The Word Virus Quotes

The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.

The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.

The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.

The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I'll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I'll write you by shark's tooth and scallop shell; I'll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs...

Modern man has lost the option of silence.

For him, conscious intent was a form of prediction, and prediction is only possible when the status quo has reason to assume it will meet no significant opposition.

Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it’s bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat,’” in the words of William Ralph Inge.

Messages continued to arrive from the Earl of Warwick, urging Londoners to hold firm for King Harry. Marguerite d'Anjou and her son were expected to land at any time, while from St Albans, Edward sent word that Harry of Lancaster was to be considered a prisoner of state. At that, John Stockton, the Mayor of London, contracted a diplomatic virus and took to his bed.

Now my inspiration but it won’t last and we’ll be just a photograph—i

Words are like a virus - there's no telling what kind of damage they'll do once they're out" -Mia

It was as if a virus had been injected into our school, but Macey'd known about a thousand boys before she'd come here. And I'd known Josh. The two of us had been exposed to boys before, so we had built up antibodies. We were, in a word, immune.

At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly, but they have provided the world with some of its most important innovations. Creation and destruction join together once more.

Today, in a world with instant access to Google, we rely on the electronic web to supply everything we need, from historical facts to word definitions and spellings as well as extended quotations. All of us who use a computer are aware of the shock of inner poverty that we suddenly feel when deprived (by a virus or other disaster) of our mental crutches even just for a day or a week. Plato is right: memory has been stripped from us, and all we possess is an external reminder of what we have lost, enabling us to pretend to a wisdom and an inner life we no longer possess in ourselves.13

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

the final tally of what will be considered the end of the epidemic [but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind, where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem], almost ten thousand people will have died. *

Because the thing about viruses is that they're easily manipulated. The DNA they inject doesn't have to be destructive. It can be replaced with almost any kind of DNA you want, and it can be programmed to only replace certain parts of the host's genetic code. In other words, viruses are perfect vectors for genetic engineering.

...you have to understand who you are talking to and whether or not they are using the word in any proper context of its definition. Whether this is its primary literal meaning or any of the metaphorical constructs that we humans are fond of using.

Three of my daughters are Asian American. I've seen through their eyes the racist ways in which Trump labeled Covid-19 the "China virus," China plague," and "Kung Flu."...When my youngest, who is still in elementary school, heard the words, she immediately understood the hate was direct against Asian Americans--directed against her. I read somewhere that Trump and his people find community in rejoicing the suffering of those they hate and fear--that cruelty is the point. This is not easy to explain to a six-year-old.

Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353]

It was a bad day for viruses,” Moderna’s chair Afeyan says about the Sunday in November 2020 when he got the first word of the clinical trial results. “There was a sudden shift in the evolutionary balance between what human technology can do and what viruses can do. We may never have a pandemic again.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus had rendered him helpless. “Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: ‘Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.’ I threw my laptop across the room.”  . . . If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)  . . . “This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications,” said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.

There won’t be any rat brains in Haven. Put that image out of your mind. We’re completely self-sufficient in energy and water and food. The refugees will put some strain on us but we have enormous reserves. Mac, Nick, and I are used to military planning and—well, we planned for a siege right from the start.” Oh no. Her breath blocked in her chest. Her hand slid from his and her back hit the chairback with a thud. “You knew this was coming?” she whispered. The words would barely come out between numb lips. “You knew and you didn’t stop it?” He grabbed her hand back. “No, God no. We didn’t plan for this. For a massive outbreak of a deadly virus, no.

The dichotomy of the gun-toting, substance-abusing queer seeking spiritual refuge might strike some as anticlimactic. But William Burroughs was not what he appeared to be to many of his fans. The work which so many revere as biblical texts in the church of addiction were always seen by the writer himself as cautionary rather than visionary.

The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up. All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion. Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done. No, she had said weakly, I don't want to go home. I'll be all right now.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to chose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it. Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Influenza. If you close your eyes and say the word aloud, it sounds lovely. It would make a good name for a pleasant, ancient Italian village.

already, and the fuzz walks in on some newlyweds from Sioux Falls.

Clichés are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.

Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.

the world is being built up by greedy people wanting higher towers and then there’s a war or a hurricane or a tsunami or a virus or a financial collapse happening to put things in balance. this has happened all through history and the humankind survives and moves on. this is not an exception: this is a rule. and you are not granted to stay here, that is not your right. you were handed a gift of walking here for a little while, breathing the air, feeling things, but did you say thank you? ever? or just took for granted, carried life like a burden and now you’re being angry because suddenly things outside of your control are threatening your peace? why do you let your peace depend on things outside of your control in the first place?

By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.

I know a lot about HIV—including the U=U rule. If someone’s viral load, the level of HIV in the blood, is undetectable, the virus is untransmittable. In other words, they can’t transmit HIV to someone else.

People with high dependency needs have difficulty standing up to this level of social sanction. The more dependent, the less able they are to use their native intelligence. They depend instead on the word of religious authority.

Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion -- in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real. Viral, pernicious thought, corrosive of meaning, generative of an erotic perception of reality's turmoil.

To be fair, the House of Lagos let loose a virus that wiped out a staple crop.” “To be fair, you can go fuck yourself because we had nothing to do with that and you know it.” “I’ve missed you, Kiva. You and your marvelous way with the word ‘fuck.’” “No you haven’t, but thank you anyway.” Ghreni

A long time ago, psychopathy used to be called simply ‘evil’. People who were evil – who took a delight in hurting or killing others – were written about ever since Medea took an axe to her children, and probably long before that. The word ‘psychopath’ was coined by a German psychiatrist in 1888 […] from the German word psychopastiche, literally meaning ‘suffering soul’. For Mariana this was the clue – the suffering – the sense that these monsters were also in pain. […] Psychopathy or sadism never appeared from nowhere. It was not a virus, infecting someone out of the blue. It had a long prehistory in childhood. […] Yet many children grow up in terribly abusive environments – and they don’t end up as murderers. Why? Well, as Mariana’s old supervisor used to say, ‘It doesn’t take much to save a childhood.’ A little kindness, some understanding or validation: someone to recognise and acknowledge a child’s reality – and save his sanity.

