The Big Disconnect Quotes

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

The cawing of a big, black crow awoke me early the next morning, but I remained still, pretending to be asleep. I didn’t want to see Ibrahim in the light of day, and I didn’t want to make more small talk. I felt hunger pains through the remnants of champagne and cognac from the night before. I wondered why I hadn’t eaten more, feeling silly about having been so insecure about my culinary etiquette. Numb and void of emotion, I remained in a state of suspended animation reliving the events of our night of passion. The night before, I pictured silhouettes of angels dancing upon the ceiling in the moonlight, not disconnected bodies lying beneath the covers at a loss for words.

I opened the fire door to four lips none of which were mine kissing tightened my belt around my hips where your hands were missing and stepped out into the cold collar high under the slate grey sky the air was smoking and the streets were dry and I wasn't joking when I said Good Bye magazine quality men talking on the corner French, no less much less of them then us so why do I feel like something's been rearranged? you know, taken out of context I must seem so strange killed a cockroach so big it left a puddle of pus on the wall when you and I are lying in bed you don't seem so tall I'm singing now because my tear ducts are too tired and my brain is disconnected but my heart is wired I make such a good statistic someone should study me now somebody's got to be interested in how I feel just 'cause I'm here and I'm real oh, how I miss substituting the conclusion to confrontation with a kiss and oh, how I miss walking up to the edge and jumping in like I could feel the future on your skin I opened the fire door to four lips none of which were mine kissing I opened the fire door

Diesel was about to place the cockroach on the casket, and my purse rocked out with “Thriller” again. “Excuse me,” I said. And I answered my phone. “I’m beginning to appreciate Hatchet,” Wulf said to Diesel. Diesel smiled. “She has her moments. And she makes cupcakes.” I disconnected and stuffed my phone into my pocket. “Well?” Diesel asked. “It was Glo. Her broom ran away again.” “I would appreciate it if we could get on with this without more interruption,” Wulf said in his eerily quiet voice, his eyes riveted on mine. “Lighten up,” I said to Wulf. “Glo lost her broom again. This is a big deal for her. And what have we got here anyway…a dead guy and a Stone. Do you think they can wait for three minutes longer?” Diesel gave a bark of laughter, and Wulf looked like her was trying hard not to sigh. - Diesel, Lizzy, and Wulf, page 306-307.

The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things you can pinpoint the day, the hour, the minute. When you think about it, though, those things, mostly seem to happen to other people. This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I am going to tell it to you. It's a true story as much as six decades or telling and remembering can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don't always get everything right. You remember a little thing clear as a bell, the weather, say, or the splash of light on the river's ripples as the sun was going down into the black pines. things not even connected to anything in particular, while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than the big things.

The truth is our disconnection with Earth translates into a kind of disrespect of the feminine. How far can you go in violating the mother that gave you life? As long as the feminine is diminished the connection between us and the Earth will always be underscored by a big question mark. We have abused the Earth so much that we don’t know which direction to go. We must wonder about this increasing masculinity that is translated in terms of repeated violence or love of it.

There is a big disconnect between the grand social engineering agenda of government and the far simpler, unglamorous aspirations and needs of local people, many of whom are not fluent in the ways of jargon.

Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be connected starting in the womb, and if later in life you choose to disconnect, insurance agencies might refuse to insure you, employers might refuse to employ you, and healthcare services might refuse to take care of you. In the big battle between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down.

THE COUNCIL WAS NOTHING LIKE Jason imagined. For one thing, it was in the Big House rec room, around a Ping-Pong table, and one of the satyrs was serving nachos and sodas. Somebody had brought Seymour the leopard head in from the living room and hung him on the wall. Every once in a while, a counselor would toss him a Snausage. Jason looked around the room and tried to remember everyone’s name. Thankfully, Leo and Piper were sitting next to him—it was their first meeting as senior counselors. Clarisse, leader of the Ares cabin, had her boots on the table, but nobody seemed to care. Clovis from Hypnos cabin was snoring in the corner while Butch from Iris cabin was seeing how many pencils he could fit in Clovis’s nostrils. Travis Stoll from Hermes was holding a lighter under a Ping-Pong ball to see if it would burn, and Will Solace from Apollo was absently wrapping and unwrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist. The counselor from Hecate cabin, Lou Ellen something-or-other, was playing “got-your-nose” with Miranda Gardiner from Demeter, except that Lou Ellen really had magically disconnected Miranda’s nose, and Miranda was trying to get it back. Jason had hoped Thalia would show. She’d promised, after all—but she was nowhere to be seen. Chiron had told him not to worry about it. Thalia often got sidetracked fighting monsters or running quests for Artemis, and she would probably arrive soon. But still, Jason worried. Rachel Dare, the oracle, sat next to Chiron at the head of the table. She was wearing her Clarion Academy school uniform dress, which seemed a bit odd, but she smiled at Jason. Annabeth didn’t look so relaxed. She wore armor over her camp clothes, with her knife at her side and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. As soon as Jason walked in, she fixed him with an expectant look, as if she were trying to extract information out of him by sheer willpower. “Let’s come to order,” Chiron said. “Lou Ellen, please give Miranda her nose back. Travis, if you’d kindly extinguish the flaming Ping-Pong ball, and Butch, I think twenty pencils is really too many for any human nostril. Thank you. Now, as you can see, Jason, Piper, and Leo have returned successfully…more or less. Some of you have heard parts of their story, but I will let them fill you in.” Everyone looked at Jason. He cleared his throat and began the story. Piper and Leo chimed in from time to time, filling in the details he forgot. It only took a few minutes, but it seemed like longer with everyone watching him. The silence was heavy, and for so many ADHD demigods to sit still listening for that long, Jason knew the story must have sounded pretty wild. He ended with Hera’s visit right before the meeting.

