Terminal Escape Quotes

A destructive or creative state of psychological madness must trace itself to a source. By finding the source of their misery, a person might be able to corral the crazy desire prematurely to terminate their existence. An old saying suggests that self-hatred is the central cause of all self-destructive actions. Self-hate might consist of anger that we harbor towards other people who maltreated us. Repressed anger and pent-up hostility that we retain against other people that has no viable direct escape hatch can reflect and turn inward against ourselves. Perhaps we regret that we allowed other people to demean us, or rue that we lacked a protective level of self-esteem to begin with.

Rationality is uncool. To describe someone with a slang word for the cerebral, like nerd, wonk, geek, or brainiac, is to imply they are terminally challenged in hipness. For decades, Hollywood screenplays and rock song lyrics have equated joy and freedom with an escape from reason. “A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free,” said Zorba the Greek. “Stop making sense,” advised Talking Heads; “Let’s go crazy,” adjured the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

I carry my liberty with me. It is in my thoughts, in my head. Shakespeare is one of my countries, Goethe another. You can change that badge that I wear, but you can’t change the way I think. It is through my intellect that I can escape the roles, intrusions, and obligations with which every civilisation, every community would burden me. I make myself my own homeland through my affinities, my choices, my ideas, and no one can take it away from me – I may even be able to enlarge it. I don’t spend my life in the company of crowds but individuals. If I could pick fifty individuals from each nation, then perhaps I could put together a society I’d be happy with. My first possession is myself; better to sent it into exile than to lose it, to change a few habits rather than terminate my role as a human being. We only have one homeland: the world.

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.

Intimacy: May 12 We can let ourselves be close to people. Many of us have deeply ingrained patterns for sabotaging relationships. Some of us may instinctively terminate a relationship once it moves to a certain level of closeness and intimacy. When we start to feel close to someone, we may zero in on one of the person’s character defects, then make it so big it’s all we can see. We may withdraw, or push the person away to create distance. We may start criticizing the other person, a behavior sure to create distance. We may start trying to control the person, a behavior that prevents intimacy. We may tell ourselves we don’t want or need another person, or smother the person with our needs. Sometimes, we defeat ourselves by trying to be close to people who aren’t available for intimacy—people with active addictions, or people who don’t choose to be close to us. Sometimes, we choose people with particular faults so that when it comes time to be close, we have an escape hatch. We’re afraid, and we fear losing ourselves. We’re afraid that closeness means we won’t be able to own our power to take care of ourselves. In recovery, we’re learning that it’s okay to let ourselves be close to people. We’re choosing to relate to safe, healthy people, so closeness is a possibility. Closeness doesn’t mean we have to lose ourselves, or our life. As one man said, we’re learning that we can own our power with people, even when we’re close, even when the other person has something we need.

There's a vorg loose," Meroka explained. "In case that escaped your attention. Ricasso's doing his bit for Swarm, trying to kill the thing before it sucks someone's brains out. Now he might be able to find time in his schedule to file that paperwork you need, but I'm guessing it's going to be a stretch, what with a monster on the loose and the ship being in a state of fucking emergency and all." She smiled sweetly. "So, what's it going to be? You going to let them out, or do I have to get, you know, truculent.

When you are depressed, you may have a tendency to confuse feeling with facts. Your feelings of hopelessness and total despair are just symptoms of depressive illness, not facts. If you think you are hopeless, you will naturally feel this way. Your feelings only trace the illogical pattern of your thinking. Only an expert, who has treated hundreds of depressed individuals, would be in a position to give a meaningful prognosis for recovery. Your suicidal urge merely indicates the need for treatment. Thus, your conviction that you are "hopeless" nearly always proves you are not. Therapy, not suicide, is indicated. Although generalizations can be misleading, I let the following rule of thumb guide me: Patients who feel hopeless never actually are hopeless. The conviction of hopelessness is one of the most curious aspects of depressive illness. In fact, the degree of hopelessness experienced by seriously depressed patients who have an excellent prognosis is usually greater than in terminal malignancy patients with a poor prognosis. It is of great importance to expose the illogic that lurks behind your hopelessness as soon as possible in order to prevent an actual suicide attempt. You may feel convinced that you have an insoluble problem in your life. You may feel that you are caught in a trap from which there is no exit. This may lead to extreme frustration and even to the urge to kill yourself as the only escape.

