthur and the others—it wasn’t their fault—I made them let us into the game—” “I don’t doubt it,” the earl said over her shoulder. “You probably gave them no chance to refuse.” “You’re not going to punish them?” “For playing rounders on their off-time? Hardly.” Removing his coat, Westcliff tossed it to the ground. He turned to the catcher, who was hovering nearby, and said, “Jim, be a good lad and help field a few balls.” “Yes, milord!” The boy ran in a flash to the empty space on the west side of the green beyond the sanctuary posts. “What are you doing?” Lillian asked as Westcliff stood behind her. “I’m correcting your swing,” came his even reply. “Lift the bat, Miss Bowman.” She turned to look at him skeptically, and he smiled, his eyes gleaming with challenge. “This should be interesting,” Lillian muttered. Taking up a batter’s stance, she glanced across the field at Daisy, whose face was flushed and eyes over-bright in the effort to suppress a burst of laughter. “My swing is perfectly fine,” Lillian grumbled, uncomfortably aware of the earl’s body just behind hers. Her eyes widened as she felt his hands slide to her elbows, pushing them into a more compact position. As his husky murmur brushed her ears, her excited nerves seemed to catch fire, and she felt a flush spreading over her face and neck, as well as other body parts that, as far as she knew, there were no names for. “Spread your feet wider,” Westcliff said, “and distribute your weight evenly. Good. Now bring your hands closer to your body. Since the bat is a few inches too long for you, you’ll have to choke up on it—” “I like holding it at the base.” “It’s too long for you,” he insisted, “which is why you pull your swing just before you hit the ball—” “I like a long bat,” Lillian argued, even as he adjusted her hands on the willow handle. “The longer the better, as a matter of fact.” A distant snicker from one of the stable boys caught her attention, and she glanced at him suspiciously before turning to face Westcliff. His face was expressionless, but there was a glitter of laughter in his eyes. “Why is that amusing?” she asked. “I have no idea,” Westcliff said blandly, and turned her toward the pitcher again.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle names becomes “boy” (however old you are), and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved. Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end. The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.

Come on, show me what you got” Shelby said throwing a set of gear to wing before pulling on a pair of gloves herself “I'll try not to hurt you too badly” “how reassuring” Wing said pulling on his gloves he had been giving Shelby hand-to-hand combat training for some time back at H.I.V.E And what she lacked in technique she made up for in speed and cunning. “Bring it” Shelby said with a grin raising both gloves in a defensive stance and beckoning him towards her “It will be brought” Wing replied. He feinted to her left and she went to block as he simultaneously swung a low blow into her other side, carefully pulling his punch so that he just tapped her. “Two perhaps three broken ribs” Wing said matter of factly “maintain your guard” Shelby nodded and took a quick jab at his jaw which wing blocked effortlessly “Try not to look where you are striking you betray your intentions” They went on like that for a couple more minutes just as in their previous sparring sessions Wing noticed that once they began Shelby became totally focused. There were none of this smart comments or sarcasm that she'd normally used - she was suddenly deadly serious. “Broken job possible unconsciousness” Wing said calmly as he struck her passed her guard stopping his fist millimetres from her chin. “Oh my God” Shelby gasped suddenly, staring in shock at something over wings shoulder. He spun around, his guard raised. Shelby dropped low swinging her leg out, sweeping Wing's feet out from under him and sending him crashing to the floor. “Wounded pride, possible humiliation” Shelby said with a grin offering her hand to Wing and pulling him up off the floor. “and so ends today's lesson” she said pulling off her head guard. “an unconventional tactic” Wing said with a nod, taking off his own helmet. “but a successful one none the less” “ I kinda like unconventional tactics” Shelby said stepping towards him. “never underestimate the power of surprise” She grabbed the back of his neck and kissed him for a few long seconds. “what was that about maintaining your guard?” she said with a smile as she pulled away from him. “sometimes one should let ones guard down” Wing said staring at her for a moment before drawing her towards him and kissed her back. “Er...guys?” a familiar voice said causing Wing and Shelby to spring apart. “Dr Nero wants you to report to the briefing room” Wing winced slightly as he saw Nigel and Franz standing in the doorway. Nigel was looking pointedly at the floor and Franz was staring at him and Shelby, his mouth hanging open in surprise. “come on big guy - no rest for the wicked” Shelby said to Wing with a grin, taking his hand and dragging him out of the room past Nigel and the stunned looking Franz.

propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?