This false solution is last for a reason. Doing without is the final resting place of many who have tried the first six false solutions. It is where people go who have given up hoping for relationship. It is a place of quiet despair. When doing the same, the opposite, too much, nothing, for others, and to yourself fall through, you are left looking at yourself, alone, in a mirror. The very isolation of the dilemma is a judgment on you. It judges in several ways, telling you things like: You aren’t meant for safe people. You don’t qualify. You’ve been asking for too much. You can’t get it right. You are too damaged to have relationships. You aren’t spiritual enough. Typically, people who are trying this last false solution don’t make a big fuss about things. They get their lives in order. They bury themselves in work, service, or other worthwhile venues. And they try not to think about what they’re doing without. The disconnected part of the soul isn’t a very rude or demanding entity. It tends to die quietly, gradually withering away like a starving infant. After a period of time, you may no longer even be able to feel the pain of isolation. At that point, less pain but more damage is occurring. If you are in this position, part of you is still alive. You’re reading this book—even if you’re weary, cynical, and with no hope. But you are taking a step.

The healing power of a good apology is also immediately recognizable. When someone offers me a genuine apology, I feel relieved and soothed. Whatever anger and resentment I may still be harboring melts away. I also feel better when I offer an apology I know is due. I’m enormously grateful that I can repair the disconnection after having made a mistake or acted badly.

Just because your baby can tap a touch screen to change a picture does not mean that he should, that it is a developmentally useful or appropriate activity for him. In fact, research suggests that the process of tapping a screen or keypad and engaging with the screen activity may itself be rerouting brain development in ways that eliminate development of essential other neural connections your child needs to develop reading, writing, and higher-level thinking later.

When texting begins to take the place of substantive in-person conversations for any of us, we are training the language and speech centers of our brain for a new, unnatural, and superficial model of connection. When that training starts early, as it does now for young texters, they get so used to it at such a young age that, unlike the newborn baby who innately knows something is missing and complains about it, our older tech-trained children don’t even know what they have lost.

Some that read this book will find its Libertarian and Constitutionalist slant a bit obtuse and maybe even off-putting. This author makes no apologies for viewing the history of the eugenics movement from this political perspective. It is the ethical and legal underpinnings of the American Revolution that remain as a guiding light while the eugenics movement continues to reemerge long after its alleged demise. Limited, or rather minimal government, goes a long way to curtail the disconnect that emerges when government grows so large that it no longer feels compelled to heed to the dictates of the governed.

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential. Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.

You walk around the world and you see people multitasking. They’re playing games and they’re reading email and they’re on Facebook, etc … On a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once … Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is, You know what? You’re really lousy at it! It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we’ve done suggests they’re worse at analytical reasoning. We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.15

Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process. As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough. One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples. When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team. Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach. You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error—just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community. Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight. The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and process are much more important than material, models, and methods. The church is an organization that exists for its nonmembers. Christianity does not promise a storm-free life. However, if we build our lives on biblical foundations, the storms of life will not destroy us. We cannot have lives that are storm-free, but we can become storm-proof. Just as we have to figure out the most effective way to engage our community for Christ, we also have to figure out the most effective way to establish spiritual foundations in each unique context. There is really only one biblical foundation we can build our lives on, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Pastors, teachers, and church staff believe their primary role is to serve as mentors. Their task is to equip every believer for the work of the ministry. It is not to do all the ministry, but to equip all the people to do it. Their top priority is to equip disciples to do ministry and to make disciples. Do you spend more time ministering to people or preparing people to minister? No matter what your church responsibilities are, you can prepare others for the same ministry. Insecurity in leadership is a deadly thing that will destroy any organization. It drives pastors and presidents to defensive positions, protecting their authority or exercising it simply to show who is the boss. Disciple-making is a process that systematically moves people toward Christ and spiritual maturity; it is not a bunch of randomly disconnected church activities. In the context of church leadership, one of the greatest and most important applications of faith is to trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through those you are leading. Without confidence that the Holy Spirit is in control, there is no empowering, no shared leadership, and, as a consequence, no multiplication.

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential. Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.

I call an ambulance and do a mini-intake over the phone but they will not come to help when they hear his background. He is a felon, they say. You have to call the police. I beg. Please help us. This isn’t a criminal matter. They refuse. They disconnect the line. My mother and I go back and forth and decide we have no other choice. I call the local law enforcement office and explain everything. I beg them to go slow. I tell them Monte’s history with police because by now I know how he was beaten and tortured by LA County sheriffs. Two rookies arrive and they are young as fuck. I meet them downstairs. I ask them, What will you do if my brother gets violent? Monte’s never been violent but I am trying to prepare for anything. I’m—we’re—in a place we’ve never been. We’ll just taser him, one responds. No! My God! Absolutely not! I refuse to let them past me until they promise me they won’t hurt him, and when they finally do, I lead them into the apartment, explaining to Monte as I walk through the door, It’s okay. It’s okay. They’re just here to help. And my brother. My big, loving, unwell, good-hearted brother, my brother who has rescued small animals and my brother who has never, never hurt another human being, drops to his knees and begins to cry. His hands are in the air. He is sobbing. Please don’t take me back. Please don’t take me back. I stop cold. I tell the police they have to leave and they do and I get down on the floor. I curl up next to Monte. I hold him as much as he’ll allow.

I’m not sure I see your point.” “Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?” “Get where?” “Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like—” eloquently, he batted at the air as if at a blown leaf. “But—maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me.” “Sorry but I’m not really appreciating your point here.” “You don’t need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own. Because—” up went the batwing eyebrow—“well, if you didn’t take picture from museum, and Sascha didn’t steal it back, and I didn’t think of claiming reward—well, wouldn’t all those dozens of other paintings remain missing too? Forever maybe? Wrapped in brown paper? Still shut in that apartment? No one to look at them? Lonely and lost to the world? Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?” “I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.’ ” “Yes—but why give it a name? Can’t they both be the same thing?

