Transitional Object Quotes

Listen, every object's in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil--they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

We define Greenaissance as an era of renewal with momentous innovation and investment opportunities aligned across fields with the common objective of sustainable energy transition.

Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight-- and with no apparent antecedents whatever. For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.

While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen

When a business is experiencing dysfunction, it often times has a lot to do with internal processes and internal systems. And when we put in place new internal processes and new internal systems based on clear objectives and a clear value-add strategy, the business transitions from dysfunction to effectiveness.

In the past, we had objects to believe in—objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, …Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen them there—the vastest things of the universe imaged in objects so mean.

Mrs. Levesque will put me to use as witness, as crutch, as Kleenex, as proxy for Jean-Pierre -- a temporary substitute for all the neighbors, church folk, friends, and family members who will soon come bursting through her door to share her grief. I am a transitional love object, an objet d'amour; I am Rab-Rab, Blankie, Jesus, Mama. What a strange privilege it is to be so used.

For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree. For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.

You cannot friend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why.

The belief that science proceeds from observation to theory is still so widely and so firmly held that my denial of it is often met with incredulity. I have even been suspected of being insincere- of denying what nobody in his senses would doubt. But in fact the belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory is absurd; as may be illustrated by the story of the man who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as evidence. This story should show us that though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not. Twenty-five years ago I tried to bring home the same point to a group of physics students in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following instructions : 'Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!' They asked, of course, what I wanted them to observe. Clearly the instruction, 'Observe!' is absurd. (It is not even idiomatic, unless the object of the transitive verb can be taken as understood.) Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems.

As for us,Etienne was right.Our schools are only a twenty-minute transit ride away.He'll stay with me on the weekends, and we'll visit each other as often as possible during the week. We'll be together.We both got our Point Zero wishes-each other.He said he wished for me every time.He was wishing for me when I entered the tower. "Mmm," I say.He's kissing my neck. "That's it," Rashmi says. "I'm outta here.Enjoy your hormones." Josh and Mer follow her exit,and we're alone.Just the way I like it. "Ha!" Ettiene says. "Just the way I like it." He pulls me onto his lap,and I wrap my legs around his waist.His lips are velvet soft,and we kiss until the streetlamps flicker on outside. Until the opera singer begins her evening routine. "I'm going to miss her," I say. "I'll sing to you." He tucks my stripe behind my ear. "Or I'll take you to the opera.Or I'll fly you back here to visit. Whatever you want.Anything you want." I lace my fingers through his. "I want to stay right here,in this moment." "Isn't that the name of the latest James Ashley bestseller? In This Moment?" "Careful.Someday you'll meet him, and he won't be nearly as amusing in person." Etienne grins. "Oh,so he'll only be mildly amusing? I suppose I can handle mildly amusing." "I'm serious! You have to promise me right now,this instant,that you won't leave me once you meet him.Most people would run." "I'm not most people." I smile. "I know.But you still have to promise." His eyes lock on mine. "Anna,I promise that I will never leave you." My heart pounds in response.And Etienne knows it,because he takes my hand and holds it against his chest,to show me how hard his heart is pounding, too. "And now for yours," he says. I'm still dazed. "My what?" He laughs. "Promise you won't flee once I introduce you to my father.Or, worse, leave me for him." I pause. "Do you think he'll object to me?" "Oh,I'm sure he will." Okay.Not the answer I was looking for. Etienne sees my alarm. "Anna.You know my father dislikes anything that makes me happy.And you make me happier than anyone ever has." He smiles. "Oh,yes. He'll hate you." "So....that's a good thing?" "I don't care what he thinks.Only what you think." He holds me tighter. "Like if you think I need to stop biting my nails." "You've worn your pinkies to nubs," I say cheerfully. "Or if I need to start ironing my bedspread." "I DO NOT IRON MY BEDSPREAD." "You do.And I love it." I blush,and Etienne kisses my warm cheeks. "You know,my mum loves you." "She goes?" "You're the only thing I've talked about all year.She's ecstatic we're together." I'm smiling inside and out. "I can't wait to meet her.

We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a "transitional object"--a baby's warm blanket for adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.

Here is a minimal list of the things that every software professional should be conversant with: • Design patterns. You ought to be able to describe all 24 patterns in the GOF book and have a working knowledge of many of the patterns in the POSA books. • Design principles. You should know the SOLID principles and have a good understanding of the component principles. • Methods. You should understand XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Waterfall, Structured Analysis, and Structured Design. • Disciplines. You should practice TDD, Object-Oriented design, Structured Programming, Continuous Integration, and Pair Programming. • Artifacts: You should know how to use: UML, DFDs, Structure Charts, Petri Nets, State Transition Diagrams and Tables, flow charts, and decision tables. Continuous

She would begin to view them ... with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness.

He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.

Listen, every object’s in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil—they’re all fluid and in transition. They don’t stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life.

The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.

The Freudian fetishist is defined by the fact that his desire is not primarily for the woman. (..) fetish is a “transitional object” – helping the toddler bridge his fear and loneliness. Having this unconsciously remembered evidence of mother’s warmth and reassurance with him, he is encouraged to go forward into sexual pleasures. (..) Another fascinating aspect of fetishistic thinking is the extraordinary amount of detail connected to the object. The fetish is lovingly described, lingeringly examined.

Leadership is most essential during periods of transition, when values and institutions are losing their relevance, and the outlines of a worthy future are in controversy. In such times, leaders are called upon to think creatively and diagnostically: what are the sources of the society’s well-being? Of its decay? Which inheritances from the past should be preserved, and which adapted or discarded? Which objectives deserve commitment, and which prospects must be rejected no matter how tempting? And, at the extreme, is one’s society sufficiently vital and confident to tolerate sacrifice as a waystation to a more fulfilling future?

If your CEO has enough good ideas to fuel the company’s growth objectives in perpetuity, maybe you don’t need to tap into the reservoir of talent at other levels of the organization. But the most innovative companies in the twenty-first century have transitioned from command-and-control organizations to a participatory approach that involves collaboration and teamwork.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities.

Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it. Many of us have never taken a class in grammar, yet we know in our bones that a transitive verb takes an object, that a subject needs a predicate; we know without thinking the difference between third person singular and third person plural. We may mention “race,” referring to people as black or white or Latino or Asian or indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

I have used the theologians and their treatment of apocalypse as a model of what we might expect to find not only in more literary treatments of the same radical fiction, but in the literary treatment of radical fictions in general. The assumptions I have made in doing so I shall try to examine next time. Meanwhile it may be useful to have some kind of summary account of what I've been saying. The main object: is the critical business of making sense of some of the radical ways of making sense of the world. Apocalypse and the related themes are strikingly long-lived; and that is the first thing to say tbout them, although the second is that they change. The Johannine acquires the characteristics of the Sibylline Apocalypse, and develops other subsidiary fictions which, in the course of time, change the laws we prescribe to nature, and specifically to time. Men of all kinds act, as well as reflect, as if this apparently random collocation of opinion and predictions were true. When it appears that it cannot be so, they act as if it were true in a different sense. Had it been otherwise, Virgil could not have been altissimo poeta in a Christian tradition; the Knight Faithful and True could not have appeared in the opening stanzas of "The Faerie Queene". And what is far more puzzling, the City of Apocalypse could not have appeared as a modern Babylon, together with the 'shipmen and merchants who were made rich by her' and by the 'inexplicable splendour' of her 'fine linen, and purple and scarlet,' in The Waste Land, where we see all these things, as in Revelation, 'come to nought.' Nor is this a matter of literary allusion merely. The Emperor of the Last Days turns up as a Flemish or an Italian peasant, as Queen Elizabeth or as Hitler; the Joachite transition as a Brazilian revolution, or as the Tudor settlement, or as the Third Reich. The apocalyptic types--empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe--are fed by history and underlie our ways of making sense of the world from where we stand, in the middest.

By around 2008, the number of objects connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people connected to the Internet—a transition that some point to as the beginning of the Internet of Things (IoT). Those things include cars, home appliances, traffic lights, vending machines, thermostats, quadcopters, cameras, environmental sensors, robots, and all kinds of material goods both in the manufacturing process and in the distribution and retail system. This provides AI systems with far greater sensory and control access to the real world.

The object of facing up squarely to the fact of the climacteric is to acquire serenity and power. If women on the youthful side of the climacteric could glimpse what this state of peaceful potency might be, the difficulties of making the transition would be less. It is the nature of the case that life beyond the menopause is as invisible to the woman who has yet to struggle through the change as to the top of any mountain is invisible from the valley below. Calm and poise do not simply happen to the post menopausal woman, she has to fight for them.

What is present comes to presence in a coming forth and a going away. Even φθορά is γίνεσθαι: coming forth, a kind of φύσις, emergence—disappearance—going down. The quintessence of γένεσις as φύσις is transition, the unity of coming forth and passing away, and the latter essentially occurs in the same, in ἀλήθεια, because ἀλήθεια is conjointly and essentially concealment—withdrawal into concealing. This transition is the presencing which, however, now remains precisely hidden in favor of the presence of that which is present, that which is beaten into limits and as such is then pursued and dispelled in change. The transition will not be involved in the entrenchment of what comes to presence. The transition preserves the ἄπειρον. Presence is transitionally the gathered-gathering peak of φύσις, i.e., of unconcealedness. Presence must be experienced aletheiologically and not metaphysically in terms of the constant and the objectively present. Then it becomes clear that “being” pervades not the factor of duration of objective presence but, rather, the unique gatheredness of the emerging-perishing disconcealment.

A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits. But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.

There is a paradox, which goes back to Zeno in the fifth century BC, involving the apparent contradiction of an object being in motion yet also being at a precise place at a given instant. Leonardo wrestled with the concept of depicting an arrested instant that contains both the past and the future of that moment. He compared an arrested instant of motion to the concept of a single geometrical point. The point has no length or width. Yet if it moves, it creates a line. “The point has no dimensions; the line is the transit of a point.” Using his method of theorizing by analogy, he wrote, “The instant does not have time; and time is made from the movement of the instant.”26

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

[T]he intense cathexis of longing which is concentrated on the missed or lost object (a cathexis which steadily mounts up because it cannot be appeased) creates the same economic conditions as are created by the cathexis of pain which is concentrated on the injured part of the body. [...] The transition from physical pain to mental pain corresponds to a change from narcissistic cathexis to object cathexis. An object-presentation which is highly cathected by instinctual need plays the same role as a part of the body which is cathected by an increase of stimulus. The continuous nature of the cathectic process and the impossibility of inhibiting it produce the same state of mental helplessness.

Just as Marx’s methodological method provides an objective analysis of capitalist development, the materialist concept of history developed by Marx and Friedrich Engels provides an objective analysis of how to reach communism. Therefore, by tracing the historical (as in necessary) development of the productive forces, we shall see that the ‘Leninist’ road – of revolution, proletarian dictatorship and centrally planned ‘state’ socialism – remains necessary. By drawing on the work of the Soviet Russian philosopher Genrikh Volkov, we shall see that the Leninist road opens up the path to a Single Automated Society – fully automated production in a de facto one-state world, the final stage of the socialist transition to global communism. We shall establish precisely why this road is the solution that must be pursued if humanity is to combat the climate crisis and survive to realise its full potential in what Marx called “the beginning of human history”.

Even more interesting is that with all these millions of "fortuitous" colors, it appears that particularity is so rampant that any object we identify as, say, "blue" shares almost nothing in common with any other object we might identify as the same color. We tend to think that color operates like crayons. We use one crayon to fill in a tree, a bird, jacket, and a roof. But it appears that the same color can be served by very different microstructures. For example, what we see as simple blue can be produced by incandescnce, transitions, vibrations, refraction, scattering, diffraction, etc. As Hardin points out, the "same blue" found in the sky, water, a rainbow, a beetle, a sapphire, the star Sirius, and a television dot results from very different microstructures. This may be a tough swallow for some Platonists who hope for a uniform basis for each color, but it should be a joy for those who seek to honor our God of the details. Like the true particularity of the persons of the Trinity, creation boasts in real individuality too.