I’ll let you off your leash, but you have to show some manners. No humping, no pissing on anything man made, and keep the crotch greetings exclusive to your four-legged fury friends. Got it?” Swarley nods because I’ve made him part human over the past few months and I’m pretty sure I saw him roll his eyes at me too. Guess I’d better start getting used to sassiness and eye rolling … read that on a parenting blog too. Note to self. Find more positive bloggers that paint the picture of parenthood with rainbows, fairies, and pixie dust. “Sydney?” I turn. “Hey, Dane!” He bends down to let his dogs off their leashes. “Gosh, I didn’t think you’d be back. How was Paris?” Which part? The view of the ceiling from the couch or the drain from the top of the toilet? “Great!” Extremely sugarcoated … maybe teetering on an outright lie. “So how long are you staying?” He rests his hands on his hips. Dane is adorable. I’m sure grown men don’t like to be called adorable; hell, I didn’t like it when Lautner said it to me, but Dane is just that. Tall, dark, and admittedly handsome with a boyish grin that makes me want to take him home, bake him cookies, and pour him a tall glass of milk. “I’m not sure. Trevor and Elizabeth just moved to San Diego and I’m staying at their house until it sells or until I find something else.” He cocks his head to the side. “Yet, they left Swarley?” Turning my gaze to look for the wild pooch, I shake my head. “Their condo association doesn’t allow large pets. They’ve been looking for a new home for him, but for now I have him.” “You two have come a long way since the first day you showed up at my office.” Clasping my hands behind my back, I look down and kick at the dirt. “Yeah, you’re right. As of lately, I’ve considered taking him myself. But until I know where I’m going to end up, offering it would be a little premature if not irresponsible.” “Grad school with a dog. You’d have to find some place to live that allows pets.” My faces wrinkles as I peek up at him. “I’m not going to grad school, at least not for a while. Something’s kind of come up.” “Oh?” Dane’s hands shift from his hips to crossing over his chest as he widens his stance. I blow out a long breath, scrubbing my hands over my face. My fingers trace my eyebrows as I meet his eyes again. “I’m … pregnant.” Dane’s eye are going to pop out of his head and the dogs will be chasing them if he opens them any wider. “I’m sorr—or congrat—or—” I smile because his adorableness doubles when he gets all nervous and starts stuttering. “It’s congratulations now … ‘I’m sorry’ was last month.” He nods in slow motion. “So you came back for Lautner?” “No … well, yes, but that backfired on me. He’s … moved on.” “Moved on? Are you serious? From … you?” I shrug, bobbing my head up and down. “Well … he’s a fuc—a freaking idiot.” As much pain as this conversation brings me, I still manage to let a giggle escape with an accompanying smile. “You’re right. He is a fucafreaking idiot.” Dane grins. “Especially because he’s with Claire.” His eyes go wide again. “Dr. Brown?” I nod. “Dr. Fucafreaking Brown.” Dane mouths WOW! “Exactly.

But won’t political involvement distract us from the main task of preaching the Gospel? At this point someone may object that while political involvement may have some benefits and may do some good, it can so easily distract us, turn unbelievers away from the church, and cause us to neglect the main task of pointing people toward personal trust in Christ. John MacArthur writes, “When the church takes a stance that emphasizes political activism and social moralizing, it always diverts energy and resources away from evangelization.”83 Yet the proper question is not, “Does political influence take resources away from evangelism?” but, “Is political influence something God has called us to do?” If God has called some of us to some political influence, then those resources would not be blessed if we diverted them to evangelism—or to the choir, or to teaching Sunday School to children, or to any other use. In this matter, as in everything else the church does, it would be healthy for Christians to realize that God may call individual Christians to different emphases in their lives. This is because God has placed in the church “varieties of gifts” (1 Cor. 12:4) and the church is an entity that has “many members” but is still “one body” (v. 12). Therefore God might call someone to devote almost all of his or her time to the choir, someone else to youth work, someone else to evangelism, someone else to preparing refreshments to welcome visitors, and someone else to work with lighting and sound systems. “But if Jim places all his attention on the sound system, won’t that distract the church from the main task of preaching the Gospel?” No, not at all. That is not what God has called Jim to emphasize (though he will certainly share the Gospel with others as he has opportunity). Jim’s exclusive focus on the church’s sound system means he is just being a faithful steward in the responsibility God has given him. In the same way, I think it is entirely possible that God called Billy Graham to emphasize evangelism and say nothing about politics and also called James Dobson to emphasize a radio ministry to families and to influencing the political world for good. Aren’t there enough Christians in the world for us to focus on more than one task? And does God not call us to thousands of different emphases, all in obedience to him? But the whole ministry of the church will include both emphases. And the teaching ministry from the pulpit should do nothing less than proclaim “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). It should teach, over the course of time, on all areas of life and all areas of Bible knowledge. That certainly must include, to some extent, what the Bible says about the purposes of civil government and how that teaching should apply to our situations today. This means that in a healthy church we will find that some people emphasize influencing the government and politics, others emphasize influencing the business world, others emphasize influencing the educational system, others entertainment and the media, others marriage and the family, and so forth. When that happens, it seems to me that we should encourage, not discourage, one another. We should adopt the attitude toward each other that Paul encouraged in the church at Rome: Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God…. So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother (Rom. 14:10–13). For several different reasons, then, I think the view that says the church should just “do evangelism, not politics” is incorrect.