WHY ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE In its present-day form, the disease model of addiction asserts that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease. This disease is evidenced by changes in the brain, especially alterations in the striatum, brought about by the repeated uptake of dopamine in response to drugs and other substances. But it’s also shown by changes in the prefrontal cortex, where regions responsible for cognitive control become partially disconnected from the striatum and sometimes lose a portion of their synapses as the addiction progresses. These are big changes. They can’t be brushed aside. And the disease model is the only coherent model of addiction that actually pays attention to the brain changes reported by hundreds of labs in thousands of scientific articles. It certainly explains the neurobiology of addiction better than the “choice” model and other contenders. It may also have some real clinical utility. It makes sense of the helplessness addicts feel and encourages them to expiate their guilt and shame, by validating their belief that they are unable to get better by themselves. And it seems to account for the incredible persistence of addiction, its proneness to relapse. It even demonstrates why “choice” cannot be the whole answer, because choice is governed by motivation, which is governed by dopamine, and the dopamine system is presumably diseased. Then why should we reject the disease model? The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn’t want to call the excitement we feel when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each rewarding experience builds its own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That’s true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. As we anticipate and live through these experiences, each network of synapses is strengthened and refined, so the uptake of dopamine gets more selective as rewards are identified and habits established. Prefrontal control is not usually studied when it comes to travel arrangements and football, but we know from the laboratory and from real life that attractive goals frequently override self-restraint. We know that ego fatigue and now appeal, both natural processes, reduce coordination between prefrontal control systems and the motivational core of the brain (as I’ve called it). So even though addictive habits can be more deeply entrenched than many other habits, there is no clear dividing line between addiction and the repeated pursuit of other attractive goals, either in experience or in brain function. London just doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s got to be Paris. Good food, sex, music . . . they no longer turn your crank. But cocaine sure does.

Every time our child’s texting, TV, electronic games, and social networking take the place of family, and every time our tech habits interrupt our time with them, that pattern is broken and the primacy of family takes another hit.

All the wisdom in the world about child-rearing cannot, by itself, replace intimate human ties, family ties, as the center of human development . . . the point of departure for all sound psychological thinking. —SELMA FRAIBERG, THE MAGIC YEARS

Doctors and researchers, from local emergency rooms to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), link the growing use of handheld electronic devices to an alarming increase in injuries to children, especially when parents or caregivers are distracted and fail to properly supervise young children in the moment. The Wall Street Journal, in a roundup of research and interviews with experts on the subject, noted that injuries to children under age five rose 12 percent between 2007 and 2010, after falling for much of the prior decade, according to the most recent data from the CDC.

In addition to the issue of distracted supervision putting children at risk for injury, at some point distracted, tech-centered parenting can look and feel to a child like having a narcissistic parent or an emotionally absent, psychologically neglectful one. In nonclinical settings, most notably in focus groups in schools around the country, the take-home message I am hearing from children of all ages is this: They feel the disconnect. They can tell when their parents’ attention is on screens or calls and increasingly they are feeling that all the time. It feels “bad and sad” to be ignored. And they are tired of being the “call waiting” in their parents’ lives.

conversation within themselves—the capacity for reflection—that enables them to sit alone, think about things, and come to insights. To

nine minutes of SpongeBob SquarePants can lead to aggressive behavior after you turn the TV off.

As for trust, at best all you can trust is that they are good kids who will inevitably roam into bad tech terrain. But unlike grown-ups, whose fully matured brain should be able to tell right from wrong, a joke from bullying, and tasteful content from trash, and should be able to exercise impulse control and mature judgment in how we use tech, our children are not there yet. They are still children. Our

I feel lonely in big cities. Disconnected.

No man ever steps in the same river twice. ~ Heraclitus We live in a word of ever-present change: the dispossessed buy Disney time shares the disenfranchised open Subways the disabled get the best parking spaces at the mall the disbelievers meet Jesus at a hockey game the disconcerted get the best seats to Rolling Stones concerts the disconnected have the most Facebook friends the discouraged win Purple Hearts in Fallujah the discredited have Amex Platinum Cards the discrete are exposed by the Washington Post the disgraced cash in big on their notoriety the disheveled design successful urban clothing lines the dishonest run our banks and brokerage houses the disreputable hold the highest offices. Shit, today, even the disgruntled have turn gruntled. So, fuck you Heraclitus of Ephesus! I'm tossing your bipolar Greek ass back in the river you came from.

That we can feel angry, too, and work through that feeling rather than be defined by it. There’s

The law gave me an entirely new vocabulary, a language that non-lawyers derisively referred to as "legalese." Unlike the basic building blocks- the day-to-day words- that got me from the subway to the office and back, the words of my legal vocabulary, more often than not, triggered flavors that I had experienced after leaving Boiling Springs, flavors that I had chosen for myself, derived from foods that were never contained within the boxes and the cans of DeAnne's kitchen. Subpoenakiwifruit. InjunctionCamembert. Infringementlobster. Jurisdictionfreshgreenbeans. Appellantsourdoughbread. ArbitrationGuinness. Unconstitutionalasparagus. ExculpatoryNutella. I could go on and on, and I did. Every day I was paid an astonishing amount of money to shuffle these words around on paper and, better yet, to say them aloud. At my yearly reviews, the partners I worked for commented that they had never seen a young lawyer so visibly invigorated by her work. One of the many reasons I was on track to make partner, I thought. There were, of course, the rare and disconnecting exceptions. Some legal words reached back to the Dark Ages of my childhood and to the stunted diet that informed my earlier words. "Mitigating," for example, brought with it the unmistakable taste of elementary school cafeteria pizzas: rectangles of frozen dough topped with a ketchup-like sauce, the hard crumbled meat of some unidentifiable animal, and grated "cheese" that didn't melt when heated but instead retained the pattern of a badly crocheted coverlet. I had actually looked forward to the days when these rectangles were on the lunch menu, slapped onto my tray by the lunch ladies in hairnets and comfortable shoes. Those pizzas (even the word itself was pure exuberance with the two z's and the sound of satisfaction at the end... ah!) were evocative of some greater, more interesting locale, though how and where none of us at Boiling Springs Elementary circa 1975 were quite sure. We all knew what hamburgers and hot dogs were supposed to look and taste like, and we knew that the school cafeteria served us a second-rate version of these foods. Few of us students knew what a pizza was supposed to be. Kelly claimed that it was usually very big and round in shape, but both of these characteristics seemed highly improbable to me. By the time we were in middle school, a Pizza Inn had opened up along the feeder road to I-85. The Pizza Inn may or may not have been the first national chain of pizzerias to offer a weekly all-you-can-eat buffet. To the folks of the greater Boiling Springs-Shelby area, this was an idea that would expand their waistlines, if not their horizons. A Sizzler would later open next to the Pizza Inn (feeder road took on a new connotation), and it would offer the Holy Grail of all-you-can-eat buffets: steaks, baked potatoes, and, for the ladies, a salad bar complete with exotic fixings such as canned chickpeas and a tangle of slightly bruised alfalfa sprouts. Along with "mitigating," these were some of the other legal words that also transported me back in time: Egressredvelvetcake. PerpetuityFrenchsaladdressing. Compensatoryboiledpeanuts. ProbateReese'speanutbuttercup. FiduciaryCheerwine. AmortizationOreocookie.