The ‘Other Half’ is the word. The ‘Other Half’ is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the ‘Other Half’ is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common ‘hallucinations’ of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject’s body at an angle…yes quite an angle it is the ‘Other Half’ worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. ― William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded. (Grove Press January 12, 1994) Originally published 1962.

Influenza is caused by three types of viruses, of which the most worrisome and widespread is influenza A. Viruses of that type all share certain genetic traits: a single-stranded RNA genome, which is partitioned into eight segments, which serve as templates for eleven different proteins. In other words, they have eight discrete stretches of RNA coding, linked together like eight railroad cars, with eleven different deliverable cargoes. The eleven deliverables are the molecules that comprise the structure and functional machinery of the virus. They are what the genes make. Two of those molecules become spiky protuberances from the outer surface of the viral envelope: hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Those two, recognizable by an immune system, and crucial for penetrating and exiting cells of a host, give the various subtypes of influenza A their definitive labels: H5N1, H1N1, and so on. The term “H5N1” indicates a virus featuring subtype 5 of the hemagglutinin protein combined with subtype 1 of the neuraminidase protein. Sixteen different kinds of hemagglutinin, plus nine kinds of neuraminidase, have been detected in the natural world. Hemagglutinin is the key that unlocks a cell membrane so that the virus can get in, and neuraminidase is the key for getting back out. Okay so far? Having absorbed this simple paragraph, you understand more about influenza than 99.9 percent of the people on Earth. Pat yourself on the back and get a flu shot in November. At

A kiss. One-point-three seconds--and gone. He touched his metal mouth even though he could not feel--neither physical touch nor emotional. Ana had never kissed him on the mouth before. One the cheek, yes, when she'd drunk too much of Wick's Cercian ale. But never on the mouth. Her words echoed through his processors like a virus. I'll always come back for you. I promise on iron and stars. It was more than a promise--it was an oath. Unbreakable. Strong like iron and steady like stars. It was said that such promises could never be broken; the Goddess would not allow it. The probability of a supernatural binding was less than one percent, but the vow stuck with him all the same. Because Ana had never promised on iron and stars before.

One or two percent of any society is always subcultural. The Trotskyite, the Communist, the arsonist, the homosexual, the assassin--these are obviously dangerous and the courts must dispose their cases. Law has its problems. I shall not underestimate them; but law is not the problem. The enemy I am talking about is the one lurking in the guts of the whole nation like an invisible and deadly virus. It is not an action, but an attitude that says everyone has the right to arson, murder, rape, because doing those things is necessarily included under the rubric of freedom, of doing what one wants--not what I want or you want, but what someone wants. In a word, we have raised the abnormal and aberrant to the condition of a human right. The beast is loose among us, and he is welcome in our universities and homes.

First of all, word is that the Flare is running rampant through this whole shuck city and that all kinds of corruption is going on to hide it because the ones who are sick are government bigwigs. They’re hiding the virus with the Bliss—it slows down the Flare so people who have it can blend in with everyone else, but the virus keeps spreading. My guess is it’s the same all over the world. There’s just no way to keep that beast out.

[but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind, where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem], almost ten thousand people will have died. * * *

On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus “the Vaccine Virus”—the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy’s arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient—today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination—the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. “It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice,” Jenner wrote in 1801.

Government didn’t say you must stop worshiping God. You must stop praying or preaching the word of God. You must stop believing in God or exercising your faith. You must stop your religion, but what is asking for is everyone should stop human contact. and should social distance themselves, because the virus spread easily in a group of people. By limiting contact, it means not going to church, Easter, clubs, Tavern, events, malls, gym ,school, work. I need you to do your part in order for me to survive.

The talk of sin is of course to many a big turn-off; to others, an even bigger myth - because in reality, sin is like the spiritual equivalent of a microscopic parasite, or a virus, or better yet even, an infectious disease. And just as one might never know of, until visiting a competent doctor, the tiny pathogens progressively eroding one's body, so we might never know that in sin we are eroding our being and losing direction until hearing the Word of God rightfully applied. Therefore I ask, which of the doctors would then be the more competent: the one who finds the problem and gives the solution, or the one who willfully ignores the problem (or rather finds the problem when it is much too late)? Seldom does anyone write off the knowledge of medicine for the physical body as primitive practice, so neither must the knowledge of the Word of God for one's spiritual well-being remain written off as primitive practice - quite the opposite really. As it is written thus: 'Lean not on your own understanding.

Those seven words were spoken with quiet confidence that either confirmed Shacket’s insanity or belied it. Carson was disturbed to find that he could not be sure which. “Whatever happened to you,” Carson said, “whatever you’ve been coronated with—are you communicable?” “So this is why you’re here. Ready to inflame the population with fear of a plague.” Shacket shook his head and looked again at the window. “You’re getting tiresome, Doctor.” “No bacteria, no viruses?” “When a king coughs, does he then infect those around him with royalty?

The word chimeric comes from Greek mythology, in which a chimera was a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake. CAR T-cells are called “chimeric” because they begin with ordinary T-cells taken from a person’s blood (the so-called “killer” white blood cells that recognize and attack a broad range of bacteria or viruses) and attach a kind of lion’s head: a molecular signal that guides the T-cells to seek and destroy cancer. The T-cell part of the chimera is a powerful killer, and the antibody at the head makes the attack more specific, reducing side effects.

Good luck with that, Harvath thought. In his experience, life was predominantly made up of three distinct groups: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. And if there was one thing he had learned from a lifetime of hunting wolves and protecting sheep, it was that sheep had two speeds—graze and stampede. Now that word was out that the virus was loose, all bets were off. Very soon, chaos was going to ensue. “What else do you have?” he asked, bracing himself for more bad news. “The pharmaceutical companies Damien’s involved with appear pretty benign. One focuses on dementia medication and the other on birth control drugs.

My mother looked at my dad and didn’t know him. Didn’t know where she was. Who she was. What was happening to her. There was this, like, permanent, creepy smile, cracked lips pulled back from bleeding gums, her teeth stained with blood. Sounds came out of her mouth, but they weren’t words. The place in her brain that made words was packed with virus, and the virus didn’t know language—it knew only how to make more of itself. And then my mother died in a fury of jerks and gargled screams, her uninvited guests rocketing out of every orifice, because she was done, they’d used her up, time to turn off the lights and find a new home.