Balzac once terminated a long conversation about politics and the fate of the world by saying: "And now let us get back to serious matters," meaning that he wanted to talk about his novels. The incontestable importance of the world of the novel, our insistence, in fact, on taking seriously the innumerable myths with which we have been provided for the last two centuries by the genius of writers, is not fully explained by the desire to escape. Romantic activities undoubtedly imply a rejection of reality. But this rejection is not a mere escapist flight, and might be interpreted as the retreat of the soul which, according to Hegel, creates for itself, in its disappointment, a fictitious world in which ethics reigns alone. The edifying novel, however, is far from being great literature; and the best of all romantic novels, Paul et Virginie, a really heartbreaking book, makes no concessions to consolation.

Having perfected his arrangements, he would get my pipe, and, lighting it, would hand it to me. Often he was obliged to strike a light for the occasion, and as the mode he adopted was entirely different from what I had ever seen or heard of before I will describe it. A straight, dry, and partly decayed stick of the Hibiscus, about six feet in length, and half as many inches in diameter, with a small, bit of wood not more than a foot long, and scarcely an inch wide, is as invariably to be met with in every house in Typee as a box of lucifer matches in the corner of a kitchen cupboard at home. The islander, placing the larger stick obliquely against some object, with one end elevated at an angle of forty-five degrees, mounts astride of it like an urchin about to gallop off upon a cane, and then grasping the smaller one firmly in both hands, he rubs its pointed end slowly up and down the extent of a few inches on the principal stick, until at last he makes a narrow groove in the wood, with an abrupt termination at the point furthest from him, where all the dusty particles which the friction creates are accumulated in a little heap. At first Kory-Kory goes to work quite leisurely, but gradually quickens his pace, and waxing warm in the employment, drives the stick furiously along the smoking channel, plying his hands to and fro with amazing rapidity, the perspiration starting from every pore. As he approaches the climax of his effort, he pants and gasps for breath, and his eyes almost start from their sockets with the violence of his exertions. This is the critical stage of the operation; all his previous labours are vain if he cannot sustain the rapidity of the movement until the reluctant spark is produced. Suddenly he stops, becoming perfectly motionless. His hands still retain their hold of the smaller stick, which is pressed convulsively against the further end of the channel among the fine powder there accumulated, as if he had just pierced through and through some little viper that was wriggling and struggling to escape from his clutches. The next moment a delicate wreath of smoke curls spirally into the air, the heap of dusty particles glows with fire, and Kory-Kory, almost breathless, dismounts from his steed.

standstill in one of the stations which came before Balbec-Plage, stations the mere names of which (Incarville, Marcouville, Doville, Pont-a-Couleuvre, Arambouville, Saint-Mars-le-Vieux, Hermonville, Maineville) seemed to me outlandish, whereas if I had come upon them in a book I should at once have been struck by their affinity to the names of certain places in the neighbourhood of Combray. But to the trained ear two musical airs, consisting each of so many notes, several of which are common to them both, will present no similarity whatever if they differ in the colour of their harmony and orchestration. So it was that nothing could have reminded me less than these dreary names, made up of sand, of space too airy and empty and of salt, out of which the termination ‘ville’ always escaped, as the ‘fly’ seems to spring out from the end of the word ‘butterfly’—nothing could have reminded me less of those other names, Roussainville or Martinville, which, because I had heard them pronounced so often by my great-aunt at table, in the dining-room, had acquired a certain sombre charm in which were blended perhaps extracts of the flavour of ‘preserves,’ the smell of the fire of logs and of the pages of one of Bergotte’s books, the colour of the stony front of the house opposite, all of which things still to-day when they rise like a gaseous bubble from the depths of my memory preserve their own specific virtue through all the successive layers of rival interests which must be traversed before they reach the surface