But unlike grown-ups, whose fully matured brain should be able to tell right from wrong, a joke from bullying, and tasteful content from trash, and should be able to exercise impulse control and mature judgment in how we use tech, our children are not there yet. They are still children.

Large and obscure words tax mental resources too much, interrupting you from making your point and disconnecting you from your audience. That’s why simplicity in speech is valued and used by people in the most important fields, like tech and politics.

Blanca came in and out of my life over the next few weeks, but she never came far enough for me to see her. I failed to meet her in so many different ways that I began to know her anyway. I knew the qualities of her particular absence. I dressed up for it. I wore a suit that I had never gotten the hang of in the seventies, but now it felt all right. It’s an unusual suit because it’s light beige, almost off-white. You don’t see that color much in big amounts, suit and jacket both. It became my uniform for not meeting Blanca.

Until this night, this awful night, he’d had a little joke about himself. He didn’t know who he was, or where he’d come from, but he knew what he liked. And what he liked was all around him-the flower stands on the corners, the big steel and glass buildings filled with milky evening light, the trees, of course, the grass beneath his feet. And the telephones-it didn’t matter. He liked to figure them out, master them, then crush them into tiny hard multicolored balls which he could then juggle or toss through plate glass windows when nobody was about. He liked piano music, the motion pictures, and the poems he found in books. He also liked the automobiles that burnt oil from the earth like lamps. And the great jet planes that flew on the same scientific principles, above the clouds. He always stopped and listened to the people laughing and talking up there when one of the people laughing and talking up there when one of the planes flew overhead. Driving was an extraordinary pleasure. In a silver Mercedes-Benz, he had sped on smooth empty roads from Rome to Florence to Venice in one night. He also liked television-the entire electric process of it, with tiny bits of lights. How soothing it was to have the company of the television, the intimacy with so many artfully painted faces speaking to you in friendship from the glowing screen. The rock and roll, he liked that too. He liked the music. He liked the Vampire Lestat singing “Requiem for the Marquise”. He didn’t pay attention to the words much. It was the melancholy and the dark undertone of drums and cymbals. Made him want to dance. He liked the giant yellow machines that dug into the earth late at night in the big cities with men in uniforms, crawling all over them; he liked the double-decker buses of London, and the people-the clever mortals everywhere-he liked, too, of course. He liked walking in Damascus during the evening, and seeing in sudden flashes of disconnected memory the city of the ancients. Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians in these streets. He liked the libraries where he could find photographs of ancient monuments in big smooth good-smelling books. He took his own photographs of the new cities around him and sometimes he could put images on those pictures which came from his thoughts. For example, in his photograph of Rome there were Roman people in tunics and sandals superimposed upon the modern versions in their thick ungraceful clothes. Oh, yes, much to like around him always-the violin music of Bartók, little girls in snow white dresses coming out of the church at midnight having sung at the Christmas mass. He liked the blood of his victims too, of course. That went without saying. It was no part of his little joke. Death was not funny to him. He stalked his prey in silence; he didn’t want to know his victims. All a mortal had to do was speak to him and he was turned away. Not proper, as he saw it, to talk to these sweet, soft-eyed things and then gobble their blood, break their bones and lick the marrow, squeeze their limbs to dripping pulp. And that was the way he feasted now, so violently. He felt no great need for blood anymore; but he wanted it. And the desire overpowered him in all its ravening purity, quite apart from the thirst. He could have feasted upon three or four mortals a night.

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.

This circular concept of time remains prevalent in the religion and philosophy of many indigenous and Eastern cultures. But in the West, our awareness of cycles has been overshadowed by a linear view of time, one that emphasizes beginnings and endings and strives for progress over repetition. Why did linear time come to dominate the Western way of thinking? Part of the reason is cultural, having to do with the way that Judeo-Christian thought describes the story of humanity not as a wheel but as a distinct trajectory through time. But equally important is that as we have come to see ourselves as separate from nature, we have built structures and systems that distance us from its circular rhythms. Electric light allows us to keep our own schedules, obscuring the phases of the moon and draining the sunrise and sunset of the meaning they once carried. Rather than matching our appetites to the harvests, we match the harvests to our desires. We have big watery strawberries all year round, forgetting that there was once a time when they were available only in June and tasted like sweet red fire. Our buildings heat and cool the air to a consistent temperature regardless of the weather outside. Our sound machines play any birdsong on demand, regardless of where those birds are in their migratory arc. Thus, disconnected from participation in these natural cycles, we have forgotten that time moves in loops as well as lines.

This capacity to maintain a long series of exhalations is unique to humans, thanks to bipedal locomotion. In quadrupedal animals like monkeys and apes, the shoulder locks the chest wall whenever the weight is on one arm during movement, and this means they can only take one breath per walking cycle. In humans, the arms are freed from weight-bearing, and so we are able to disconnect the breathing and walking cycles. This becomes important later for the evolution of speech, because this too depends on being able to sustain long, uninterrupted exhalations. Otherwise, we would end up with one-word sentences!