A Community in Conversation Last week I went to the Chill Out and Proud festival to sell my books of poetry. It was not my first gay pride festival, but it was Somerset’s. There are a few observations that I had this particular day. My observations have very little to do with morality and more to do with wanting to live in a community that can communicate. My first observation was that my family and I were on high alert and felt a sense of fear for the first time in my life in the town of Somerset. It was not the people attending the festival that left us feeling uneasy, but rather the protestors. My second observation is that there were two groups of what would seem to be opposites, Christians and Neo Nazi white supremacists, standing side by side holding signs and yelling into an otherwise quiet and peaceful group of citizens. I understand everyone’s right to protest and be heard but the method of communicating our differences should be a checkpoint of self reflection. I had a calm conversation with one of the protesters who approached me. I asked him to consider that yelling at people might result in them putting their guards up, increasing the tension, and in turn, people yelling back. It’s a cyclical deterioration where no one hears or understands one another. Anger and fear are the brothers that are born of this kind of relationship. I would say the same to those who yell back at the protesters. We are going to be a community of diverse people who do not think the same or live the same lifestyle, but if we are going to live together peaceably, we need to find a better way to disagree. My last observation is that the protestor also asked me why I was there, did I have a family member who is gay? He stated, “You don’t just come to these things for no reason”. I replied, “Honestly, I did start going and taking my family to gay pride festivals just to be amongst other cultures. It’s good to get to know people who are different from yourself.” The world’s a big place and you may find that you have more in common with people than you think or, in this case, that you know more gay people than you think. I would like to say the same to you. Somerset is a lot more diverse than you think and we have a lot more in common than you think. The only way we will love our neighbor as ourselves is by getting to know our neighbors, even in the midst of our differences. Protesting often times takes a stance of offense; a form of violence that may not always be physical but is a form of violence all the same. Everyone has the right to be heard, but only if they are willing to really listen to others in an attempt to understand. As an atheist, I have never stood outside a church and disrupted their gathering, although I am willing to have a conversation about how my journey brought me here and how you have come to this point. For me to enter a gathering and protest is an offensive move that would cause the people involved to put up walls. It would not be welcomed and I would not do it. It would be a hindrance to us actually knowing and understanding each other. The only way to truly know someone is by being with them, by conversation. We will not agree. There are too many of us and if we agreed on every point of life then that would be another checkpoint for self reflection. I am just asking us to practice a certain amount of hospitality no matter your beliefs about each other, whether gay or straight; whether Christian, Agnostic, or Atheist; whether Democrat, Republican, or Democratic Socialist; whether you’re the protestor or the protested against; in person or on Facebook, let us contemplate mindful listening, empathy, patience, kindness, and the well-being of people who are different than yourself. Eric Overby Eric_o_84@hotmail.com

In his recent critique of fashionable ecological philosophies, Andreas Malm pointedly remarks: 'When Latour writes that, in a warming world, 'humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action,' he gets it all wrong: there is nothing intensively subjective but a lot of objectivity in ice melting. Or, as one placard at a demonstration held by scientists at the American Geophysical Union in December 2016: 'Ice has no agenda - it just melts.'' The reverse claim is that human interventions have only had such a menacing and even fatal consequences for our living conditions within the Earth system because human agency has not yet sufficiently freed itself from its dependence on natural history. This seems to be the conviction behind the 'Ecomodernist Manifesto,' for instance, which claims that 'knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, even great, Anthropocene,' and that a good Anthropocene 'demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.' In this confrontation, an age-old dualism has assumed a new guise: the attempt to establish a complicity with the forces of destiny - if necessary at the price of surrendering human subjectivity or perhaps involving other forms of self-sacrifice - is juxtaposed with the attempt to achieve human autonomy by subordinating the planet under the superior power of human ingenuity. These two positions, a modernist stance and a position critical of it, are usually considered to represent mutually exclusive alternatives. Actually, however, the two positions have more in common than first meets the eye. At the beginning of chapter 3, I referred to Greek philosophers who suggested that the best way to protect oneself against the vicissitudes of fate was to learn how to submit oneself to it willingly, sacrificing one's drives and ambitions while expecting, at the same time, that this complicity with destiny would empower one to master worldly challenges. What unites the seemingly opposite positions, more generally speaking, is a shared move away from engagement with the concrete and individual human agency (i.e., with empirical human subjects and with the unequal power distribution in human societies) toward some powerful form of abstraction, be it 'to distribute agency' or to use the 'growing social, economic, and technological powers' of humanity for a better Anthropocene. I suggest that we take a more systemic look at the role of humanity in the Earth system, taking into account both its material interventions and the knowledge that enabled them.

By the mid-1980s, [Stephen Jay Gould] had emerged as a major public figure, using his background as a paleontologist to dive into controversies with radical stances on the ways new species emerge and how evolutionary change comes about. His [popular history of life] college class was composed of around six hundred students who, taking it as a distributional requirement, were unlikely to become science majors. This audience proved an ideal focal group for Gould to try out his new theories and presentations. Every Tuesday and Thursday in the fall he held forth, lecturing with dramatic flourish to undergraduates who either sat rapt in the front rows or sprawled sleeping in the rear ones.

The field of honor is a painful field,” Olive went on at last, as though Peg had not spoken. “That’s what my father taught me when I was young. He taught me that the field of honor is not a place where children can play. Children don’t have any honor, you see, and they aren’t expected to, because it’s too difficult for them. It’s too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that’s why honor is a painful field.