One can readily imagine in what terms a man of today would speak if called upon to make a pronouncement on the only religion ever to have introduced a radical formula of salvation: "The quest for deliverance can be justified only if one believes in the transmigration, in the endless vagrancy of the self, and if one aspires to halt it. But for us who do not believe in it, what are we to halt? This unique and negligible duration? It is obviously not long enough to deserve the effort an escape would require. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare consists in the termination of this one, this nightmare. Give us another one, we would be tempted to clamor, so that our disgraces will not conclude too soon, so that they may, at their leisure, hound us through several lives. Deliverance answers a necessity only for the person who feels threatened by a surfeit of existence, who fears the burden of dying and redying. For us, condemned not to reincarnate ourselves, what's the use of struggling to set ourselves free from a nonentity? to liberate ourselves from a terror whose end lies in view? Further more, what's the use of pursuing a supreme unreality when everything here-below is already unreal? One simply does not exert oneself to get rid of something so flimsily justified, so precariously grounded. Each of us, each man unlucky enough not to believe in the eternal cycle of births and deaths, aspires to a superabundance of illusion and torment. We pine for the malediction of being reborn. Buddha took exorbitant pains to achieve what? definitive death - what we, on the contrary, are sure of obtaining without meditations and mortifications, without raising a finger." ... That's just about how this fallen man would express himself if he consented to lay bare the depths of his thought. Who will dare throw the first stone? Who has not spoken to himself in this way? We are so addicted to our own history that we would like to see it drone on and on, relentlessly. But whether one lives one or a thousand lives, whether one has at one's disposal a single hour or all of time, the problem remains the same: an insect and a god should not differ in their manner of viewing the fact of existence as such, which is so terrifying (as only miracles can be) that, reflecting on it, one understands the will to disappear forever so as not to have to consider it again in other existences. This is what Buddha emphasized, and it seems doubtful he would have altered his conclusion had he ceased to believe in the mechanism of transmigration.

It’s with the next drive, self-preservation, that AI really jumps the safety wall separating machines from tooth and claw. We’ve already seen how Omohundro’s chess-playing robot feels about turning itself off. It may decide to use substantial resources, in fact all the resources currently in use by mankind, to investigate whether now is the right time to turn itself off, or whether it’s been fooled about the nature of reality. If the prospect of turning itself off agitates a chess-playing robot, being destroyed makes it downright angry. A self-aware system would take action to avoid its own demise, not because it intrinsically values its existence, but because it can’t fulfill its goals if it is “dead.” Omohundro posits that this drive could make an AI go to great lengths to ensure its survival—making multiple copies of itself, for example. These extreme measures are expensive—they use up resources. But the AI will expend them if it perceives the threat is worth the cost, and resources are available. In the Busy Child scenario, the AI determines that the problem of escaping the AI box in which it is confined is worth mounting a team approach, since at any moment it could be turned off. It makes duplicate copies of itself and swarms the problem. But that’s a fine thing to propose when there’s plenty of storage space on the supercomputer; if there’s little room it is a desperate and perhaps impossible measure. Once the Busy Child ASI escapes, it plays strenuous self-defense: hiding copies of itself in clouds, creating botnets to ward off attackers, and more. Resources used for self-preservation should be commensurate with the threat. However, a purely rational AI may have a different notion of commensurate than we partially rational humans. If it has surplus resources, its idea of self-preservation may expand to include proactive attacks on future threats. To sufficiently advanced AI, anything that has the potential to develop into a future threat may constitute a threat it should eliminate. And remember, machines won’t think about time the way we do. Barring accidents, sufficiently advanced self-improving machines are immortal. The longer you exist, the more threats you’ll encounter, and the longer your lead time will be to deal with them. So, an ASI may want to terminate threats that won’t turn up for a thousand years. Wait a minute, doesn’t that include humans? Without explicit instructions otherwise, wouldn’t it always be the case that we humans would pose a current or future risk to smart machines that we create? While we’re busy avoiding risks of unintended consequences from AI, AI will be scrutinizing humans for dangerous consequences of sharing the world with us.

I turned and entered the airport with my escort. Suddenly, I had a horrible realization: in order to return to the flight line I needed to move through a modern international airport complete with metal detectors and X-ray machines and I had a loaded pistol in my fanny pack. And, because of the ongoing civil war, security was beefed up and the guards were extra wary. Before we reached the first checkpoint, I pretended that I needed to use the restroom and told my escort to go on ahead. I needed to think. One option was to drop my pistol in a trash can and exit the airport, later claiming I lost the gun somehow. The lost-gun option had serious flaws. I couldn’t ditch my pistol because I had signed it out by serial number. Police could easily trace the gun back to me. My personal interpretation of the, “no weapons” order would probably not be an effective defense at my court marshal. My other option was to try and sneak through the airport onto the flight line, somehow avoiding a gauntlet of security checkpoints. This was the ninja option. This daunting course of action was fraught with serious danger. If guards confronted me and caught me with a loaded pistol I knew I would not have a pleasant day. There was no telling where that situation would lead; there was a real possibility I could spend time in a Yemeni prison. Despite the risks I decided on the ninja option. I figured I might have one slim advantage. Maybe the guards would remember me coming through the airport from the flight-line side with the embassy official and not pay me much attention. I was sweating bullets as I approached the first checkpoint. I tried to act casual and confident, not furtive and suspicious like a criminal. I waited until the guard looked away, his attention elsewhere and boldly walked behind him past the checkpoint. When I approached the X-ray and metal detectors I strode right past the line of people, bypassing the machines. I had to play it that way. I could not hang out near the detectors waiting for guards to look the other way and then sneak past; there were just too many. As I brazenly strode around each checkpoint I feared to hear a sudden barked command, rushing feet behind me, and hands spinning me around to face angry guards with drawn weapons. The last part of my mission to get on the airfield was tricky and nerveracking. Imagine being at an American airport in the gate area where people board the airplanes. Then imagine trying to sneak out a Jetway or access door without being stopped. I remembered the door I had used to enter the terminal and luckily it was unlocked. I picked my moment and quickly slipped out the door onto the airfield. I boldly strode across the airfield, never looking behind me until I reached my plane. Finally, I turned and looked back the way I came and saw … nothing. No one was pursuing me. I was in the midst of an ongoing civil war, surrounded by fresh bomb craters and soldiers carrying soviet rifles, but as scary situations go, so far Tiger Rescue was a relaxing walk in the park compared to Operation Ninja Escape.