During this psychological transformation, the ordinary anchors of everyday life fell away for many working Americans. Family, community, tradition, and certainty were shaken apart by the economic force of the new—urban, postindustrial, and corporate—brand of capitalism. The sense of a person's self, which had previously been socially defined, moved into the interior of each individual's life and mind. Gradually, another concept of the self emerged as capitalism moved into this new stage, and sales or leisured consumption replaced the older emphasis on production and honest, hard work. This transition marked a shift toward a new type of person, one “predicated on the effectiveness of sales technique or the attractiveness of the individual salesperson. Personal magnetism replaced craftsmanship; technique replaced moral integrity.”85 The pervasive anxiety of this era led Americans to look for leadership anywhere they could find it. Three new areas promised relief. First, a new, popular psychology of personality offered to teach Americans how to transform themselves into people with “an intensely private sense of well being.” Self-pleasure and self-satisfaction now became the purpose of individual existence rather than a by-product of a well-lived life, and this ideology conveniently dovetailed with the new consumerism.86 Not surprisingly, then, a second transformative force emerged as the emerging field of advertising co-opted psychology and drafted psychologists like John B. Watson, A. A. Brill, and Sigmund Freud's brilliant nephew Edward Bernays into its well-paying service. On the advice and example of these men, copywriters began to suggest to consumers that they could transform their position in the social and business hierarchy by buying and displaying the correct products and behaviors. The new generation of ads was highly motivational.

To discipline without damage, big people must escape the vortex. And to escape the vortex, big people must stop using the disconnect as a disciplinary technique.

Family creates our first experience of ourselves in the world, and it becomes the foundation of our view of the world,” writes

year before law school. I was heading down the entrance stairs when I first saw her; long dark hair, petite build, and the most gorgeous large round chocolate eyes I had ever seen. Smitten from the onset, I watched her stumble and fall as I raced to help her, making sure she wasn't hurt. She looked at me and I saw the emptiness behind those big brown eyes straight away. What had drained the sparkle from them? I wanted to find out. I picked her up off the stairs, asked her if there were any injuries but she just

Stop talking. Now.” Deanna’s head fell back and she started laughing. It was a full-bodied belly laugh that spread over him like a breeze on a hot day. The sound was so sweet that it almost made up for how big of a disgusting pervert he felt like right now. While she was still chuckling, she touched his arm. “Don’t feel bad. How old were you then?” “It was senior year, so seventeen,” Lucky answered, still feeling gross. “See? You were a teenager, too. It’s fine. Really.” She continued giggling, and he had to admit that the sound made him so happy that he didn’t even care that it was at his expense. “It still feels wrong.” His shoulders shook as a chill ran through him, and it wasn’t the good kind. It was the grossed-out kind. “I think it’s hilarious,” she said, clearly enjoying seeing him squirm. “I’m so glad I can amuse you,” he said flatly. “Well, I think it’s only fair since I seemed to have offered hours of amusement for you—” Without even thinking, he reached over the seat and started tickling her. She wiggled and laughed, begging him to stop. He did, but only because a call came in. When he saw the picture on his console’s display, he knew he had to answer it. Pressing the answer button, he extended his patent greeting to his publicist. “Hello, beautiful.” “Why can’t you just play nice with others, especially the press?” Jessie Sloan-Courtland asked in her usual no nonsense tone. Jessie wasn’t one for niceties. She was all business, all the time. Deciding to ignore her rhetorical question and her dislike for small talk, he pushed on undeterred. “I’ve been good. How about you?” “Lucky. You can’t treat the press like that.” Jessie seemed to have the same game plan as he did. This conversation was going to happen, so he figured he might as well just get it over with. “I wasn’t there for them. I was there for the kids.” “It doesn’t matter. They were there, and whether you like it or not, you have a responsibility—” “I had a responsibility to visit the kids and their families. I had a responsibility to protect the people I brought with me. And I lived up to my responsibilities.” “I’m not going to argue with you. You’re supposed to be cleaning up your act. We agreed. And your image is your responsibility. When you elbow photographers in the nose, you open yourself up for lawsuits, and that is not something sponsors think is appealing. You know what’s on the line with this bout. Don’t screw it up.” “Yes, Mom,” he answered—his normal response for when Jessie was right. “You know, you’re not nearly as cute as you think you are,” she said, sounding less than impressed. “Awww, you think I’m cute. Does Zach know? I don’t want to come betw—” “Goodbye, Lucky.” “Bye, beautiful.” When the call disconnected, Lucky felt a little twinge of guilt that Jessie had even had to make that call. He knew better. “Wow. She’s awesome.” Unlike Jessie, Deanna did sound impressed. “Yeah. She is pretty awesome,” he agreed. “And so beautiful.” Deanna was still looking at Jessie’s picture on the console. He didn’t want her to get the wrong idea just because he’d called her beautiful. “Her husband sure thinks so. He’s actually a friend of mine. Have you heard of Zach Courtland?” Deanna was quiet for a beat. Then she snapped her fingers. “Was he the one in the Calvin Klein ads?” “That’s him.” “Wow. She’s married to him? He’s…hot.” Well, this conversation had taken a turn Lucky didn’t like. Not one little bit.

The city looked marvelous with its dazzling skyscrapers. I felt lost within the Big Apple. The never-ending attractions were calling me. The streets were filled with people. It was like the world was touching the sky. The paths didn’t seem to stop anywhere. There were platforms of happiness and shops of dreams: Prada, Zara, Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Givenchy, Jimmy Choo, Versace, Dior, Bloomingdale, all of them. There was no lack of fun and happiness. Yet in the entire city, there was a strange silence, a cold passion. Every set of eyes seemed to be lonely. Everyone was together yet disconnected and I felt so miserable that I puked while we were passing Macy’s in the cab.