Growing numbers of us are acknowledging with grief that many forms of supremacy—Christian, white, male, heterosexual, and human—are deeply embedded not just in Christian history but also in Christian theology. We are coming to see that in hallowed words like almighty, sovereignty, kingdom, dominion, supreme, elect, chosen, clean, remnant, sacrifice, lord, and even God, dangerous viruses often lie hidden, malware that must be identified and purged from our software if we want our future to be different from our past. We are realizing that our ancestors didn’t merely misinterpret a few Scriptures in their day; rather, they consistently practiced a dangerous form of interpretation that deserves to be discredited, rejected, and replaced by a morally wiser form of interpretation today. (We

One day the world stopped because of the thing. We knew it was there and knew it was dangerous because, you know, it left bodies in the dirt. We all stayed in – couldn’t touch, shouldn’t meet, mustn’t dance. God forbid we kiss. Eventually, the thing got tired. Besides, it knew it wasn’t welcome, even though, the grass grew better, and the birds worried less, and the air breathed deeper as the humans breathed less. We all stayed in – couldn’t touch, shouldn’t meet, mustn’t dance. God forbid we kiss. I hope we remember what we once did; blocking airways, blocking enemies, blocking friends. Let things mend. One day, the world stopped. Another day, it started again and acted like it had never stopped. It does things like that. I do hope we remember that life is not long and love is not free, unless it is.

Repeatedly over the next half hour he returned to the word “opportunity.” It kept knocking. “A lot of these viruses, a lot of these pathogens that come out of wildlife into domestic animals or people, have existed in wild animals for a very long time,” he said. They don’t necessarily cause any disease. They have coevolved with their natural hosts over millions of years. They have reached some sort of accommodation, replicating slowly but steadily, passing unobtrusively through the host population, enjoying long-term security—and eschewing short-term success in the form of maximal replication within each host individual. It’s a strategy that works. But when we humans disturb the accommodation—when we encroach upon the host populations, hunting them for meat, dragging or pushing them out of their ecosystems, disrupting or destroying those ecosystems—our action increases the level of risk.

The conjunction of the 'straightest', most austere product of the Northern hemisphere—the presbyterian, the Anglo-Saxon, the quintessential hyperborean, in his pride and his theology—and the most primitive, regressive, impotent and also the most unselfconscious element that the Antipodes concealed under the sun: the Aboriginals. The clash resulted in the quasi-total extermination of the Antipodean, but the Southern hemisphere has not perhaps pronounced its last word yet. The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us—the virus of origins.

The cars and trucks that passed this way threw their trash out into the forest without pause, faster than the gleaners could pick them up and find new uses for them. The waste had always struck Maceo as a disgusting mystery, but now, it made sense. The indestructible plastic bottles and wrappers that rained on the ground were not merely trash, but seeds—diabolical harbingers of the alien ecology of metal and plastic and advertising that had already swallowed the coast. It was a hostile invader that no one else seemed to want to fight. The dead-eyed souvenir-hawkers at Coba sold the products the signs foretold; beside the road to the ruins of the once-sacred ceremonial city, a looming image of golden arches promised a still-greater ritual awaiting them in Valladolid—the devouring of machine-made ghost-food. Maceo could not read the words on the billboards, but he knew that they sought to infect their victims with the virus of desire.

An alive society is a society that is active with arguments of different opinions at different level; noisy; edgy; aggressive; non-linear and colored with wide range of expressions; a society that permits the progression of thoughts by allowing questions, not only for them to arise but also to be discussed; a society that sees questions as a sign of prosperous health, not a virus that should be treated or a threat that should be corrected or an enemy to be eliminated; a society that is not scared of the word 'subversive' for subversiveness was and still the only catalyst that leads to experiments in discovering new findings of any sort; be it scientific, philosophical, artistic, economic, political and so on; a society that celebrates the capability if its inhabitants being alive; a society that is not only curios but also anxious enough to embark on the journey out of their boxes; a society that sees a resistance as an important message that there is something wrong with its system that needs to be tended to immediately, cleverly; a society that believes that cleverness is a skill that can only be achieved by practicing a lot of 'trial and error'.

Anyone familiar with the darker side of life understands that a man who has lost his shadow is like a woman with a dark past who marries: no one is more loyal, because she knows how much is at stake. Whispered words like moans sliding over naked skin. It was in such places that you learned the philosophy of the different races: the melancholy Italians, suspicious Jews, Brutal Germans, and stubborn Spaniards, intoxicated with envy and murderous pride. The spiteful resentment that we women often resort to when we are in pain. Elegance could be acquired through money, education, hard work and intelligence. Doubt is what keeps people young. Certainty is like a malignant virus that infects us as we get older. Spain: that sad, embittered country, reeking of the sacristy and run by black marketeers and mediocre ruffians. The paradise of envy, barbarity and treachery. One of those men who use others as a pretext to talk about themselves. How flimsy the ties are that prevent human beings from lying or betraying. Women are the only worthwhile temptation. Everything else is negotiable. After all, like the rest of womankind, she only needed persuading.

Two Last Thoughts If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that …” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate. Abbreviations in the Notes In order to save forests’ worth of paper, references cite only the first one or two authors.

This outbreak is the result of several forces coming together. The enemy is not just the virus itself. We ourselves are also our own worst enemies in this fight. Or at the very least, we are accomplices to the crime. I'm told that there are a lot of people who are now suddenly waking up to just how meaningless it is to go around every day shouting empty slogans about how awesome our country is. They know that those cadres who go around giving speeches on political education, but who never take concrete action are utterly useless. We refer to them as people who live off the labor of their mouths. And they certainly know that a society that lacks common sense and fails to pursue the facts as they present themselves, not only ends up harming people through words, but can actually result in the loss of human lives. Many, many human lives. This is a lesson that resonates deeply. And also comes with a heavy weight. Even though we have all lived through the SARS epidemic of 2003, it seems we have all quickly forgotten the lessons we supposedly learned then. Now fast forward to 2020. Will we forget again? The devil is always on our heels and if we aren't careful, he will catch up to us again and torture us until we finally wake up. The real question is, do we even want to wake up?