Many times, over the last few years, I have been asked the same question: “Why has Ukraine gained such prominence in world politics?” I first encountered it in the context of the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, followed immediately by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its aggression against the rest of Ukraine, with the subsequent dramatic worsening of US-Russian and EU-Russian relations. The same question arose concerning Ukraine’s role in the impeachment process and then again in the American presidential campaign of 2020. My answer was and remains the same. The appearance of Ukraine on the center stage of European and then American politics is not a fluke. Ukraine, the largest post-Soviet republic after Russia and now the object of Russian aggression, has become a battleground in the last few years. Unlike its East Slavic neighbors, Russia and Belarus, Ukraine has maintained democratic institutions and politics throughout the tumultuous years of the post-Soviet transition and oriented itself toward the West in its geopolitical aspirations and social and cultural values.

Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.

Reply to Objection 2: Equality is measured by greatness. In God greatness signifies the perfection of nature, as above explained (A[1], ad 1), and belongs to the essence. Thus equality and likeness in God have reference to the essence; nor can there be inequality or dissimilitude arising from the distinction of the relations. Wherefore Augustine says (Contra Maxim. iii, 13), "The question of origin is, Who is from whom? but the question of equality is, Of what kind, or how great, is he?" Therefore, paternity is the Father's dignity, as also the Father's essence: since dignity is something absolute, and pertains to the essence. As, therefore, the same essence, which in the Father is paternity, in the Son is filiation, so the same dignity which, in the Father is paternity, in the Son is filiation. It is thus true to say that the Son possesses whatever dignity the Father has; but we cannot argue---"the Father has paternity, therefore the Son has paternity," for there is a transition from substance to relation. For the Father and the Son have the same essence and dignity, which exist in the Father by the relation of giver, and in the Son by relation of receiver.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth. As our minds become more deeply aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method that is not otherwise there. We see vividly, as normally we should not, the enormous mischief and casual cruelty of our prejudices. And the destruction of a prejudice, though painful at first, because of its connection with our self-respect, gives an immense relief and a fine pride when it is successfully done. There is a radical enlargement of the range of attention. As the current categories dissolve, a hard, simple version of the world breaks up. The scene turns vivid and full. There follows an emotional incentive to hearty appreciation of scientific method, which otherwise it is not easy to arouse, and is impossible to sustain. Prejudices are so much easier and more interesting. For if you teach them at first as victories over the superstitions of the mind, and the exhilaration of the chase and of the conquest may carry the pupil over that hard transition from his self-bound experience to the phase where his curiosity has matured, and his reason has acquired passion.

Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided—already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order—by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by what Poincaré called the (experimental) group of displacement. But it goes without saying that, at this elementary level, which precedes all thought, we cannot regard this grouping as an operational system, since it is a system of responses actually effected; the fact is therefore that it is undifferentiated, the displacements in question being at the same time and in every case responses directed towards a goal serving some practical purpose. We might therefore say that at this level spatio-temporal, logico-arithmetical and practical (means and ends) groupings form a global whole and that, in the absence of differentiation, this complex system is incapable of constituting an operational mechanism. At the end of this period and at the beginning of representative thought, on the other hand, the appearance of the symbol makes possible the first form of differentiation: practical groupings (means and ends) on the one hand, and representation on the other. But this latter is still undifferentiated, logico-arithmetical operations not being distinguished from spatio-temporal operations. In fact, at the intuitive level there are no genuine classes or relations because both are still spatial collections as well as spatio-temporal relationships: hence their intuitive and pre-operational character. At 7–8 years, however, the appearance of operational groupings is characterized precisely by a clear differentiation between logico-arithmetical operations that have become independent (classes, relations and despatialized numbers) and spatio-temporal or infra-logical operations. Lastly, the level of formal operations marks a final differentiation between operations tied to real action and hypothetico-deductive operations concerning pure implications from propositions stated as postulates.

Alice's Cutie Code TM Version 2.1 - Colour Expansion Pack (aka Because this stuff won’t stop being confusing and my friends are mean edition) From Red to Green, with all the colours in between (wait, okay, that rhymes, but green to red makes more sense. Dang.) From Green to Red, with all the colours in between Friend Sampling Group: Fennie, Casey, Logan, Aisha and Jocelyn Green  Friends’ Reaction: Induces a minimum amount of warm and fuzzies. If you don’t say “aw”, you’re “dead inside”  My Reaction: Sort of agree with friends minus the “dead inside” but because that’s a really awful thing to say. Puppies are a good example. So is Walter Bishop. Green-Yellow  Friends’ Reaction: A noticeable step up from Green warm and fuzzies. Transitioning from cute to slightly attractive. Acceptable crush material. “Kissing.”  My Reaction: A good dance song. Inspirational nature photos. Stuff that makes me laugh. Pairing: Madison and Allen from splash Yellow  Friends’ Reaction: Something that makes you super happy but you don’t know why. “Really pretty, but not too pretty.” Acceptable dating material. People you’d want to “bang on sight.”  My Reaction: Love songs for sure! Cookies for some reason or a really good meal. Makes me feel like it’s possible to hold sunshine, I think. Character: Maxon from the selection series. Music: Carly Rae Jepsen Yellow-Orange  Friends’ Reaction: (When asked for non-sexual examples, no one had an answer. From an objective perspective, *pushes up glasses* this is the breaking point. Answers definitely skew toward romantic or sexual after this.)  My Reaction: Something that really gets me in my feels. Also art – oil paintings of landscapes in particular. (What is with me and scenery? Maybe I should take an art class) Character: Dean Winchester. Model: Liu Wren. Orange  Friends’ Reaction: “So pretty it makes you jealous. Or gay.”  “Definitely agree about the gay part. No homo, though. There’s just some really hot dudes out there.”(Feenie’s side-eye was so intense while the others were answering this part LOLOLOLOLOL.) A really good first date with someone you’d want to see again.  My Reaction: People I would consider very beautiful. A near-perfect season finale. I’ve also cried at this level, which was interesting. o Possible tie-in to romantic feels? Not sure yet. Orange-Red  Friends’ Reaction: “When lust and love collide.” “That Japanese saying ‘koi no yokan.’ It’s kind of like love at first sight but not really. You meet someone and you know you two have a future, like someday you’ll fall in love. Just not right now.” (<-- I like this answer best, yes.) “If I really, really like a girl and I’m interested in her as a person, guess. I’d be cool if she liked the same games as me so we could play together.”  My Reaction: Something that gives me chills or has that time-stopping factor. Lots of staring. An extremely well-decorated room. Singers who have really good voices and can hit and hold superb high notes, like Whitney Houston. Model: Jasmine Tooke. Paring: Abbie and Ichabod from Sleepy Hollow o Romantic thoughts? Someday my prince (or princess, because who am I kidding?) will come? Red (aka the most controversial code)  Friends’ Reaction: “Panty-dropping levels” (<-- wtf Casey???).  “Naked girls.” ”Ryan. And ripped dudes who like to cook topless.”  “K-pop and anime girls.” (<-- Dear. God. The whole table went silent after he said that. Jocelyn was SO UNCOMFORTABLE but tried to hide it OMG it was bad. Fennie literally tried to slap some sense into him.)  My Reaction: Uncontrollable staring. Urge to touch is strong, which I must fight because not everyone is cool with that. There may even be slack-jawed drooling involved. I think that’s what would happen. I’ve never seen or experienced anything that I would give Red to.