If a networked product can begin to win over a series of networks faster than its competition, then it develops an accumulating advantage. These advantages, naturally, manifest as increasing network effects across customer acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Smaller networks might unravel and lose their users, who might switch over. Naturally, it becomes important for every player to figure out how to compete in this type of high-stakes environment. But how does the competitive playbook work in a world with network effects? First, I’ll tell you what it’s not: it’s certainly not a contest to see who can ship more features. In fact, sometimes the products seem roughly the same—just think about food-delivery or messaging apps—and if not, they often become undifferentiated since the features are relatively easy to copy. Instead, it’s often the dynamics of the underlying network that make all the difference. Although the apps for DoorDash and Uber Eats look similar, the former’s focus on high-value, low-competition areas like suburbs and college towns made all the difference—today, DoorDash’s market share is 2x that of Uber Eats. Facebook built highly dense and engaged networks starting with college campuses versus Google+’s scattered launch that built weak, disconnected networks. Rarely in network-effects-driven categories does a product win based on features—instead, it’s a combination of harnessing network effects and building a product experience that reinforces those advantages. It’s also not about whose network is bigger, a counterpoint to jargon like “first mover advantage.” In reality, you see examples of startups disrupting the big guys all the time. There’s been a slew of players who have “unbundled” parts of Craigslist, cherry-picking the best subcategories and making them apps unto themselves. Airbnb, Zillow, Thumbtack, Indeed, and many others fall into this category. Facebook won in a world where MySpace was already huge. And more recently, collaboration tools like Notion and Zoom are succeeding in a world where Google Suite, WebEx, and Skype already have significant traction. Instead, the quality of the networks matters a lot—which makes it important for new entrants to figure out which networks to cherry-pick to get started, which I’ll discuss in its own chapter.

So in the 1800s you could buy shoes from someone who performed multiple tasks, using multiple skills. There wasn’t a Nike. There wasn’t an organization of sixty-three thousand people selling shoes with a specific swoosh in every country to every family in the world. Instead of making bespoke shoes from beginning to end for a specific customer, most of the people who work in big companies are hyper-specialized on small, disconnected tasks.

To believe that market competition curbs the excesses of big, powerful corporations demands a leap of faith that history does not support. It's a peculiar form of market fundamentalism that I can no longer embrace.

Coincidence...Coincidence came calling for me big-time in the early seventies. Coincidence: it's supposed to mean just these random, disconnected events that concur or collide. But coincidence is not that at all. It's the stuff that's meant to be.

the Nines’ need to avoid conflict at all costs. Nines fear that expressing their preferences or asserting their agenda will put important relationships at risk and upset the calm surface of their inner sea. What if their priorities and wants compete with the agenda of someone they care about and this difference leads to conflict and relational disconnection? What if asserting their own opinions, needs and desires creates disharmony between them and the people they love? Nines so value feeling comfortable and tranquil, maintaining the status quo, and preserving connections with others that they set aside their own viewpoints and aspirations to merge with those of others. This doesn’t seem like a big deal for Peacemakers, who often grew up feeling like neither their presence nor priorities matter much to others.

The reality is that there is a huge section of this country that feels like D.C. is filled with a bunch of self-serving careerists who’ve never built anything in their lives, and that Wall Street is filled with people making ungodly amounts of money, and Silicon Valley is just totally disconnected from everyone, and all of them are trying to tell me how to live my life,” he says. “If you put aside all the stupid, offensive shit that Trump does and says, the fact is that he is posing some big, important questions about how we are thinking about our labor pool, our trade agreements, NATO, and our international relationships.

I have often been struck by what many regard as the most haunting of C. S. Lewis’s poems—the sonnet titled “Reason,” probably written in the early 1920s. Lewis here contrasts the clarity and strength of reason (symbolised by Athene, the “maid” of the poem) with the warm darkness and creativity of the imagination (Demeter, the earth-mother). For Lewis, the big question is this: Is there anyone who can be “both maid and mother” to him?[180] Who indeed could achieve such a fusion, reconciling what many would see as polar opposites? At the intellectual level, Lewis was searching for a true marriage of reason and imagination—something that eluded him totally as a young man. It seemed to him then that his life of the mind was split into two disconnected hemispheres. “On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’”[181] Lewis’s later discovery of the Christian faith offered him a synthesis of reason and imagination which he found persuasive and authentic till the end of his life.

We work our way back through the crowd. A few steps behind, holding Dad’s hand, I keep my eyes affixed to the back of his white polo shirt. The outline of his wallet is visible through his back pants pocket, stained into the old khakis. A hanky to wipe his brow creeps out of the other pocket. He clips his beeper tightly to his belt—it’s his post-work Sunday casual uniform. As we move faster through the horde, the sweat on our palms intensifies on the humid mid-Atlantic summer day. For a second, his grip slips and we become disconnected. I fall back a few feet as people aggressively pass by. I never lose sight of the man in the white shirt. Immediately Dad turns around, his face concerned but focused. He jogs back and grabs my hand tight, locking his big thumb and fingers around my wrist. He pulls me in. His other hand now sits across my shoulder, a protective hold. “Buddy, if we’re ever separated, just look for me there,” he says, pointing at a hot dog stand with a big, memorable Oriole bird logo. He pauses and looks me up and down. “But we won’t ever be separated.

Because we’re disconnected from our Future Selves, we opt for near immediate goals or dopamine hits. This short-term seeking ends up costing our Future Selves big. [Example of this, from comedian Jerry Seinfeld] Late at night, I think, “Well, it’s night, I’m having a good time, I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m Night Guy. Getting up after five hours’ sleep? That’s Morning Guy’s problem. Let him worry about that. I’m Night Guy, I’ve got to party.” Then you get up after five hours of sleep, you’re cranky, you’re exhausted. Night Guy always screws Morning Guy.