In a religion based on a human incarnation of the divine, when ideology battles experience, it is fallible, ordinary experience that must win. My initial appropriation of the Christian religion, which in its early stages often felt like a storming of heaven’s gates, had been based on a fallacy, on the notion that religious faith could provide me with a coherent philosophical system. Feminist theology especially had seemed a safe place in which all of my stances could be argued and defended, as in an impregnable fortress. But I found I could not breathe there; I found no room for mystery. I am surely not the first or the last Christian to seek to forsake the fallibility inherent in Jesus’ incarnation for a sure thing. It was the false purity of ideology I had to reject, in order to move toward the realistic give-and-take of community. Not a community of those who would share my presuppositions regarding feminism, but an ordinary small-town church congregation, where no one would much care about the heavy-duty theology in which I had been immersing myself. I could still employ it, as a useful guide to navigating Christian seas. But I could also learn to look to the strong women of the congregation, who often seemed to incarnate a central paradox of the Christian faith: that while the religion has often been used as an agent of women’s oppression, it also has had a remarkable ability to set women free.

vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that’s why honor is a painful field. Do you understand?

I do not have the power to, nor would I ever want to take away from a worthy cause Of any sort. To presume that I hold that power based on my promotion of love - is in and of itself ridiculous. Walk a mile in my shoes before you judge me. Oh wait that is not possible. Nor is it possible for me to walk in yours. Therefore I will not judge your actions. Yet, I can seek understanding should you cease from your attack on me. I love you in spite of the attack but it does not still feel good nor does it elicit my desire to commune with you. It merely pushes me to stand more firmly in my own stance on love - which I know to be beautiful. Hatred is not powerful. Come to me and ask me what I see and I will gladly share. Ask me to consider your way and I will listen and consider it. But shoot me down for not doing things your way and you will not gain my support.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive. At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators. Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto. With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools. In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.

While the passive stance we take in the initial construction of our persona can make it feel like a permanent part of our being, we do have the ability to re-sculpt the masks we wear in public. Rather than being the man or woman who others want us to be, we can heed the ancient wisdom to “become who we are” and we can construct a persona more aligned with our values and the strengths of our character. For as Jung points out, in the construction of one’s persona there are two sources around which to orient it. It can be oriented around “the expectations and demands of society”, which is the path of the conformist, or it can be oriented around “the social aims and aspirations of the individual”, which is the path we must take if we are dissatisfied with our role on the stage of life.

Faith is a stance you take as you say, "I will trust God for my miracles, even in the face of obstacles.

Faith is when you take a not-so-easy stance to follow God, as you journey across the face of the earth.

The point of the BoPo movement isn’t necessarily for everyone to simply just “love” their bodies or feel positively about them, but rather, to take a stance against social norms and pressures of what society says beauty “should” be by bringing adequate representation to people of color, people of different ethnicities, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, older adults, and those with disabilities.44 But rather than bringing adequate representation and diversity to society’s ideal body standards, what has unfortunately happened is that many thin, fit, White, and conventionally attractive people, specifically cisgender White women, have taken its message to simply be “love yourself despite your ‘imperfections.’” They’ve taken something that wasn’t meant for them to be used to further validate their own beauty standards.

About “Arresting the Shadow” (一、陰をおさゆると云) “Arresting the shadow” (yin) means to carefully observe your enemy in order to know if his mind is overly engaged and where it is lacking. Pointing your sword when his mind is preoccupied and diverting his attention, then arresting the shadow of the area that is lacking will upset his rhythm and victory will be for the taking. Even so, it is crucial that you do not leave your mind on the shadow and forget to strike. You must work this out.22 (19) About “Shifting the Shadow” (一、影を動かすと云事) This shadow is that of yang. When the enemy pulls his sword back and assumes a front-on stance,23 suppress his sword with your mind and make your body empty. As soon the enemy encroaches, unleash with your sword. This will surely make him move. When he does, it is easy to win. This method did not exist before. Do not allow the mind to become fixed as you strike at protruding parts of his body. Ponder this carefully.24 (20) About “Detaching the Bowstring” (一、弦をはづすと云事) “Detaching the bowstring” is employed when your mind and the enemy’s are tightly connected [with a bowstring]. In such a situation, you must promptly detach [the string] with your body, sword, legs and mind. Detaching is most effective when the enemy least expects it. This should be explored. (21) About the “Small Comb” Teaching (一、小櫛のおしへの事) The spirit of the “small comb” is to untangle knots. Hold a comb in your mind and use it to slash threads in the enemy’s web of entanglement. Entangling with threads and pulling strings are similar. Pulling is stronger, however, as entanglement is a tactic executed with a weaker mind. This should be considered judiciously.