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end. Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd. But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes. In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities

One of the most effective ways to quicken your story’s pace is to move from a static description of an object, place or person to an active scene. The classic method for accomplishing this is to have your character interact with the subject that’s been described. For instance, let’s say you’ve just written three paragraphs describing a wedding dress in a shop window. You’ve detailed the Belgian lace veil, the beaded bodice, the twelve-foot train, even the row of satin buttons down the sleeves. Instinctively you feel it’s time to move into an action scene, but how do you do it without making your transition obvious? A simple, almost seamless way is to initiate an action between your character (let’s call her Miranda) and the dress you’ve just described. Perhaps Miranda could be passing by on the sidewalk when the dress in the window catches her attention. Or she could walk into the shop and ask the shopkeeper how much the dress costs. This method works well to link almost any static description with a scene of action. Describe an elegant table, for instance, complete with crystal goblets, damask tablecloth, monogrammed napkins and sterling silver tableware; then let the maid pull a cloth from her apron and begin to polish one of the forks. Or describe a Superman kite lying beside a tree, then watch as a little girl grabs the string and begins to run. You will still be describing, but the nature of your description will have changed from static to active, thus quickening the story’s pace. Throughout

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumors of the future. Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own. I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

Such gratuity necessarily revolutionizes the ordinary human way of looking at talent, effort, and achievement. Henceforth I do strain, I do intend, and I do utilize my potential, but solely by virtue of Another. What can my effort to cultivate the land avail me if I have neither seed nor soil? The ground, the possibility, the impulse, the sense—all of these are given to me absolutely free and undeserved. Jesus does not specify what the “free gift” precisely is which the apostles have received, and the word δωϱεὰν may also be read adverbially to mean “gratis”, “free of charge”, so that the alternate translation would be: “You received without cost; give without charge.” The very indetermination of the object, however, here makes the formulation even more absolute. Although in context the specific “gift” meant is probably the divine authority to heal and generally to act in Jesus’ stead, surely it also refers to the first call to discipleship by Jesus, to the invitation to and privilege of following him and sharing his life, and to this present call to special apostleship as well. In other words, the “gift” given by God free of charge is the Christian’s whole life; Christ Jesus himself. The gratuitousness with which God gives his Son to mankind, furthermore, imposes an inviolable pattern of transitiveness. The one who receives must give the gift further as freely as he has received it. As a result of receiving from God, one must give like God. God, then, imparts not only the gift itself but the very manner of the giving. This gift communicates its qualities to its recipient: having such a gift, I myself must become gift. The gift of God’s life—Jesus—does not pass through me like water through a pipe, leaving me unaffected. It descends upon me like fire on a sacrifice, roasting the meat and making it edible for God’s hungry.

Understanding Metro's history may illuminate today's debates. To conservatives who decry Metro's expense--around $10 billion in nominal dollars--this book serves as a reminder that Metro was never intended to be the cheapest solution to any problem, and that it is the product of an age that did not always regard cheapness as an essential attribute of good government. To those who celebrate automobile commuting as the rational choice of free Americans, it replies that some Americans have made other choices, based on their understanding that building great cities is more important than minimizing average commuting time. This book may also answer radicals who believe that public funds should primarily--or exclusively--serve the poor, which in the context of transportation means providing bus and rail transit for the carless while leaving the middle class to drive. It suggests that Metro has done more for inner-city African Americans than is generally understood. And to those hostile to public mega-projects as a matter of principle, it responds that it may take a mega-project to kill a mega-project. Had activists merely opposed freeways, they might as well have been dismissed as cranks by politicians and technical experts alike. By championing rapid transit as an equally bold alternative, they won allies, and, ultimately, victory. Most important, this book recalls the belief of Great Society liberals that public investments should serve all classes and all races, rather than functioning as a last resort. These liberals believed, with Abraham Lincoln, that 'the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves--in their separate, and individual capacities.' This approach justifies the government's role in rail not as a means of distributing wealth, but as an agent for purchasing rapid transit--a good that people collectively want but cannot collectively buy through a market.

he used the phrase “naive transitivity” to describe what we and other movement activists in the 1960s were calling “rebellion.” For Freire, it was the stage when the masses, conscious that their oppression is rooted in objective conditions, “become anxious for freedom, anxious to overcome the silence in which they have always existed.” Freire was very clear, as were we, that this breaking of silence was not just a riot. Indeed, the masses were seeking to make their historical presence felt. He was equally clear, as were we, that it was not yet revolution because revolutions are made by people (as distinguished from masses) who have assumed “the role of subject in the precarious adventure of transforming and re-creating the world. They are not just denouncing but also announcing a new positive.”8 Or as we put it in Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, “a rebellion disrupts the society,” but “a revolution . . . begins with projecting the notion of a more human, human being,” one “who is more advanced in the qualities which only human beings have—creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.”9 Soon thereafter, I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and was delighted to discover that his ideas of Education for Freedom, as education that not only makes the masses conscious of their oppression but engages them in struggles to transform themselves and their world, were very close to those that I had been putting forward.10 In this landmark work, Freire critiqued the bourgeois “banking method” of education, in which students are expected to memorize the “truths” of the dominant society—that is, “deposit” information in their head then “withdraw” it when required for tests, jobs, and other demands by overseers. Instead, Freire argued that critical thinking can develop only when questions are posed as problems. This problem-posing method provides no automatic “correct” answer. By contrast, students must discover their own understanding of the truth by developing a heightened awareness of their situation.