THE GREEK word for disciple, mathetes, was a very meaningful word in the Greek world. Plato developed a form of thinking or a philosophy of life that separated the physical and spiritual realm. This disconnection between the physical and spiritual still affects our thinking today, as is apparent when we reference the secular versus the sacred. That form of thinking that Plato developed is called Platonic thought. Plato had a follower named Aristotle. Aristotle was a follower of Plato. He was a student and he studied the Platonic philosophy. Aristotle, Plato’s student, developed schools called academies, where he would train the next generation in Plato’s thinking. So Aristotle, Plato’s student, bought into the worldview of Plato, and began developing schools to train other students in this thinking of Plato. Part of this organized approach by Aristotle is known as Aristotelian logic. Aristotle systematized and organized the thinking of Plato and made it transferable. Out of these schools there were birthed men and women who now went into the marketplace with this Platonic worldview. They became doctors and lawyers and teachers, but they had this worldview. In the meantime, Rome overtook Greece. The big military machine of Rome defeated Greece and Greece was now a defeated nation and now being occupied by Roman power. But there was a problem in Rome. The folks who had been trained in Greece with the thinking of Plato and the system of Aristotle were infiltrating Roman culture. We call it the Hellenization of the Romans. Rome was being “Greek-enized,” even though it was the prominent military power. The Greek influence permeated the Roman culture because of the power of discipleship. This is the point of discipleship. When Jesus discussed discipleship, it was in the cultural context of Greek culture influencing the Roman Empire through the power of discipleship. Jesus Christ takes the concept of discipleship and intimates, “I’m looking for a generation of followers who are so saturated in My thinking, My worldview, and My orientation that when integrated into the culture in which they are situated, the culture will have to live with the influence of Jesus Christ, who permeates the culture.

Alas, the big data profiles of teenagers can’t support the same robustness of growth as entire continents of slaves and spices. Besides, consumer research is all about winning some portion of a fixed number of purchases. It doesn’t create more consumption. If anything, technological solutions tend to make markets smaller and less likely to spawn associated industries in shipping, resource management, and labor services. They make the differential between real growth and return on capital worse, not better. This means they push the banks and investors even further away from anything like real earnings until eventually there’s a complete disconnect between capital and value.

It just like a grain of sand it slipped away from our hand, Our destiny was lay shattered all across the land, we don’t know how to write a new purpose to live by when sorrow is getting invisible to the eye and the happiness is tasteless to the mouth , fate was already knocked us all down and how we’ll accept it all. With ourselves we are in a constant brawl Where did we go wrong ? That this life was blessed us with a curse so strong This world is as big as fate allows it to be Dying is a given…We have never heard of anyone escaping that destiny. Tear might drown us God will always upheld Journey without destination You’ll still search and found us in a place we wish we could’ve left. Our heartbeat almost disconnected from our heart keep saying we do breathe but why don’t we live. Hope it all our fault, yeah it ours, Losing wasn’t our mistake But our my mistake is that we gave up while keep losing. So if we keep gave up and not face those fears, each everyone will just end up same way, People who dream but don’t have courage to achieve it. So we all need to rise and fight again For us and our dream We will fight For our people that have dream But don’t have courage to achieve it. When we WIN WE CAN PROUDLY SAY THAT WE HAVE BEEN WEAK FOR A LONG TIME BUT NOW WE HAVE THE SUCCESS IN OUR HAND.

Silent fear disconnects her from others and she blames herself. In Indian culture, the fact that most fathers hold power has a big impact on their children’s self-esteem. When mothers say ‘ Papa se pooch ’, ask  Papa, girls know who has the power. As power holders, fathers’ criticism has a particularly harsh sting on girls. Criticism and constant fault finding are a core soul- sucking strategy of fear-training. I found women’s accounts of their childhood particularly empty of praise, a pattern confirmed by Dr S.  Anandalakshmy,  who  has been India’s leading scholar in child development for over four decades. She was also my professor in college. An astute observer of families, she said, ‘Yes,  it’s true, we don’t praise easily and girls receive much  less praise than boys.

Norman Nie, a clever researcher at Stanford University, wanted to resolve the question of whether the technology of the Internet is a socially enabling tool or one that displaces or replaces social interaction with technological ones. In 2002, Nie demonstrated that “for every hour spent on the Internet at home” his subjects spent “an average of almost thirty fewer minutes with their family.”1 In other words, the more time we spend using technology, the less time we spend in real human interaction. Thus have devices once used to relieve loneliness now become, in effect, generators of loneliness.

Technology has given us independence—freedom from hassles and wires and other people’s choices—and more efficient lives, but it has largely broken its promise to give us freedom with one another to build big things together. Summing up 1989 until now, one could say we are, at our worst, “bowling alone, together.” Never have we been so connectable and never have we felt so disconnected

Losing time is a big part of your diagnosis. Your psyche is disconnected and fragmented into different parts. Sometimes in dissociative states, people function very differently from the way that is typical for them. When this state becomes very severe, some people develop other states of being or might even act as if they’re a different person.

Fears of rejection Fears of being left, rejected, or alone play a big role in dependent relationships. Some codependents can’t sleep alone. If you’re disconnected from yourself, you won’t feel complete. You won’t have an inner life to sustain and nurture you, and being alone can feel empty — like no one’s home. If you’re unable to meet your needs, you hope that someone else will. Relationships add to your life but can’t fix what’s missing inside. You can feel just as lonely in a relationship, and once attachment bonds take hold, dependency on the relationship turns into addiction.

If you draw a straight line from the tip of a ship and it continues—going straight—for one thousand miles, it will end up in the place to which it is pointing. But if that boat moves by only one tiny degree, for a few days of travel it may seem like that the ship is still heading to the original target. However, that one degree of change will eventually mean that the ship misses the original destination by more than sixteen miles on a 960-mile journey. That simple one-degree adjustment doesn’t seem like a big deal, day after day, but as those days slowly add up over weeks, you will arrive at a completely different destination than you originally planned.