About “Contesting Height” (一，たけくらべと云事) “Contesting height” is employed when very close and clinging to the enemy. Make yourself as tall as you can, as if contesting height. In your mind, make yourself taller than your opponent. The cadence for getting in close is the same as the others. Consider this well. (31) About the “Door” Teaching (一，扉のおしへと云事) The body of the “door”27 is used when moving in to stick to the enemy. Make the span of your body wide and straight as if to conceal the enemy’s sword and body. Fuse yourself to the enemy so that there is no space between your bodies. Then pivot to the side, making yourself slender and straight, and smash your shoulder into his chest to knock him down. Practice this. (32) The “General and His Troops” Teaching (一、将卒のおしへの事) The “general and his troops” is a teaching that means once you embody the principles of strategy, you see the enemy as your troops and yourself as their general. Do not allow the enemy any freedom whatsoever, neither permitting him to swing nor thrust with his sword. He is so completely under your sway that he is unable to think of any tactics. This is crucial. (33) About the “Stance of No-Stance” (一，うかうむかうと云事) The “stance of no-stance” refers to [the mindset] when you are holding your sword. You can adopt various stances, but if your mind is so preoccupied with the engarde position, the sword and your body will be ineffectual. Even though you always have your sword, do not become preoccupied with any particular stance. There are three varieties of upper stance (jōdan) as well as three attitudes for the middle (chūdan) and lower (gedan) stances that you can adopt. The same can be said for the left-side and right-side stances (hidari-waki and migi-waki). Seen as such, this is the mind of no-stance. Ponder this carefully. △ (39-3) About “Assessing the Location” △ (39-4) About “Dealing to Many Enemies” (Simplified versions of Article 1 in the Fire Scroll [Scroll 3] and Article 33 in the Water Scroll [Scroll 2] of Gorin-no-Sho.) (34) About “The Body of a Boulder” (一、いわをの身と云事) “The body of a boulder” is to have an unmovable mind that is strong and vast. You come to embody myriad principles through your training, to the extent that nothing can touch you. All living things will avoid you. Although devoid of consciousness, even plants will not take root on a boulder. Even the rain and wind will do nothing to a boulder. You must strive to understand what this “body” means.

Sometimes you take the shit that's forced upon you and call it a stance.

I guess because people change and we don’t want them to.” He could find no better words. “You start out with a woman; she’s magical and mysterious and marvelous, the way they sing it. Then you get to know each other. The excitement goes away. It gets comfortable. Then even that fades. She starts to sag and turn grey and get lined and you feel cheated. You remember the fey, shy one you met and talked with till her father threatened to plant a boot in your ass. You resent this stranger. So you take a poke. I guess it’s the same for your mother. Inside, I’m still twenty, Stance. Only if I pass a mirror, or if my body won’t do what I want, do I realize that I’m an old man. I don’t see the potbelly and the varicose veins and the grey hair where I’ve got any left. She has to live with it. “Every time I see a mirror I’m amazed. I end up wondering who’s taken over the outside of me. A disgusting old goat, from the look of him. The kind I used to snicker at when I was twenty. He scares me, Stance. He looks like a dying man. I’m trapped inside him, and I’m not ready to go.

Attitudes have to do with your orientation toward something, the stance you take toward others, God, life, work, and relationships. Beliefs are anything that you accept as true.

As all power, Kamasqa is both an effluence, an etheric light fluid, as well as a dreaming. It is always creative, just as any river that is born of the melting of the glaciers, which starts as a trickle and then becomes the roaring rivers that feed the ocean. Along its way it creates habitat through life, it creates opportunities, lands to be cultivated and the people to be fed from it. I, personally, as with everything that is good medicine, take the stance of the poet when it comes to my relationship with Kamasqa. I try not to define it too much. I try just to understand that it visits me in different expressions, and every one of the expressions allows me to be more creative as a soul because I am anointed and touched by its flowing through me. It never composes me, it never defines me, but it does inspire me. And it does help dream me into being. And that’s how I understand Kamasqa to be. Creative power is a good definition, but there is much more to it.

We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.

During this era, evangelicals consolidated power both by aligning themselves with the Republican Party and by taking on a moral mantle that showed off their strong stances against abortion and homosexuality. Indeed, these were the two issues that would allow them to build their power through organizing and fundraising and that would, more and more, allow them to align themselves with electoral, and presidential, power. These issues would definitely increase their visibility in the media while proving to sustain a formidable fundraising machine that would provide means for white leaders, almost always male with the exception of Phyllis Schlafly. Through these means, they would build organizations like Focus on the Family and the Eagle Forum to energetically promote evangelical concerns and values … from a perspective of white hegemony.

Rich Nichols, another attorney, was there in Rochester, too. He had already been in contact with the players as far back as late 2012 through Hope Solo, who was frustrated with the team’s hesitance to take a stronger stance against U.S. Soccer. Solo didn’t know Nichols when she called him for the first time. She believed the national team needed a stronger voice in negotiations, and after asking around, she eventually got Nichols’s name. His highest-profile experience in sports came from representing Olympic track star Marion Jones in doping allegations and serving as general counsel for the American Basketball League, a women’s league that preceded the WNBA. Nichols’s expertise isn’t quite as a trial lawyer, but he speaks with the cadence and tempo of one, knowing which words to emphasize and where to pause for effect. As the players of the national team were debating how to move forward in contract negotiations, Solo called Nichols on her own to see if he could help. Their first conversation centered largely around the idea that the women should demand the same pay as the men’s national team. Nichols and Solo felt a philosophical connection right away. Both outspoken and unafraid to ruffle feathers, they had the same ideas about the tack the national team needed to take.