That the line does not consist of points, nor the plane of lines, follows from their concepts, for the line is the point existing outside of itself relating itself to space, and suspending itself and the plane is just as much the suspended line existing outside of itself.-Here the point is represented as the first and positive entity, and taken as the starting point. The converse, though, is also true: in as far as space is positive, the plane is the first negation and the line is the second, which, however, is in its truth the negation relating self to self, the point. The necessity of the transition is the same.- The other configurations of space considered by geometry are further qualitative limitations of a spatial abstraction, of the plane, or of a limited spatial whole. Here there occur a few necessary moments, for example, that the triangle is the first rectilinear figure, that all other figures must, to be determined, be reduced to it or to the square, and so on.-The principle of these figures is the identity of the understanding, which determines the figurations as regular, and in this way grounds the relationships and sets them in place, which it now becomes the purpose of science to know. Negativity, which as point relates itself to space and in space develops its determinations as line and plane, is, however, in the sphere of self-externality equally for itself and appearing indifferent to the motionless coexistence of space. Negativity, thus posited for itself is time. Time, as the negative unity of being outside of itself, is just as thoroughly abstract, ideal being: being which, since it is, is not, and since it is not, is If these determinations (of Kant, the forms of intuition or sensation) are applied to space and time, then space is abstract objectivity, whereas time is abstract subjectivity (“the pure I=I of self-consciousness” but still the concept is in its pure externality). Time is just as continuous as space, for it is abstract negativity relating itself to itself and in this abstraction there is as yet no real difference. In time, it is said, everything arises and passes away, or rather, there appears precisely the abstraction of arising and falling away. If abstractions are made from everything, namely, from the fullness of time just as much as from the fullness of space, then there remains both empty time and empty space left over; that is, there are then posited these abstractions of exteriority.-But time itself is this becoming, this existing abstraction, the Chronos who gives birth to everything and destroys his offspring.-That which is real, however, is just as identical to as distinct from time. Everything is transitory that is temporal, that is, exists only in time or, like the concept, is not in itself pure negativity. To be sure, this negativity is in everything as its immanent, universal essence, but the temporal is not adequate to this essence, and therefore relates to this negativity in terms of its power. Time itself is eternal, for it is neither just any time, nor the moment now, but time as time is its concept. The concept, however, in its identity with itself I= I, is in and for itself absolute negativity and freedom. Time, is not, therefore, the power of the concept, nor is the concept in time and temporal; on the contrary, the concept is the power of time, which is only this negativity as externality.-The natural is therefore subordinate to time, insofar as it is finite; that which is true, by contrast, the idea, the spirit, is eternal. Thus the concept of eternity must not be grasped as if it were suspended time, or in any case not in the sense that eternity would come after time, for this would turn eternity into the future, in other words into a moment of time.

In the preface of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1787/1933, B XVI) refers in the same way to the Copernican Revolution. He points out that for explaining the possibility of scientific knowledge about (physical) objects we have to reflect on central cognitive functions (intuition and categories). According to Piaget, however, the reversal of the attentional focus of the mind does not happen just once but several times – namely at every level transition.

Earth is currently transitioning into the Fourth Dimension. The climax of the upcoming Ascension will be felt towards the end of 2012 as the Year of the Dragon spreads its wings, all the way for the next seven years until 2019. Although the Third Dimension is focused upon the physical world, the Fourth Dimension has a primary focus on the spiritual world. In order to accept this new state of existence, profound elements of the Fourth Dimension were introduced into our Third Dimensional society to lessen the sudden impact of Ascension. Profound spiritual concepts such as Enlightenment and aspects of Unconditional Love must be understood as the next steps to progress from the Third Dimension. These seeds were planted and allowed to grow in individuals who have accepted that it is time to open the doors to the spiritual world. As human beings are the most complex forms of embodied consciousness on the planet, we will still retain our current shape and forms. What will change is the importance we place on achieving such profound spiritual objectives. The 2012-2019 Ascension will mark a turning point leading to spirituality playing a much more dominant role in society with less fixation on a solely material world. The Fourth Dimension follows the Third Dimension in its way of life; the difference is what is placed upon the core belief structures of those living within it.

There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb, everything depends on the direct object. 'I LOVE' could be virtuous or not - you could love ice cream, Jesus, child porn, my country, hurting people, the lust of the flesh. Love is not an automatic virtue. Hatred is not an automatic vice. What's the direct object? from Debate In The Age Of The Glitter-Bomb in The City, Fall 2013.

Between social mobilization and liberal democracy From Alexis de Tocqueville onward there has been a large body of democratic theory arguing that modern liberal democracy cannot exist without a vigorous civil society.29 The mobilization of social groups allows weak individuals to pool their interests and enter the political system; even when social groups do not seek political objectives, voluntary associations have spillover effects in fostering the ability of individuals to work with one another in novel situations—what is termed social capital. The correlation noted above linking economic growth to stable liberal democracy presumably comes about via the channel of social mobilization: growth entails the emergence of new social actors who then demand representation in a more open political system and press for a democratic transition. When the political system is well institutionalized and can accommodate these new actors, then there is a successful transition to full democracy. This is what happened with the rise of farmers’ movements and socialist parties in Britain and Sweden in the early decades of the twentieth century, and in South Korea after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1987. A highly developed civil society can also pose dangers for democracy and can even lead to political decay. Groups based on ethnic or racial chauvinism spread intolerance; interest groups can invest effort in zero-sum rent seeking; excessive politicization of economic and social conflicts can paralyze societies and undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. 30 Social mobilization can lead to political decay. The Huntingtonian process whereby political institutions failed to accommodate demands of new social actors for participation arguably happened in Bolivia and Ecuador in the 1990s and 2000s with the repeated unseating of elected presidents by highly mobilized social groups.31