He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?" "This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms." "I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole myth stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water -- it was all brown and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of information -- both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water -- his semen, his data, his me -- flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it to flourish." "As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -- they took it directly from the riverbeds." "So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information -- clay. They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out -- got rid of the water. If water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it and drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, then the tablet lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I sound like a maniac?

A highly regarded infectious-disease epidemiologist named Donald S. Burke, presently dean of the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, gave a lecture (later published) back in 1997 in which he listed the criteria that might implicate certain kinds of viruses as likeliest candidates to cause a new pandemic. “The first criterion is the most obvious: recent pandemics in human history,” Burke told his audience. That would point to the orthomyxoviruses (including the influenzas) and the retroviruses (including the HIVs), among others. “The second criterion is proven ability to cause major epidemics in non-human animal populations.” This would again spotlight the orthomyxoviruses, but also the family of paramyxoviruses, such as Hendra and Nipah, and the coronaviruses, such as that virus later known as SARS-CoV. Burke’s third criterion was “intrinsic evolvability,” meaning readiness to mutate and to recombine (or reassort), which “confers on a virus the potential to emerge into and to cause pandemics in human populations.” As examples he returned to retroviruses, orthomyxoviruses, and coronaviruses. “Some of these viruses,” he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, “should be considered as serious threats to human health. These are viruses with high evolvability and proven ability to cause epidemics in animal populations.” It’s interesting in retrospect to note that he had augured the SARS epidemic six years before it occurred. Much more recently, Burke told me: “I made a lucky guess.” He laughed a self-deprecating hoot and then added that “prediction is too strong a word” for what he had been doing.

CONFESSIONS OF A CLING-ON If a man is walking in a forest and makes a statement, but there is no woman around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or if a woman is walking in the forest and asks for something, and there is no man around to hear her, is she still needy? These Zen koans capture some of the frustrations people have with the opposite gender. And where is the dividing line between someone simply having a need, and someone being a needy person? Is it written in heaven somewhere what is too much need, too little need and just right amount of need for the “normal person?” Ask pop radio psychologists Dr. Laura, or Sally Jessie Rafael, or any number of experts who claim to know for sure, and you’ll get some very different answers. And isn’t it fun to see the new sophisticated ways our advanced culture is developing to make each other wrong? You better keep up with the latest technical terminology or you will be at the mercy of those who do. Whoever has read the latest most recent self-help book has the clear advantage. Example: Man: “Get real, would you! Your Venusian codependency has got you trapped in your learned helpless victim act, and indulging in your empowerment phobia again.” Woman: “When you call me codependent, I feel (notice the political correctness of the feeling word) that you are simply projecting your own disowned, unintegrated, emotionally unavailable Martian counterdependency to protect your inner ADD two year old from ever having to grow up. So there!” Speaking of diagnosis, remember the codependent. Worrying about codependency was like a virus that everyone had from about 1988 to 1994. Here’s a prayer to commemorate the codependent: The Codependent’s Prayer by Kelly Bryson Our Authority, which art in others, self-abandonment be thy name. Codependency comes when others’ will is done, At home, as it is in the workplace. give us this day our daily crumbs of love. And give us a sense of indebtedness, As we try to get others to feel indebted to us. And lead us not into freedom, but deliver us from awareness. For thine is the slavery and the weakness and the dependency, For ever and ever. Amen.

Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones and zeroes -- binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine -- he sees through the language he's working in and glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code -- becomes a Ba'al Shem of sorts." "Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were exaggerated versions of true events," the Librarian says. "These legends reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was superior to anything that came afterward." "Is Sumerian really that good?" "Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that the Sumerians -- who spoke a language radically different from anything in existence today -- had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone." "Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us.

I started blasting my gun. Letting loose a stream of words like I'd never used before. True to form, Misty didn't stay put and stood at my side. Tears stained her cheeks. Her gun firing wildly. It was a blur. The next thing I knew, no zombies were left standing and we knelt at Kali's side. I took out a rag and wiped the feathers from his face. We could tell he was still alive. His chest rising and falling in jerks. "Kali, how bad are you hurt?" I asked with an unsteady voice. "I'm okay, guys. Did we get all of them?" he whispered. "Nate, he's been bit all over!" I looked down at his body, covered in white feathers, speckled with splotches of deep red. "Yep. You got 'em, even those freak chickens." "Nate, I'm thirsty," his voice shaky and cracking. "Okay, buddy. We've got water in the truck." "No, not water. How about a glass of lemonade?" "Kali, what are you saying?" Misty's voice was tense as a piano string. "Hurry, Nate. I'm getting weak—the lemonade." I think running into the crowd of zombies would have been easier than this. Maybe that's why Kali chucked a rock at my head—he knew he could count on me for this. I ripped off a small water gun I had taped on my suit and tore off the cap. "Oh, Nate, don't. Maybe there's something we can do. Maybe—" she stopped. I put my hand behind Kali's neck and felt a slight burn, probably zombie snot. Misty took one of his hands and held it to her chest. "You were so brave, Kali, so brave." My hands didn't shake anymore; they were numb, as if they didn't belong to me. I manipulated them the best I could—like using chopsticks. Lifting Kali's head, I poured the juice into his mouth until it was gone. He was burning up; his skin felt like it was on fire. "I never thought I'd have friends, real friends—thank you, guys." He closed his eyes and I felt the muscles in his neck go limp. Gently, I put his head down and cleaned my blistering hand with the rag. Misty wiped her tears as I put the rag over Kali's face. "No, thank you, kid." We sat there still, silent except for the small cries that we both let slip out. Misty, still holding his hand. Me, staring down at my hands, soaked in tears. I don't know how much time passed. It could have been five minutes; it might have been an hour. Suddenly, the feathers moved, flying in every direction. Looking up, I saw a helicopter coming down in front of us—one of those big black military ones. It landed and three men stepped out. They wore protective gear like you see in those alien movies. I worried a little about what they might have planned for us. I've seen enough movies to know those government types can't be trusted—especially when they're in those protective suits. "What happened here? How did you manage to negate the virus?" one of the hooded figures asked. "Zombie juice," I replied. "Zombie juice?" "Actually it was the Super Zombie Juice Mega Bomb," Misty added as she stood and took my hand.

Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA." "Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?" "Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders. "The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us. "At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few -- perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization. "So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked." "Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says. "Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.

flicker?" He points to the screen and pauses the vid. "That's when they switched the footage." I stare at the screen. "How do I know you're not the ones lying?" "You saw it yourself on the street," Meyer says. I glance up from the pad and lock eyes with Meyer. "What else are they lying about?" Jayson chuckles. "Well… that's going to take longer than we have." "Here's one," Meyer says. "Remember that last viral outbreak that killed a bunch of Level Ones?" "3005B?" My heart races. That's the virus that ultimately killed Ben thirteen years ago. "That's it. The one they use in all the broadcasts to remind citizens how important it is to get your MedVac updates? It wasn't an accident." We were always told a virus swept through Level One because they hadn't gotten their updated VacTech yet. Hundreds of people died in the day it took to get everyone up to date. "My brother died because of that." Everything I've found out over the last week suddenly grips me with fear. This can't be real. My breath shortens, and suddenly my head starts slowly spinning. Everything goes blurry. Then black. ~~~ "It's all right, kid," a distant voice, which must be Jayson's, echoes in the back of my mind. The room swirls around me. Their faces blur in and out of focus. "Meyer, get her." Blinking a couple of times, I try to sit up. I guess I fell. Meyer's warm hands rest on the back of my neck, my head in his lap. "Don't stand. You could pass out again," he says. He helps me sit up. "Are you okay?" "No, I'm not okay," I mumble. "This is too much." I feel like I should be crying, but I'm not. The reality is that the anger I feel is so much greater than any sadness. Neither Meyer nor Jayson speak, and let me mull over what I've just heard. "Why did they do that?" I eventually ask. "Two reasons, kid," Jayson says. "To cull the Level Ones, and to scare Elore into taking the VacTech. If viral outbreaks are still a threat, no one questions it, and continues believing inside the perimeter is the safest place for them." "I'm sorry about your brother," Meyer says as he stands, offering me his hand. His words are genuine, filled with the emotions of someone who has also experienced loss. "I hate to end this," Jayson interrupts, "but it's time to go." Meyer eyes Jayson, and then me. "I understand if you're not ready, but you need to choose soon. Within the next few days." I take his hand and pull myself to my feet. Words catch somewhere between my heart and throat. The old me wants to tell them to get lost and to never bother me again. It's so risky. Then again, I can't stand by while Manning and Direction kill people to keep us in the dark. Joining is the right thing to do. Feelings I've never experienced before well inside my chest, and I long to shout, When do we start? Instead, I stuff them down and stare at the ground. Subtle pressure squeezes my hand, bringing me back to the present. I never let go of Meyer's hand. How long have we been like that? He releases my hand as he mutters and steps back. The heat from his touch still flickers on my skin. You didn't have to go. I clear my throat and turn toward Meyer. Our eyes lock. "I've already decided," I tell him. "I'll do it. For Ben. Direction caused his death, and there's no way I'm standing by and letting them do this to more people." I barely recognize my own voice as I ask, "What do I do?" A slap hits my back and I choke. Jayson. "Atta girl. Meyer and I knew you had it in you." "Jayson, you have to give Avlyn some time." Meyer steps toward me and holds his handheld in the air toward Jayson. "I'll bring her up to speed." "Sure thing." Jayson throws his hands in the air and walks to the other side of the room. "Sorry," Meyer murmurs. "Jayson is pretty… overwhelming. At least until you know him. Even then…" "Oh, it's fine." A white lie. "He's a nice guy. Now, why don't you tell me the instructions

Silverland held two oddly misplaced fears,” continued Carter. “He always acted like he was the cheerful sort who never sweated the details, but like any bully who gets the bully pulpit, his focus on the big picture was just a mask meant to hide what a scared little boy he was. He was a lot like a Southern gambler. In the end, a gambler places more value on a reckless, fearless, all-or-nothing bet than he does on reason. Silverland had reckless courage, but his intellect was just pretense, and in extreme situations, he couldn’t stop himself from making childish decisions. In other words, it was his own despotic creed that no matter what contemptible thing he might do, the person who held the highest position was unconditionally the greatest person, and it followed that the highest level decisions must always be made only by the person in the highest position of authority.” “Enough with

Almost every PC owner has lost a weekend sorting through the debris of worms, viruses, spyware, and broken permissions. Since Windows was originally created in the pre-Internet days, programmers didn’t worry about closing holes in the operating system. Unfortunately, hackers and spammers could easily exploit these vulnerabilities. While security continues to improve with each new release, the Windows operating system is still based on a pre-Internet model, which is prone to viruses. Mac OS X was created only a few years ago with ultimate security and stability. There are no known Mac OS X viruses, and Windows Word Macros (a common home to threats)

The word "passion" is from the Latin "passionem," which means "suffering, enduring." What else could the word "passion" mean? "Good times?" "Happiness?" Passion has nothing to do with happiness. I think we all want to be happy. I also think we rarely are. Happiness, like the urge to write, is a virus we catch. Not on purpose, but randomly. It comes, displays its symptoms, and then it goes. And we're left with a type of wistful nostalgia for this fleeting, accidental thing. This is our most common stance in the world. It's not a balanced pose, rather a kind of suffering. Enduring. A kind of passion. Which, we all agree, is a positive thing. For some reason. We want to be passionate. And we want to be happy. It's sort of like wanting to be sick and well at the same time.