So when you and I begin feeling pressure and tension and splintering and conflict at home, when little trifling things start bunching together to become this one big thing—when the nitpicking turns into bickering; the bickering into outbursts; the outbursts into rude, below-the-belt unkindness and bitterness; the bitterness into slow, seething pullbacks of silence and isolation—is it just your husband being terrible? Acting awful? Is it just you being overly sensitive, slow to relinquish a foothold of cherished, hard-fought ground? Is it just your child pulling away into isolation or overt rebellion? Is it just all of you going to your own rooms—disconnected, disjointed, fragmented?

Our children are growing up immersed in a culture where it is cool to be cruel, where media influences encourage it and social networking facilitates it.

And it may be that history, as Michel Foucault tried to convince us, is a list of discrete, disconnected processes whose joint impact is not linked to any one of them but to their fusion into one big explosion. In that case, history is not just a linear movement of endless American support for Israel against, and at the expense of, the Palestinian cause but a more distorted, curved line of ups and downs that indicate possible changes in the future. Moreover, a concerted effort to bring about such a change is a worthy goal—inside and outside the United States. But what we have this year is the ominous call at the 2006 AIPAC convention for the United States to attack and invade Iran.38

Though the act of making one’s own bed is simple and mundane, it reiterates that the little things in life can have a significant impact. ‘If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right,’ he said.

Many lower class Americans view protesters as disreputable and unhelpful, as ‘professional activists’ who are entirely disconnected from the working class because they’ve never experienced struggle in their own personal lives, and who protest mainly to find personal validation.” In a related context, Nigerian American novelist Teju Cole once tweeted, “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

If an SSD is disconnected from power, it can start losing data within a few weeks, depending on the temperature

It is this heightened state that may produce several relatively new phenomena in childhood today. As the clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair,10 the author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, observes, the most commonly heard complaint when children are asked to go off-line is “I’m bored.” Confronted with the dazzling possibilities for their attention on a nearby screen, young children quickly become awash with, then accustomed to, and ever so gradually semi-addicted to continuous sensory stimulation. When the constant level of stimulation is taken away, the children respond predictably with a seemingly overwhelming state of boredom. “I’m Bored.” There are different kinds of boredom. There is a natural boredom that is part of the woof of childhood that can often provide children with the impetus to create their own forms of entertainment and just plain fun. This is the boredom that Walter Benjamin described years ago as the “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”11 But there may also be an unnatural, culturally induced, new form of boredom that follows too much digital stimulation. This form of boredom may de-animate children in such a fashion as to prevent them from wanting to explore and create real-world experiences for themselves, particularly outside their rooms, houses, and schools. As Steiner-Adair wrote, “If they become addicted to playing on screens,12 children will not know how to move through that fugue state they call boredom, which is often a necessary prelude to creativity.” It would be an intellectual shame to think that in the spirit of giving our children as much as we can through the many creative offerings of the latest, enhanced e-books and technological innovations, we may inadvertently deprive them of the motivation and time necessary to build their own images of what is read and to construct their own imaginative off-line worlds that are the invisible habitats of childhood. Such cautions are neither a matter of nostalgic lament nor an exclusion of the powerful, exciting uses of the child’s imagination fostered by technology. We will return to such uses a little later. Nor should worries over a “lost childhood” be dismissed as a cultural (read Western) luxury. What of the real lost childhoods? one might ask, in which the daily struggle to survive trumps everything else? Those children are never far from my thoughts or my work every day of my life.

The guys had made log benches for spectators, back when they were twelve and had visions of every girl in class lining those benches, swooning as they showed off in the ring. Never quite worked out that way--if there were spectators, they were more likely to be heckling than swooning--but the memory made me smile as I lowered myself quietly onto the bench behind Daniel. He was shadowboxing, throwing punches and dodging an imaginary opponent. He was dressed in his usual gear--sweatpants and a tank top, both emblazoned with the school logo. I sat there and watched him, muscles flexing, sweat dripping from his dark blond hair, spraying with every swing, the silence punctuated by soft grunts when a blow seemed right and frustrated snorts when it didn’t. As I watched him, I started to relax. This was familiar. The sight, the sounds, the feel of the bench under my fingers, even the faint smell of perspiration--it was familiar and it was real and it made the last few hours drift away, wisps of a nightmare disconnected from reality. Finally, he sensed me there and danced in a circle, fists falling to his sides, feet still moving. His face lit up in a grin so big it chased away the last of my worries.

Elle had considered it. In fact, she still considered it, because if she were into him she wouldn’t have been balancing her checkbook while he attempted to get her naked. There was a disconnect, but then that wasn’t exactly new. Sex just wasn’t as important to her as it was to other people. The other stuff mattered more. Not a big deal. Some people also liked broccoli, while others were less enthused. It’s what made people different from one another.

Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the United States Government, and perhaps any government. And it is based upon a lie. The Director of the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the WHO have all had to reluctantly acknowledge that the vaccines cannot stop transmission. When Israel’s Director of Public Health addressed the FDA Advisory Panel, she left no doubt about the vaccines’ inability to stop transmission of the virus, or stop sickness, or stop death. Describing Israel’s situation as of September 17th, 2021, she said: Sixty percent of the people in severe and critical condition were, um, were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated. Forty-five percent of the people who died in this fourth wave were doubly vaccinated. Even so, three weeks later, on October 7th—just days before this book went to press—the President of the United States announced that he was ensuring healthcare workers are vaccinated, “because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you.” The President just told Americans that being vaccinated provides “certainty” that vaccinated people are “protected from COVID and cannot pass it to you.” Not one question was posed to the President about this stunning disconnect, about the obvious untruth—and that speech gives us a stark example of what’s going on. A televised image of an unchallenged leader mouthing untrue pronouncements to mislead and control the population—that is the world of George Orwell’s sadly prophetic novel, 1984. It

Perhaps the cultural obsession with ‘natural’ birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the Earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what ‘nature’ is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease, shit and blood, ticks and cockroaches. ‘Natural childbirth’ in the ‘natural world’ often ends in infant or maternal death. ‘Natural’ childbirth can end in clitoral tears, sepsis, rectoceles, fistulas and psychosis.