Managing the Neutral Zone: A Checklist Yes No   ___ ___ Have I done my best to normalize the neutral zone by explaining it as an uncomfortable time that (with careful attention) can be turned to everyone’s advantage? ___ ___ Have I redefined the neutral zone by choosing a new and more affirmative metaphor with which to describe it? ___ ___ Have I reinforced that metaphor with training programs, policy changes, and financial rewards for people to keep doing their jobs during the neutral zone? ___ ___ Am I protecting people adequately from inessential further changes? ___ ___ If I can’t protect them, am I clustering those changes meaningfully? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary policies and procedures that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary roles, reporting relationships, and organizational groupings that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I set short-range goals and checkpoints? ___ ___ Have I set realistic output objectives? ___ ___ Have I found the special training programs we need to deal successfully with the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I found ways to keep people feeling that they still belong to the organization and are valued by our part of it? And have I taken care that perks and other forms of “privilege” are not undermining the solidarity of the group? ___ ___ Have I set up one or more Transition Monitoring Teams to keep realistic feedback flowing upward during the time in the neutral zone? ___ ___ Are my people willing to experiment and take risks in intelligently conceived ventures—or are we punishing all failures? ___ ___ Have I stepped back and taken stock of how things are being done in my part of the organization? (This is worth doing both for its own sake and as a visible model for others’ similar efforts.) ___ ___ Have I provided others with opportunities to do the same thing? Have I provided them with the resources—facilitators, survey instruments, and so on—that will help them do that? ___ ___ Have I seen to it that people build their skills in creative thinking and innovation? ___ ___ Have I encouraged experimentation and seen to it that people are not punished for failing in intelligent efforts that do not pan out? ___ ___ Have I worked to transform the losses of our organization into opportunities to try doing things a new way? ___ ___ Have I set an example by brainstorming many answers to old problems—the ones that people say we just have to live with? Am I encouraging others to do the same? ___ ___ Am I regularly checking to see that I am not pushing for certainty and closure when it would be more conducive to creativity to live a little longer with uncertainty and questions? ___ ___ Am I using my time in the neutral zone as an opportunity to replace bucket brigades with integrated systems throughout the organization?

Accordingly, to create objects with soul, objects for a rich and beautiful world, we must invest them with life, self, and humanity; in other words, we must invest them with something of our selves. No

The java.util.concurrent.atomic package contains atomic variable classes for effecting atomic state transitions on numbers and object references. By replacing the long counter with an AtomicLong, we ensure that all actions that access the counter state are atomic.

To quote from Capl an’s The First Twelve Months of Life: “The attachment of babies to such objects... helps in the transition to independence from her [mother].

trying to convince the largest insurer of art in the country to give them some of its “totaled” art. When a valuable painting is damaged in transit or a fire or flood, vandalized, etc., and an appraiser agrees with the owner of a work that the work cannot be satisfactorily restored, or that the cost of restoration would exceed the value of the claim, then the insurance company pays out the total value of the damaged work, which is then legally declared to have “zero value.” When Alena asked me what I thought happened to the totaled art, I told her I assumed that the damaged work was destroyed, but, as it turned out, the insurer had a giant warehouse on Long Island full of these indeterminate objects: works by artists, many of them famous, that, after suffering one kind of damage or another, were formally demoted from art to mere objecthood and banned from circulation, removed from the market, relegated to this strange limbo.

Providing structure and predictability Toddlers are reassured by familiar routines, regardless of their nature. When the environment prior to placement is a healthy one, the use of transition objects that link the former caregiver’s style and schedule to the present provides the sense of structure that is important to the toddler’s developing sense of security in her new home. A consistent schedule is also important to the child who is experiencing separation anxiety. Parents should be absolutely reliable about returning when expected. It is important to help children anticipate their schedules by talking through the day’s routine. Because toddlers cannot tell time, use concrete, regularly scheduled events to help them mark time such as mealtimes or the timing of a favorite television program such as Sesame Street. Parents should make every effort to delay making additional major life changes following a toddler adoption such as moving to a new home, adding another family member, divorce, or marriage until new routines are firm and secure.

John Bowlby (1973) reported on a landmark study of the adoption of securely attached toddlers that demonstrated that transitional objects had a major impact on reducing placement trauma. In this study, many of the toddlers’ belongings, including beds, blankets, and toys, accompanied them to their new homes.

the NSR—the Northern Sea Route. This fulfills a major Russian objective, the opening up of a transit route between Europe and Asia through the Arctic Ocean. It has been facilitated by the retreat of the Arctic ice, although with more variability than sometimes recognized. For instance, in September 2014, the ice extent was 50 percent greater than it had been in September 2012. The route cuts the distance between Shanghai and Rotterdam by about 30 percent, and in the process avoids both the narrow Malacca Strait and the Suez Canal. This opening has been welcomed by Japan, South Korea, and especially by China, which, describing itself as a “Near Arctic State,” applies its own distinctive name to the route—the Polar Silk Road.

Spoiler alert, but I need to skip forward and address something. They figure out eventually that the reason Dennis Hopper made this extremely overcomplicated weird bus bomb is because he used to be a police bomb sexpert supercop just like Keanu. Unfortunately, his hand got fucked up in the line of duty, andn ow he's mad that his pension isn't luxurious enough. Can you imagine that story line being presented as a comprehensible motivation for terrorism in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty????? Hahahahaha! To a kid born in, say, 2001 that's like a fish threatening to blow up the ocean because he's thirsty. You're an already-comfortable yet inexplicably enraged middle-aged white guy in 1994 *with a government pension* who's prepared to kill a bunch of working-class people on public transit so you can squeeze millions of dollars of fun-money out of the US taxpayer coffers *because you want it?* LOL.

RESISTANCE IS IMPERSONAL Resistance is not out to get you personally. It doesn't know who you are and doesn't care. Resistance is a force of nature. It acts objectively. Though it feels malevolent, Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as the stars. When we marshal our forces to combat Resistance, we must remember this.

Imagination is not held within the mind, but it is potentially active in all the areas of transition from persons to objects or pictures. It operates, in other words, in the same zones as projection and its metaphors.