Great is His Faithfulness     “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23).     At church on Sunday, they sang a song from the hymnbook called, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” The lyrics were by Thomas Obediah Chisholm and music by William Marion Runyan. Although I had difficulty singing along, I paid close attention to the words. My favourite line was, “All I needed Thy hand hath provided.”   This verse resonated with my soul that day. It didn’t say, “All that I wanted” but rather, “All that I needed.” I took a moment to reflect on the last five years of my life and I was taken to my knees in awe and appreciation.   I wish that I had kept a journal of answered prayer. I think this is a brilliant idea. I have kept notes here and there and I have various journals that I write in every day, but I’ve never dedicated one book to just answered prayer.   There are so many little things that I pray for every day. My husband was working on my income tax on the computer when all of a sudden the program kicked him out. Two hours of work – lost. But it was restored within ten minutes without as much as one number out of place – an answer to prayer.   One of my cats was coughing and sneezing. She looked as if she had trouble breathing and took to hiding under a desk. Would she survive the night? Is it just a cold or something much worse like cat leukemia? The vet announced it only a virus – an answer to prayer.   On a four-hour hike with my mother, two aunts and my brother’s mother-in-law, the average age was 65. The terrain was full of obstacles with fallen trees, raspberry bush thorns, and slippery logs. We made the entire trip without incidence – an answer to prayer.  

That first doctor’s visit was a chilling introduction to the world of bone marrow transplants. This particular doctor was all doom and gloom. She spent so much time telling me about the high mortality rate of having a bone marrow transplant that I half-expected her to end the appointment by handing me a shovel and telling me to go ahead and start digging my own grave. One thing that I understood very clearly from her words was that with the transplant, timing was everything. You don’t want to wait too long to do the transplant, but you also have to make sure that you time it so that you are ready—mind, body and soul—to take the risk of the procedure. Do you remember that dot on the graph that the first oncologist had shown me? The “if I do nothing, I have between one and two years to live” dot? If the transplant did not go well, if I contracted a serious virus after completely wiping out my immune system, then I could die within weeks or even days after the procedure.

They are the subversive force progressively breaking down traditional mechanisms based on sacrificial repetitions of the founding murder and the cover-up that goes with them. Girard is very clear that the bible has had this unique effect which thoroughly pervades our contemporary world. But in these conditions there emerges a stark choice. After the Christian revelation there are no longer truly effective scapegoats and so, in Girard’s own words, ‘the virus of mimetic violence can spread freely’. Thus, ‘Either we choose Christ or we run the risk of self-destruction.’5 I do not disagree, but the way his analysis narrows simply to this statement cuts out a great deal of the field of contemporary reality. It becomes a kind of negative scholastic or churchy judgment on the world. All the deep genealogy he has labored over at this point becomes two dimensional and misses the profound transformative changes Christianity has brought about. In short Girard has produced a structural genealogy of violence; he lacks an equivalent genealogy of compassion. In

Keith came from behind his desk and put his arm around my shoulder. "Calm down, Marco,” he said, leading me to the more comfortable love seat. “There's an un-blending process happening here. The various defender parts have a positive intention in defending against the pain from the abuse. It just happens to be in an incorrect manner.” Keith returned to his seat and leaned back in his chair. He took a deep breath. “When you're concentrating on one particular personality trait, the other parts work in conjunction, in different combinations with each other. They try to prevent you from getting to the core of the respective trait and having to relive the pain and shame from the abuse.” He leaned forward, punctuating his words. “The key ... to un-blending ... the defender parts ... successfully ... is to understand each attribute ... as it steps in to do its job. They protect you from the harmful emotions that are associated from the abuse.” Gazing at me over his wire-rimmed glasses, he said matter-of-factly, “Getting the defender parts to step aside so you can concentrate on the characteristic you want to address is the un-blending process. Once you are able to get through all the various defensive parts that get in the way of dealing with the core part, the true self is now able to answer the part in question in a divine loving place." I sat, pulled on my ear while thinking that over for a moment. "So, the true self is present to bear witness to all the feelings, beliefs, memories, and experiences of the inadequate part." Keith smiled. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desktop, his chin perched atop his clasped hands. "In essence, the past is being stirred up so all the associated burdens, pressures, and pain can be released and relieved. Following this unburdening process, the respective part can be cleansed. It can then be recomposed in a more constructive manner—similar to wiping a virus-infected computer hard drive clean ... then reprogramming it with anti-virus protected software." I stood up. With a few deep diaphragmatic breaths, I cleared my mind. While attempting to decipher what part came in and threw me off course, I sucked in my lips, vigorously shaking my head. Skepticism came in as a defensive part. I got back in Keith’s face. “This psychological un-blending is full of shit. The defense against the abuse is another trick to get me to believe that this crap actually works.” I flung my hands in the air. “How is this going to unburden the weight I carry on my shoulders every moment of the day? All my deficient personality traits are a result of me being a dirtball loser.” I shook my head. “I’m not worthy of the slightest bit of solace or happiness that this punishment called life has to offer.” Keith took a deep breath in and a longer breath out. "Marco, you're a miracle. A remarkable good-hearted human being. You're the most determined individual that I've come across in my thirty years of practice.

most children fully recovered. It was that word – most – that bothered Ted. It reverberated in the air, kept repeating itself in Ted’s ears. Most, most, most. Which in the end was really nothing but another way of saying some children did not make it, some children never got better, some children died. As

learned only later what I’d seen: the manufacture of a term that would be used to increase traffic on the Word Exchange. For some users of the Meme—those whose devices had been infected with a new virus that had recently started circulating—terms like this one would replace “obscure” words—“cynical,” “morbid,” “integrity”—that those of us who’d grown dependent on our Memes no longer fully trusted to our memories. But I knew nothing then about these neologisms, or the virus, or why this “word” had just been fabricated.

The universal tendency of our times is to “get together.” Isolation in church life is regarded as intolerable. Those who keep themselves separate for the sake of the truth are denounced as bigots. The well-being and prosperity of the Church is sought in the merger of church bodies even at the cost of truth. Sad to say, this destructive virus of unionism has infected also many Lutheran circles. This modern striving after external union despite spiritual disunion brings to one’s mind the words that God spoke to Israel by the prophet Isaiah: “Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of Hosts, Him you shall honor as holy. Let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread” [Isaiah 8:12–13].

threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant. When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone “extreme amplification.” This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim’s blood may contain a hundred million particles of virus. During this process, the body is partly transformed into virus particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident

I want to show you a body. They are sitting on a rock that is covered in moss. The body is holding a knife and wearing Doc Martens with flowers on the sides and they are whittling something out of dead wood. They are whittling a 3d model of a pulsating blob GIF out of dead wood. It has too many dimensions, and so they are struggling to get it right. As the knife separates the layers of woodskin they are softly chanting the word “caress,” because this is the future, and the word has become a war cry, or a weapon. The knife slips and cuts a minuscule chip out of the brown wood and of their brown thumb. They are smiling and they are bleeding all over it. There is a body and they are sitting on a rock. Let them narrate this story for you, this story of the future.