Ultimately, the strike never happened. Some players felt, after speaking with the team’s attorney, John Langel, that striking before the Algarve Cup didn’t offer enough leverage. They were better off going to Portugal and continuing negotiations there with striking as an option after the tournament, before the start of the NWSL. They believed the launch of the new league offered the urgency that could make a strike effective. For Solo, who pushed for the strike, it was frustrating to see her teammates back off so quickly. Even though the Algarve Cup was a relatively minor tournament, it was the biggest national team event on the calendar until the 2015 World Cup, two and a half years away. The advice of the team’s longtime attorney to forgo the pre–Algarve Cup strike amounted to taking the federation’s side, as far as Solo was concerned. By that point, she had already lost faith in Langel’s ability to fight for the team and months earlier had started, on her own, looking for someone else who could represent the team. “It was really empowering for us. We finally were taking a huge stance against U.S. Soccer—we said, We’re putting our foot down, we’re going on strike, we mean business,” Solo says. “Well, it took about one phone call from John Langel to scare us into backing down and not going on strike.

Innovations are happening in conventional schooling. Some people will read the chapters to come and respond that their own children’s schools are incorporating evidence-based changes, making them more like Montessori schools—eliminating grades, combining ages, using a lot of group work, and so on. One could take the view that over the years, conventional schooling has gradually been discovering and incorporating many of the principles that Dr. Montessori discovered in the first half of the 20th century. However, although schooling is changing, those changes are often relatively superficial. A professor of education might develop a new reading or math program that is then adopted with great fanfare by a few school systems, but the curricular change is minute relative to the entire curriculum, and the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure of the school environment still underlie most of the child’s school day and year. “Adding new ‘techniques’ to the classroom does not lead to the developmental of a coherent philosophy. For example, adding the technique of having children work in ‘co-operative learning’ teams is quite different than a system in which collaboration is inherent in the structure” (Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001, p. 13). Although small changes are made reflecting newer research on how children learn, particularly in good neighborhood elementary schools, most of the time, in most U.S. schools, conventional structures predominate (Hiebert, 1999; McCaslin et al., 2006; NICHD, 2005; Stigler, Gallimore, & Hiebert, 2000), and observers rate most classes to be low in quality (Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, & Heck, 2003). Superficial insertions of research-supported methods do not penetrate the underlying models on which are schools are based. Deeper change, implementing more realistic models of the child and the school, is necessary to improve schooling. How can we know what those new models should be? As in medicine, where there have been increasing calls for using research results to inform patient treatments, education reform must more thoroughly and deeply implement what the evidence indicates will work best. This has been advocated repeatedly over the years, even by Thorndike. Certainly more and more researchers, educators, and policy makers are heeding the call to take an evidence-based stance on education. Yet the changes made thus far in response to these calls have not managed to address to the fundamental problems of the poor models. The time has come for rethinking education, making it evidence based from the ground up, beginning with the child and the conditions under which children thrive. Considered en masse, the evidence from psychological research suggests truly radical change is needed to provide children with a form of schooling that will optimize their social and cognitive development. A better form of schooling will change the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure on which our schools are built into something radically different and much better suited to how children actually learn.

Medusa continues to be viewed as protective and apotropaic—warding off evil, warding off the enemy—and even healing in the Greek tradition, but she has also lost her power. It is thus important to pay attention to her beneficent aspects: the fact that half of her blood is healing, and that images of her head are used to protect buildings of multiple functions within the Greco-Roman sphere; so protective is she considered to be that her head was buried near the Argive market-place. Medusa is magical. She reminds us that we must not take the female “monster” at face value; that we must weigh not only her beneficent against her maleficent attributes, but we must also take into consideration the world view and the sociopolitical stance of the cultures which create her, fashioning the demonic female as scapegoat for the benefit and comfort of the patriarchal members of their societies.

Positive vibes radiate with every stride; moments of life become a magical storyline when you take the stance of dance

I wished he would. My stance amounted to: I am glad Julian does not demand intimacy, and annoyed at him for not offering it. I stay in his apartment for free and complain it’s done strange things to our dynamic. I hate needing him and address this not by taking responsibility for my own happiness but by playing his games, which could equally be my games because I’m unsure who started it.