Transitional objects only appear when the infant can invest them with supportive or loving qualities. In order to be able to do this, the infant must have experienced actual support and love. Only when the mother has been introjected as at least a partially good object can those qualities be projected upon a transitional object. The capacity to develop attachments to transitional objects is, therefore, a sign of health rather than a sign of deprivation, just as the capacity to be alone is a sign of inner security rather than an expression of a withdrawn state. This is supported by the observation that institutionalized children whose capacity for forming human attachments may be impaired rarely form attachments to cuddly to

There are good biological reasons for accepting the fact that man is so constituted that he possesses an inner world of the imagination which is different from, though connected to, the world of external reality. It is the discrepancy between the two worlds which motivates creative imagination. People who realize their creative potential are constandy bridging the gap between inner and outer. They invest the external world with meaning because they disown neither the world’s objectivity nor their own subjectivity. This interaction between inner and outer worlds is easily seen when we observe children at play. Children make use of real objects in the external world, but invest these objects with meanings which derive from the world of their own imagination. This process begins very early in the child’s life. Many infants develop intense attachments to particular objects. D. W. Winnicott was the first psychoanalyst to draw attention to the importance of such attachments in his paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’.7 These phenomena are closely connected with the beginnings of independence and with the capacity to be alone.

For example, you’ll have a script that starts with those all-important first four seconds, and then includes your qualifying questions and your transition. Second, you’ll have a script that starts with the main body of your presentation and ends with you asking for the order for the first time. Third, you’ll have a series of rebuttal scripts that include the well-thought-out answers you’ve prepared to the various common objections you’re going to hear. And fourth, you’ll have a series of looping scripts that will include the various language patterns that will allow you to loop back into the sale, in order to move your prospect to higher and higher levels of certainty.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again.

QUICK REVIEW OF STAGE TWO PRACTICE The instructions for this Stage are simple. You sit down, finish the Preparation for Practice, make the gradual transition to the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nose, and count ten breaths. Hold the intention to follow and sustain attention on the breath sensations at the nose. Very soon, however, you’ll find yourself forgetting the breath and mind-wandering, sometimes for seconds and sometimes for many minutes. Eventually, you’ll abruptly “wake up” to the fact that, even though you intended to watch the breath, you’ve been thinking about something else. Feel happy and pleased about this “aha!” moment of introspective awareness. Then, gently direct attention back to the breath. To engage more fully with the meditation object, practice following the breath. As long as you appreciate the moment of “waking up” to mind-wandering, diligently return attention to the object, and fully engage with it, you’re on the right track. If you sit through the entire session without getting discouraged and if you keep returning to the breath when your mind wanders, consider your meditation a total

The professor is no longer revered for their depth of scholarly knowledge and andragogical skill. Instead, the educator is now at the subjective mercy of an assessment that evaluates how well they pleased the personal and entertainment interests of their students, as opposed to learning objectives, curriculum agendas, and demonstration of learned course skills and theory. When did this paradigm shift from educator to customer service agent begin?

The history of the Middle Ages is filled with examples of prominent people fulfilling pledges that would seem ridiculous to us. In many cases, the actions proposed involved no objective connection to any benefit other than a vivid demonstration of the importance those undertaking them placed upon the vow itself.

If the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body (and no doubt the distinction between noesis and noema as well?), it is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my body's operations, the terminus its exploration ends up in, and which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body. When we say that the perceived thing is grasped 'in person' or 'in the flesh' (leibhaft}, this is to be taken literally: the flesh of what is perceived, this compact particle which stops exploration, and this optimum which terminates it аll reflect my own incarnation and are its counterpart. Here we have a type of being, a universe with its unparalleled 'subject' and 'object,' the articulation each in terms of the other, and the definitive definition of an 'irrelative' of all the 'relativities' of perceptual experience, which is the 'legal basis' for all the constructions of understanding. All understanding and objective thought owe their life to the in augural fact that with this color (or wit h whatever the sensible element in question may be ) I have perceived, I have had, a singular existence which suddenly stopped my glance yet promised it an indefinite series of experiences, which was a concretion of possibles real here and now in the hidden sides of the thing , which was a lapse of duration given all at once. The intentionality that ties together the stages of my exploration, the aspects of the thing , and the two series to each other is neither the mental subject's connecting activity nor the ideal connections of the object. It is the transition that as carnal subject I effect from one phase of movement to another, a transition which as a matter of principle is always possible for me because I am that animal of perceptions and movements called a body.

So, what should be New York’s highest-priority project? Unfortunately, no objective measure or crystal ball exists to answer that question. Peter Hall’s 1982 book, Great Planning Disasters, reveals the difficulty of trying to assess and compare megaprojects. The author, a world-renowned urban planner, singled out the Sydney Opera House and San Francisco’s BART rail system as planning disasters. The opera house had faced massive cost overruns and its design made it unable to function as a major opera house, while the BART system was attracting far fewer riders than expected. Hall had no idea that these two projects would prove to be wildly successful. The opera house is now Australia’s top tourist destination and the country’s most iconic structure, while BART has become essential to the economic health of the San Francisco Bay Area and the backbone of its transit system. Hall’s effort to determine the success of these two projects after they were built was relatively straightforward compared to a task that requires even more guesswork—assessing projects before they are built, when estimates of both costs and benefits are subject to wide debate and manipulation.

loss is a subjective experience, and your “objective” view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant.

Confusion over the identity of things is thus a function of our very attempts to substantiate them, to fix them in memory. This indifference of memory, this indifference to history, is proportional to our efforts to achieve historical objectivity. One day we shall be asking ourselves whether Heidegger himself ever existed. The paradox of Robert Faurisson's thesis may seem repugnant - and indeed, it is repugnant in its historical claim that the gas chambers never existed - but at the same time it is a perfect reflection of a whole culture: here is the dead end of a fin de siecle so mesmerized by the horror of the century's origins that forgetting is an impossibility for it, and the only way out is denial. So proof is useless, since there is no longer any historical discourse in which to frame the case for the prosecution, but punishment too is in any case an impossibility. Auschwitz and the final solution simply cannot be expiated. Punishment and crime have no common measure here, and the unrealistic character of the punishment ensures the unreality of the facts. What we are currently experiencing is something else entirely. What is actually occurring ­collectively, confusedly, via all the trials and debates - is a transition from the historical stage to a mythical stage: the mythic - and media-led - reconstruction of all these events. And in a sense this mythic conversion is the only possible way, not to exculpate us morally, but to absolve us in phantasy from the guilt of this primal crime. But in order for this to be achieved, in order for even a crime to become a myth, the historical reality must first be eradicated.