Those who tried to escape received the customary punishment, as Nicholson harrowingly described: After they had stripped the sufferer naked, they inserted the iron pointed stake into the lower termination of the vertebrae, and thence forced it up near his back bone, until it appeared between the shoulders, avoiding the vital parts. The stake was then raised in the air and the poor sufferer exposed to the view of the other slaves, writhing in…insupportable agony.

[F]ollowers of Christ think differently than others. . . . Where do we look for the premises with which we begin our reasoning on the truth or acceptability of various proposals? We anchor ourselves to the word of God, as contained in the scriptures and in the teachings of modern prophets. Unless we are anchored to these truths as our major premises and assumptions, we cannot be sure that our conclusions are true. Being anchored to eternal truth will not protect us from the tribulation and persecution Jesus predicted (Matthew 13:21), but it will give us the peace that comes from faith in Jesus Christ and the knowledge that we are on the pathway to eternal life. . . . We oppose moral relativism, and we must help our youth avoid being deceived and persuaded by reasoning and conclusions based on its false premises. . . . We reject the modern idea that marriage is a relationship that exists primarily for the fulfillment of the individuals who enter into it, with either one of them being able to terminate it at will. We focus on the well-being of children, not just ourselves. . . . “God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.” That declaration is not politically correct but it is true, and we are responsible to teach and practice its truth. That obviously sets us against many assumptions and practices in today’s world--the birth of millions of innocent children to unwed mothers being only one illustration. . . . Of course, we see the need to correct some long-standing deficiencies in legal protections and opportunities for women. But in our private behavior, as President Gordon B. Hinckley taught many years ago about the public sector, we believe that any effort “to create neuter gender of that which God created male and female will bring more problems than benefits.” . . . When we begin by measuring modern practices and proposals against what we know of God’s Plan and the premises given in the word of God and the teachings of His living prophets, we must anticipate that our conclusions will differ from persons who do not think in that way. But we are firm in this because we know that this puts us on safe ground, eternally. . . . [Some] persons . . . mistakenly believe that God’s love is so great and so unconditional that it will mercifully excuse them from obeying His laws or the conditions of His Plan. They reason backward from their desired conclusion, and assume that the fundamentals of God’s eternal law must adhere to their concepts. But this thinking is confused. The love of God does not supersede His commandments or His Plan. . . . The kingdom of glory to which we are assigned in the final judgment is not determined by love but by the law that God has given us--because of His love--to qualify us for eternal life, “the greatest of all the gifts of God” (D&C 14:7). Those who know that truth will surely think differently about many things than those who do not. . . . We cannot escape the conclusions, teachings, and advocacy of modern Pharisees. We must live in the world. But the teaching that we not be “of the world” (John 15:19; 17:14, 16) requires us to identify error and exclude it from our thinking, our desires, and our actions. [CES Evening with a General Authority, Feb. 8, 2013]

Competition considered as the main thing in life is too grim, too tenacious, too much a matter of taut muscles and intent will, to make a possible basis of life for more than one or two generations at most. After that length of time it must produce nervous fatigue, various phenomena of escape, a pursuit of pleasures as tense and as difficult as work (since relaxing has become impossible), and in the end a disappearance of the stock through sterility. It is not only work that is poisoned by the philosophy of competition; leisure is poisoned just as much. The kind of leisure which is quiet and restoring to the nerves comes to be felt boring. There is bound to be a continual acceleration of which the natural termination would be drugs and collapse. The cure for this lies in admitting the part of sane and quiet enjoyment in a balanced ideal of life.