Push press. The push press is identical to the press but includes a leg drive. The lift initiates from the legs and is completed through the arm and hand. This allows more diversified conditioning in addition to significantly increasing the ability to work at higher volume and intensity. Once you find the max load you can use in the press, the use of your legs will allow you to do more than you can in a strict press. The use of the legs also allows greater endurance because you are distributing effort over more of your body. To perform this exercise, clean the kettlebell to your chest (see figure 7.20a). Load the stance by sinking your knees downward as you compress your rib cage (see figure 7.20b). Immediately follow the slight downward knee bend with fast and explosive lifting, pressing your feet vigorously into the ground (see figure 7.20c). From the extension of the legs, the kettlebell will already be more than halfway to the top. Complete the lift by pressing through the triceps into the overhead lockout position, identical to the top position of the press (see figure 7.20d). To drop the kettlebell back to your chest, rise up slightly on your toes as you move your body back in order to allow the kettlebell to fall straight down the chimney (see figure 7.20e). Your feet are planted again as the kettlebell reaches your chest and your elbow slides on top of your hip (see figure 7.20f). When performing this exercise, use anatomical breathing with four breathing cycles. Starting from the rack position, inhale deeply before the initial compression, and then exhale as you drop into a half squat. Inhale as you extend the legs and bump with the rib cage, and exhale as you lock out. Take one full breath cycle while in lockout and add more recovery breaths if needed. Inhale as you deflect the trunk backward to drop the kettlebell, and exhale as the kettlebell lands back in the rack position.

The Hind chuckled, the sound laced with menace. “I’ll find out, you know. I always do.” “I look forward to it,” Hunt said, stalking toward the doors. A dark figure loomed ahead of them—Baxian. His eyes were on the Hind. Stony, and yet seeking. She stopped short. The Hind stopped short. Baxian said, “Lidia.” The Hind replied flatly, “Baxian.” “I was looking for you.” He inclined his head to Hunt in dismissal. He’d take over from here. “Is it to explain why you vanished into the night with Hunt Athalar?” she asked, folding her hands behind her back in a perfect imperial stance. A good little soldier. Hunt passed Baxian. “Not a word,” Hunt said so softly it was barely more than a breath. Baxian nodded subtly. Hunt had barely pushed open the doors to the training area when he heard Baxian say carefully to the Hind, as if remembering who she was, “I don’t answer to you.” Her voice was smooth as silk. “Not to me, or Ephraim, but you still answer to the Asteri.” Her true masters. “Whose will is mine.” Hunt’s stomach churned. She was right. And he’d do well to remember it before it was too late.

BREATH 1​While seated or lying down, take 30 to 40 full conscious breaths: Breathe fully in to the belly and the chest, then letting go, without force. 2​On your final exhale, let the air out and hold it out for as long as you can without discomfort. Listen to your body and don’t force it! 3​When you feel the urge to breathe again, take a deep breath in, hold for 10 to 15 seconds. Then release and relax. 4​Repeat the steps above two or three more times, paying attention to how you feel and adjusting your breath as needed. 5​Rest in this elevated state until you are ready to move on with your day. Alternatively, use the energy you just generated for your morning workout or yoga practice. Experiment with what feels right for you. Congratulations! You just influenced key drivers of your health, increased your vitality and focus, busted your stress, reduced inflammation factors, and optimized your immune system. FOR COMPLETE WHM BREATHING INSTRUCTIONS AND SAFETY GUIDELINES, SEE CHAPTER 4. MIND Your post-breathing practice state is the perfect time to program your mindset. Try this: 1​Before you get up from your breathing practice, bring up a thought in your mind like “Today I’m going to stay in the cold shower for 15 more seconds than yesterday,” or “I feel happy, healthy, and strong.” 2​Reflect on this thought and notice how your body feels. 3​If you identify any inner resistance to your intention, just keep breathing steadily until you feel an alignment between your body and mind. With practice, your sense of your inner experience, or interoception, will sharpen, allowing you to more consciously observe and control your body and mind. SEE CHAPTER 12 FOR DETAILS. COLD 1​At the end of your warm shower, turn the water to cold. 2​If you like you can start by first putting your feet and legs, than your arms, then your full torso under the water. 3​Do NOT do the WHM Basic Breathing Exercise while standing in the shower. 4​Gradually extend your exposure every day until you can handle two minutes in the cold. 5​If you are shivering when you get out, try the horse stance exercise. (See “How Long Can You Hold a Horse Stance?” for details.) Success! You just improved your metabolic efficiency, regulated your hormones, further reduced inflammation, and are enjoying the endorphins and endocannabinoids released in response to the cold.

the relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole. In a way, it’s a late-twentieth-century postmodern analogue of the nineteenth-century imperialist romanticization of the “exotic”. Are all Native Americans literal creationists? Are most of them? Has anyone bothered to ask them?

Let’s start with an exercise. Take your golf stance and close your eyes. For a few seconds, think of a situation that you’re afraid

One of the most well-known revivalist preachers of the day was Charles Grandison Finney. Finney led Oberlin College, which became the first institution of higher education to accept both women and black people. Finney was an outspoken abolitionist, but he was not a proponent of black equality. He advocated for emancipation, but he did not see the value of the “social” integration of the races. Though he excluded white slaveowners from membership in his congregations, he also relegated black worshipers to particular sections of the sanctuary. Black people could become members in his churches, but they could not vote or hold office.17 Finney’s stance for abolition but against integration arose from his conviction that social reform would come through individual conversion, not institutional reform. Finney and many others like him believed that social change came about through evangelization. According to this logic, once a person believed in Christ as Savior and Lord, he or she would naturally work toward justice and change. “As saints supremely value the highest good of being, they will, and must, take a deep interest in whatever is promotive of that end. Hence, their spirit is necessarily that of the reformer.”18 This belief led to a fixation on individual conversion without a corresponding focus on transforming the racist policies and practices of institutions, a stance that has remained a constant feature of American evangelicalism and has furthered the American church’s easy compromise with slavery and racism.