In the final tally of what will be considered the end of the epidemic [but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind, where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem], almost ten thousand people will have died.

Whenever we find a new phenomenon which partakes to some degree of the nature of those which we have already termed “living phenomena,” but does not conform to all the associated aspects which define the term “life,” we are faced with the problem whether to enlarge the word “life” so as to include them, or to define it in a more restrictive way so as to exclude them. We have encountered this problem in the past in considering viruses, which show some of the tendencies of life—to persist, to multiply, and to organize— but do not express these tendencies in a fully-developed form.

Being responsible front of the other. (part1) We live in a historical period which, without too many difficulties, can be defined as a transition period. In many respects, in fact, the world as it appeared a few decades ago has almost completely disappeared. In its place, however, no paradigm that can be said to be truly new has yet materialized. The era to come, which always seems to be on the verge of a future driven by perhaps too naively acclaimed technological development, is as if it were slowed down by ideas, visions and practices that still belong to the past. Take for example the urgent need to convert industrial production, but also individual consumption, through sustainable, ecological, greener and more aware practices. It is our own planet that requires us to make a change in this sense: climate change is there for all to see, but the political institutions that should deal with the issue are unable to be decided and united to stem the problem. We know that the resources we have are limited but we continue to exploit them even though there are already alternatives, so we squander what nature can offer us in a year well before this year is over because we still believe in the mad and blind race of progress. We also take the incredible technological development that information technology has made possible. We can store an incredible amount of information in devices that we can put in our pockets, we have at our fingertips practically much of all the knowledge that humanity has produced throughout its history, but ignorance continues to spread like a river in full. The areas in which it is possible to recognize that much the current historical period is a period of transition are still many others, from the political one, with the crisis of representative democracies but also with the absence of a real alternative, to the economic one, social, with the giants of the web that increasingly impoverish small businesses, thus contributing to widening the gap, now almost unbridgeable, between the few who have too much and the many who have less and less. Or with the appearance of a new precious commodity: our personal data that is exchanged too lightly, as if they were a traditional market product. In this framework, already quite unstable in itself, the Covid-19 pandemic, directly or indirectly, is also radically changing our sociality. In fact, the spread of the virus has highlighted not only the fragility of the world economic-social system, in which if you break a link in the chain it is the whole chain that breaks, but it has also made clear, by difference, how much the our way of relating to others, even the most banal, even the most everyday. Especially in a country like ours, which has made conviviality its distinctive feature. What seemed natural to us, like hugging and greeting each other with a kiss with an acquaintance or going to a concert piled on top of each other, now that we are discouraged - if not forbidden - takes on even more value. Probably a value that we didn't even know, so obvious and taken for granted, was there before. In other words: we only discover what our social freedom was worth now that it is being restricted to us. And we discover it, precisely, by difference, by comparing what we could have done before with what we must do now. In this regard, I would like to ask a question: why should all of us accept that our way of life, our daily habits and our social freedom are limited? The question is deliberately provocative. His answer, quite obvious. In some cases, however, even the question whose answer seems obvious and obvious must still be formulated. It must be formulated in order to attempt to review the question posed in a clearer and more profound way, that is, to better understand the underlying reasons. Therefore, although the answer is evident as well as common sense, I believe that asking this question can help to better understand some intrinsic reasons.

published by Márquez et al. (2007) in Science in 2007 described “a virus in a fungus in a plant.” The plant—a tropical grass—grows naturally in high soil temperatures. But without a fungal associate that grows in its leaves, the grass can’t survive at high temperatures. When grown alone, without the plant, the fungus fares little better and is unable to survive. However, it turns out not to be the fungus that confers the ability to survive high temperatures after all. Rather, it is a virus that lives within the fungus that confers heat tolerance. When grown without the virus, neither fungus nor plant can survive high temperatures. The microbiome of the fungus, in other words, determines the role that the fungus plays in the microbiome of the plant. The outcome is clear: life or death. One of the most dramatic examples of microbes that live within microbes comes from the notorious rice blast fungus: Rhizopus microsporus. The key toxins used by Rhizopus are actually produced by a bacterium living within its hyphae. In a dramatic indication of how entwined the fates of fungi and their bacterial associates can be, Rhizopus requires the bacteria not only to cause the disease but also to reproduce. Experimentally “curing” Rhizopus of its bacterial residents impedes the fungus’s ability to produce spores. The bacterium is responsible for the most important features of Rhizopus’s lifestyle, from its diet to its sexual habits. See Araldi-Brondolo et al. (2017), Mondo et al. (2017), and Deveau

Pak Yoo was a different person in English than in Korean. In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity. Before moving to America, he'd prepared himself for the difficulties he knew he'd experience: the logical awkwardness of translating his thoughts before speaking, the intellectual taxation of figuring out words from context, the physical challenge of shaping his tongue into unfamiliar positions to make sounds that didn't exist in Korean. But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech and, like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself. In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.

Two Last Thoughts • If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. • Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

Where the Church is not healed, it will wither. The Word of God is the antibiotic that alone can destroy the virus that would plague the life of the Church!

Stay safe at home, stop spreading the virus and spread my quotes

From the pathogen’s perspective, humans are what epidemiologists call an “accidental host” of many zoonoses, meaning that the pathogen usually fails to complete its life cycle in man alone. In other words, it can “afford” (evolutionarily speaking) to kill humans at staggering rates, because its natural reservoir is elsewhere.