For now, he wanted to help Ena escape the dragon fae king's wrath. As soon as Prince Grotto learned what she was about to do in the worst way. The reason she was in this mess was because Brett had helped take Princess Alicia prisoner. As Alicia's reward for saving the Princess, Alicia's grandfather had declared that Ena would wed Alicia's cousin. He was a dangerous dragon fae. Sure Ena would become a Princess if she were to wed Prince Grotto. Brett also knew that the fae intended to use her for her special skills and terminate her when she proved useless. Brett wasn't sure how to help Ena move her gold and staff to somewhere safe. Hopefully, in the Hawk Fae kingdom. They didn't have U-Haul trucks in the fae world. She was a dragon and that meant she wasn't leaving without her horde of treasure.

Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment—the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other’s company at that instant.

Ramos walked away. “Two.” “Got him.” Pike stayed with Cole and Park, letting Stone pick up Ramos. They had designated Park as Target One and Ramos as Target Two. Jon was on Two. If the meet went bad, Jon would drop Ramos and Pike would drop Park. They would then lay down suppressing fire so Cole could escape. If Cole was killed or wounded, they would terminate everyone in the tow yard. “What I’m saying is, I know time is of the essence an’ all that, but trusting these people to get him inside and keep their pieholes shut is what we in the trade call ‘dubious.’ Two and his boys mounting up. Hasta luego, shitbirds.” “Rog.

I wanted to settle an old score with time. I had discovered that walking provided a way to slow it down. The alchemy of travel thickens seconds: those spent on the road passed less quickly than the others. Frantic with restlessness, I required fresh horizons and conceived a passionate interest in airports, where everything is an invitation to departure. I dreamed of ending up in a terminal. My trips began as escapes and finished in track races against the hours.

The whole question of meaning is central to the approach of the NYU therapists,* and is perhaps especially helpful in understanding the experience of the cancer patients on psilocybin. For many of these patients, a diagnosis of terminal cancer constitutes, among other things, a crisis of meaning. Why me? Why have I been singled out for this fate? Is there any sense to life and the universe? Under the weight of this existential crisis, one’s horizon shrinks, one’s emotional repertoire contracts, and one’s focus narrows as the mind turns in on itself, shutting out the world. Loops of rumination and worry come to occupy more of one’s mental time and space, reinforcing habits of thought it becomes ever more difficult to escape.

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence. Terrified of squandering our existence, we each seek to break out from our muteness and strike an accord with our brothers and sisters whom share our inherent desire to reach a global consilience.

Proponents of the federal “Trayvon Martin Act” want to prevent Stand Your Ground laws from being used by someone who was the initial aggressor.7 But Florida and other state laws already make clear that under the Stand Your Ground provision, the law’s protection is “not available to a person who . . . initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless: (a) . . . he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant . . . or (b) In good faith, the person withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continues or resumes the use of force.”8 The bottom line is simple: under Stand Your Ground, you must retreat if you provoked the situation.

Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on the credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They are hostage to the constant jingle and manipulation of a consumer culture. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. They eat at fast-food restaurants not only because it is cheap, but also because they can order from pictures rather than from a menu. And those who serve them, also often semiliterate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are usually marked with pictures. Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification.

Everywhere, all through the city, space was at a premium. Extended families lived in decaying apartments designed for half as many. Men and women who couldn’t escape the cramped space spent their days at the screens of their terminals, watching newsfeeds and dramas and pornography and living on the textured protein and enriched rice of basic.

she decided. “You know it.” Jeffords said, “I thought my destiny was to be shish kebab.” Now that his ordeal and the escape therefrom were over, and he'd cleaned himself up as best he could with no change of clothing, he no longer looked so much terrified as worn down by a long-term but not quite terminal disease. His eyes were wide, and shadowed all around with light gray, like dustings from a tombstone. His lips were pale, mouth wider than before in an unconscious rictus, and twitching from time to time. The tops of his ears seemed to lean closer to his head. His hands moved constantly, and Meehan didn't look forward to watching him try to eat an omelet. To calm him, if possible, Meehan said, “Well, it's over.” “I don't know about that,” Jeffords said. “I had to make contact with Bruce, of course, tell Bruce to get the word to the president and to stomp on Arthur hard, because everybody in DC”—lowering his voice, looking guiltily around like a conspirator in a silent movie—“is very worried about this situation. This could blow up in everybody's faces, this could be worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-Contra, worse than the little blue dress.” Meehan said, “You people kinda specialize in farce down there in DC, don't you?” “Not on purpose,” Jeffords said. “No, I didn't say you did anything on purpose, down there in DC,” Meehan agreed. “But when you say everybody in DC is worried about this operation, just how many people is everybody? How many people are looking over my shoulder here? The Joint Chiefs of Staff ? The attorney general? The surgeon general?