Many take this change in value a step further, giving their passivity a positive veneer. They romanticize the self-destructive artist who loses control of him-or herself. Anything that smacks of discipline or effort seems fussy and passé: what matters is the feeling behind the artwork, and any hint of craftsmanship or work violates this principle. They come to accept things that are made cheaply and quickly. The idea that they might have to expend much effort to get what they want has been eroded by the proliferation of devices that do so much of the work for them, fostering the idea that they deserve all of this—that it is their inherent right to have and to consume what they want. “Why bother working for years to attain mastery when we can have so much power with very little effort? Technology will solve everything.” This passivity has even assumed a moral stance: “mastery and power are evil; they are the domain of patriarchal elites who oppress us; power is inherently bad; better to opt out of the system altogether,” or at least make it look that way.

To speak about anything that relates to race and current events is being partisan and biased. I don’t think speaking about the value of Black life is partisan. I’m just tired of Black bodies lying dead in the streets. I don’t think speaking in lament of gun violence is a taking a partisan stance. I’m tired of turning on the news and seeing school shootings. I don’t think speaking about the criminal justice system is partisan. I’m just expressing frustration for the millions of Black families that are affected by this unjust system. My hope is that my white fans will consider the depth of their own privilege. They have in front of them an opportunity to use their influence to create more just, equitable systems and to prioritize voices of color. I hope they enter into our shared experiences with solidarity and humility. I also hope that they begin to do the hard work of discipling and learning to discuss issues in nuanced, thoughtful ways. I deeply feel the pain of my Black fans and people of color. They are under siege every day in a culture and a church that have proven hostile to their very existence. P93

She knew that politicians loved to take strong stances against crime, but the reality was that by the time the criminal justice system got involved, it was usually too late to do anything. Criminals weren’t made when they turn eighteen. They were made through a lifetime of experiences.

Telling a current employer about an offer from another company is a common tactic but works for men more easily than for women. Men are allowed to be focused on their own achievements, while loyalty is expected from women. Also, just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls “relentlessly pleasant.”22 This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance.23 Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused … and smile.

Let us be women who Love. Let us be women willing to lay down our sword words, our sharp looks, our ignorant silence and towering stance and fill the earth now with extravagant Love. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who make room. Let us be women who open our arms and invite others into an honest, spacious, glorious embrace. Let us be women who carry each other. Let us be women who give from what we have. Let us be women who leap to do the difficult things, the unexpected things and the necessary things. Let us be women who live for Peace. Let us be women who breathe Hope. Let us be women who create beauty. Let us be women who Love. Let us be a sanctuary where God may dwell. Let us be a garden for tender souls. Let us be a table where others may feast on the goodness of God. Let us be a womb for Life to grow. Let us be women who Love. Let us rise to the questions of our time. Let us speak to the injustices in our world. Let us move the mountains of fear and intimidation. Let us shout down the walls that separate and divide. Let us fill the earth with the fragrance of Love. Let us be women who Love. Let us listen for those who have been silenced. Let us honour those who have been devalued. Let us say, Enough! with abuse, abandonment, diminishing and hiding. Let us not rest until every person is free and equal. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who are savvy, smart, and wise. Let us be women who shine with the light of God in us. Let us be women who take courage and sing the song in our hearts. Let us be women who say, Yes to the beautiful, unique purpose seeded in our souls. Let us be women who call out the song in another’s heart. Let us be women who teach our children to do the same. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who Love, in spite of fear. Let us be women who Love, in spite of our stories. Let us be women who Love loudly, beautifully, Divinely. Let us be women who Love.

Jack’s lesson here: Sometimes you take the shit that’s forced upon you and call it a stance.

This is what every leader of the half dozen “suicide cults” in history have done: Taking an apocalyptic stance on the universe, with them at its center,

When you think everything is the apocalypse, this leads people to take up war stances on issues that don’t really merit it.

The odds change as our position in the cycles changes. If we don’t change our investment stance as these things change, we’re being passive regarding cycles; in other words, we’re ignoring the chance to tilt the odds in our favor. But if we apply some insight regarding cycles, we can increase our bets and place them on more aggressive investments when the odds are in our favor, and we can take money off the table and increase our defensiveness when the odds are against us.

gaze down at my little doll still in her pristine uniformed shirt and plaid skirt with the mask in place, on her knees before her God, ready to confess all her sins with her throat. “Take it out,” I demand, widening my stance. She grips the button of my jeans, popping them open before practically ripping the zipper open to release her favorite toy. Her eyes light up with fascination, as they always do when she sees my length, and her thumb immediately flicks the stud of my piercing as her soft fingers wrap around me. A deviant growl leaves my throat and my cock pulses in her soft palm, feeling the sensation travel across my body as blood floods the region to harden me like steel.