The virus is a single word in the great wiki of hope and information, a mortal sleeperhold in spacetime, an earnest Tonga deathgrip on life. I’m the big world, there may be the end-of-days tectonic supernovae of bodyslams, the torque of tiger feint crucifix armbars on the topology of subspace, but the virus perseveres in its ardent intercellular replications, its ontological infections, its almost-endless epistemology of transmission.

I’m safer with the two of you than on my own,” Kim said. “But…” Walker frowned. The weight in that one word, the thick lines in her forehead, showed just how much it disturbed her. “What?” he urged. Kim glanced at the others below, the handful of people gathered around Hakan while he mourned. “What if we shouldn’t even try?” she said. “What if the demon isn’t poison, but more like a virus, and if we bring it down off the mountain we’re just setting it loose in the world?” Walker stared at her. He had no reply. What Kim had said terrified him more than any idea he’d ever heard.

I didn’t come here because of some virus,” Shay said, his words coming carefully and deliberately after breathing deeply. He breathed to force down the solid cramp in his chest and because he feared, that if he did not, he may forget to, and giving into unconsciousness or death was too easy, too tempting an escape.

Sending you all a loving hug, Just don't forget me. The memories are still fresh, I so wish with you to be. We might be a distance apart, Living amidst a crisis. The happy vibes of recent past, In this desert are an oasis. Don't ever let thy hopes fade, Look up at the sky, a healthy hue. One thing I promise my friends, My heart will always be with you. The giggles and the friendly jabs, Those loud laughs over food and wine. They are my antidotes in need, Even the Virus wonders how am I fine. I am just waiting for to meet again, Life will bring back that time. Song of heart I cannot sing, But the words are there to rhyme. Nature knows how to correct us, Earth is saying, remember me. Sending you all a loving hug, Just don't forget me!

Louis Sullivan, the first great modern architect, declared that form follows function. To understand viruses, or for that matter to understand biology, one must think as Sullivan did, in a language not of words, which simply name things, but in a language of three dimensions, a language of shape and form. For in biology, especially at the cellular and molecular levels, nearly all activity depends ultimately upon form, upon physical structure—upon what is called “stereochemistry.

As the new century began, AIDS researchers pondered this roster of different viral lineages: seven groups of HIV-2 and three groups of HIV-1. The seven groups of HIV-2, distinct as they were from one another, all resembled SIVsm, the virus endemic in sooty mangabeys. (So did the later addition, group H.) The three kinds of HIV-1 all resembled SIVcpz, from chimps. (The eventual fourth kind, group P, is most closely related to SIV from gorillas.) Now here’s the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers. In other words, HIV hasn’t happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history. Therefore it wasn’t a highly improbable event. It wasn’t a singular piece of vastly unlikely bad luck, striking humankind with devastating results—like a comet come knuckleballing across the infinitude of space to smack planet Earth and extinguish the dinosaurs. No. The arrival of HIV in human bloodstreams was, on the contrary, part of a small trend. Due to the nature of our interactions with African primates, it seems to occur pretty often.

From the time an influenza virus first attaches to a cell to the time the cell bursts generally takes about ten hours, although it can take less time or, more rarely, longer. Then a swarm of between 100,000 and 1 million new influenza viruses escapes the exploded cell. The word “swarm” fits in more ways than one. •

And yet what are the writings of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault (and even Althusser) but a philosophy of disappearance? The obliteration of the human, of ideology. The absent structure, the death of the subject, lack, aphanisis. They have died of these things and their deaths bear the characteristics of this inhuman configuration. They bear the mark of a Great Withdrawal, of a defection, of a calculated failure of will, of a calculated weakening of desire. They all became shrouded in silence towards the end, in their various ways, and words fell away one by one. One can see no rosy future for their philosophies. They are even in danger, to the great despair of their disciples, of having no consequences at all. Because theirs are subtle modes of thought and ones therefore which subtilize their own traces and which have never, when all is said and done, produced constructive effects (at least that's not the best of what they have done). Those thinkers whose minds were rooted in a humanist configuration, whether liberal or libertine (Levi-Strauss, Lefebvre, Aron - and Sartre too) survive better. Whether or not they are still alive, they have not ' disappeared' in the same way; they have not been infected with the virus; their works perpetuate them and they bear the glory of those works without weakening. A whole generation, by contrast, will have disappeared in a manner wholly coherent with what it described, what it sensed, of the inhuman. It is ironic signs they have left behind, and the whole labour that is left for those whom they have sumptuously disappointed will be to make positive monuments out of those signs, monuments worthy of memory, of a juicy, intellectual memory, with no regard for the elegance and style of their disappearance.

The same is true of Canada. In other words, some of the countries that beat the virus had big governments, while others had small ones. What was the common element? A competent, well-functioning, trusted state—the quality of government.

We will be stronger for this, But only if it forces us To reach out. Corona Barry Marks “…normally only visible during a solar eclipse” Of course I’m crazy there are no sharks in swimming pools, just like there were none in freshwater lakes and rivers all those years when boys and dogs and a horse or two disappeared and everyone knew it was a haint, not some biological U-Boat stalking Little Bear Creek for 400 million years. Yes, I watch for periscopes, dorsal fins, Indian signs whispering something is down there, beneath the surface tension: angle of reflection, angle of refraction, invisible geometry making you squint and not see, making you not see. Go ahead, tell me I’m crazy with my stock of masks and toilet paper, bottled water and ammo; I know this immigrant air is from Mexico, maybe Wuhan before that, and the things I can’t see are the ones trying to pry my ribs open to let the ghost-you-can’t-see out of its cage. I know things under the air, behind the darkness, within the water are real because so am I and I believe the myth of electricity and the fable of fluoridation, that the sun can be lethal and meds can mend a Stockholm Syndrome childhood. I believe my vote and my opinion count. I believe in germs and viruses, and not going out with a wet head, and the new normal and the old one, too. I believe it is the unseen things that kill us, the small things: a moment’s distraction, the hole a virus shoots through a body. I cannot believe the dead will forgive us for being too slow to believe in what we did not want to see.

Among all the viruses on the Earth, the more hazardous virus is human than the coronavirus

Be negative! Positive is no more a positive word in 2020. Playing the hide and seek, the Corona virus is frequently mutating. In the same human body, reports are sometimes positive and sometimes negative.