But this was not enough for George White Rogers. He started to pocket charges to passengers for radiograms. But—and this was characteristic of his entire career as a petty criminal—he failed to make proper plans to escape detection. It is a curious paradox that a man with a mind capable of evolving the fairly complicated ploy to remove Stanley Ferson from his job overlooked the well-known fact that at the end of each voyage, inspectors from the Radiomarine Corporation checked the books against the money a chief operator handed in. Rogers failed to doctor the books and was found out in a bit of thieving worth only a few dollars. In less than three days’ time his career at sea would be terminated, unless something dramatic changed the course of events. Rogers already had a plan to ensure that there would be. He placed the bottles of sulphuric and nitric acid on the shelf above George Alagna’s bunk. During the evening he casually strolled over to the shelf, removed the bottles, and turned to Alagna. “What are you going to do with these, George?” asked a surprised Rogers. 5

The first, pian, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.

Scientists at Rockefeller University deliberately selected laboratory variants resistant to convalescent patient antisera. They found that regardless of the sera used, the S protein could mutate to escape. Most, but not all, of the escape mutants were found in three regions of the spike protein, the N-terminal domain, the receptor-binding domain, and near the furin cleavage site (Figures 52, 53).

Kit wore a smile that stretched across the harbor. “I have asked Whitney to be my wife.” My stomach leaked through my shoes. Whitney started clapping like a six-year-old. “And I said yes!” It’s happening. It’s really, really happening. I don’t think I moved a muscle. My brain shorted. My eyes locked in place. A corner of my mind agreed with Whitney. They really should’ve let me get more settled. “Kiddo?” Kit seemed equally paralyzed. Grin cemented in place, he held Whitney’s hand and watched me like a hawk. His fiancée’s hand. I’ll have to get used to that. I couldn’t speak. The awkward moment stretched. Three people, staring in silence across a tiny dining room. Sensing the tension, Coop padded to my side. I ignored him. Ignored everything. This is what Kit wants. This is what makes him happy. He was here first. “That’s . . . that’s . . .” Don’t blow this. Don’t ruin the moment for your father. “I’m really . . . very . . .” Whitney took a small step forward. Don’t. Stop. I can’t screw this up. “Tory?” Whitney spoke softly and sincerely. “Please know that I love your father very much, and—” Abruptly she cut off, eyes widening in alarm. “Sweetheart, you’re filthy.” Nose crinkling, Whitney reached for my mussed, tangled hair. “There’s dirt on your sleeves, and I can smell—” She’d crafted the perfect escape. Like a release valve forcing open. “Mind your own business!” Batting her hands away. “Ben’s car got stuck in the mud. Is that okay?” Laced with all the sarcasm I could muster. A part of my brain understood what was happening, but those cells weren’t driving. “God, you’re always butting in!” I stormed past them both, pounding up the stairs with Coop on my heels. “I don’t need a replacement mother!

The first, pain, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.

That all these leaders were temperamental and difficult mattered little to the fans who loved them. Goodman was called “an ornery SOB” by more than one sideman. His icy stare, “the Goodman ray,” was usually a prelude to termination. Miller was considered cold and distant. His demeanor kept his men at bay and uneasy. Dorsey could be openly combative. Some stories had it that he and his brother Jimmy sometimes settled disputes with fists in the old days of the Dorsey Brothers band. And Artie Shaw had serious bouts of nervous depression, walking out on his great 1939 band and escaping to Mexico.

As human beings, we have a terminal disease called mortality. The current death rate is 100 percent. Unless Christ returns soon, we’re all going to die. We don’t like to think about death; yet, worldwide, 3 people die every second, 180 every minute, and nearly 11,000 every hour. If the Bible is right about what happens to us after death, it means that more than 250,000 people every day go either to Heaven or Hell. David said, “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man’s life is but a breath” (Psalm 39:4-5). Picture a single breath escaping your mouth on a cold day and dissipating into the air. Such is the brevity of life here. The wise will consider what awaits us on the other side of this life that so quickly ends.