The movies were just kind of figuring out how to use computers in 2003, and nobody was just kind of figuring out how to use computers harder than Michael Bay. It’s tempting to say that every frame of Bad Boys II looks like a TV commercial, but truly every frame looks like a print advertisement, like those Candies ads where Jenny McCarthy’s taking a shit, shallow and glossy and tinged acid green. There are four car chases, one of which is at least fifteen minutes long. Even the most passing transitions are giddily tasteless: the camera EXPLODES out of the speedboat’s tailpipe and ZOOMS across Biscayne Bay and WHAMS down the ventilation shaft in the backward sunglasses factory and SHOOMPS into the buttcrack of a raver’s low-rise jeans and SPROINGS across her transverse colon and SQUEAKS through her appendix and AIRHORNS out her belly button and PLOPS into the Cuban drug lord’s mojito as he shoots his favorite nephew in the head while saying, “Adios, kemosabe,” or something fucking cool like that. When faced with a choice, Bay picks “all of the above” every time. He’s like a dog in one of those obedience trials who’s like, “Obedience? I don’t know her,” and just goes buck wild on the sausages. Except instead of “obedience” it’s “having a coherent plot that holds the audience’s attention” and instead of “sausages” it’s “explosions, Ferrari chases, and how many different cool kinds of box could a gun come in.

It will be seen that the Infinitive is a kind of noun with certain features of the verb, especially that of taking an object (when the verb is Transitive) and adverbial qualifiers. In short, the Infinitive is a Verb-Noun.

It is very important to note that the transcendence of the object is by no means a primitive component necessarily ingredient in all knowledge. It is missing in all ecstatic knowledge. In ecstatic knowledge the known world is still not objectively given. Only when the (logically and genetically simultaneous) act furnishing ecstatic knowledge and the subject which performs this act become themselves the content of knowledge in the act of reflection does the character originally given in ecstatic knowledge become a mere reference pointing to the “object.” It is only here that the object or that which turns into an object remains from now on “transcendent” to consciousness. Therefore, whenever there is consciousness, objects transcendent to consciousness must also be given to consciousness. Their structural relationship is indissoluble. Whenever self-consciousness and consciousness of an object arise, they do so simultaneously and through the same process. The categorical form of an object is not first impressed in a judgment upon a nonobjective given, not even in a one-term, simple judgment, as some people have thought (e.g., Heinrich Maier in his book *Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit*). This is a pure construction. Consciousness of an object precedes all judgment and is not originally constituted by judgment. The same holds true of consciousness of states of affairs. The consciousness of an object and the intentional object are not the result of an active [tätige] “forming” or “imprinting” which we perform on the given through judgments or any other operations of thought. On the contrary, they are the result of a pulling back, the result, that is, of the re-flexive act, in which an originally ecstatic [*ekstatisch gebender*] act turns back knowingly onto itself and comes upon a central self as its starting point. This central self can be given at every level and degree of “concentration” and “collectedness” in “self-consciousness.” What we had hold of [*das Gehabte*] remains “as” object, while the act of reflection turns the knowing back into the knower, as the result of a turning away [*Abwendung*] and a pulling back, and not of an active turning to [*Zuwendung*]. From what has been said, one may very well imagine that the real world could be abolished without consciousness and the self being altered or abolished thereby. But this could in no way be the case with the world of objects that transcend consciousness. Descartes as well as Lotze misunderstood this. Where a *cogito* exists, there must also be a *cogitatur* in which a transcendent object is thought. Only a being capable of reflection (*reflexio*) and self-consciousness *can* have objects. Charlotte Bühler has recently made it seem probable that the infant does not yet possess objective consciousness. In waking from the effects of a drug we can follow the process by which the givenness of the surrounding world becomes objective again. There is one last point of contact between the problem of reality and the consciousness of transcendence. The consciousness of transcendence, as already indicated, shows how the mere ecstatic possession of reality on the level of the immediately experienced resistance of an X to the central drives of life passes over into a reflexive and thus objective possession of reality. And we find similar transitions between ecstatic remembering which is merged in the being of what is past and reflexive remembering, between ecstatic drive activities and recurrent deliberation [*Besinnung*], between ecstatic surrender to a value and objectification of a value, between identifying with an alter ego and “understanding” [*Verstehen*] another, however slightly.” ―from_Idealism and Realism_

The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.

So much was lost - names, faces, ages, ethnic identities - that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered. This is not quite as harrowing or hopeless as it might sound I liken it to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken vessels using gold. The scars of the object are not concealed, but highlighted and embraced, thus giving them their own dignity and power. The brokenness and its subsequent repair are a recognized part of the story of the journey of the vessel, not to be obscured, and change, transition, and transformation are seen as important as honoring the original structure and its traditional meaning and beauty.

Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you’re moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border is a line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.

For Microsoft’s productivity applications, the break came when the world transitioned from text-based DOS applications to graphical user interfaces, in the mid-1980s. But as the industry shifted from text to graphical interfaces, it created an opening, as every application needed to be rewritten to support the new paradigm of dropdown menus, icons, toolbars, and the mouse. While Microsoft redesigned and rethought their applications, their competitors were too stuck in the old world, and so Word and Excel leapfrogged their competitors. Then in an ensuing stroke of product marketing genius, it was combined into the Microsoft Office suite, which promptly became a colossus. Much effort was put toward making each application within the suite work with each other. For example, an Excel chart would be embedded within a Microsoft Word document—this was called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)—which made the combination of the products more powerful. In other words, the product really matters, and bundling can provide a huge distribution advantage, but it can only go so far. It’s an echo of what we now see in the internet age, where Twitter might drive users to its now-defunct livestreaming platform Periscope, or Google might push everyone to use Google Meet. It can work, but only when the product is great. This is part of why the concept of bundling as been around forever—the McDonald’s Happy Meal was launched in the 1970s, and cable companies have been bundling TV channels since their start. But at the heart of these bundling stories are important, iconic products that reinvent the market.

A wearable, writing-enhancing object serves several important purposes. First, it helps you transition from the world of everyday living into the fictional realms you’ve created. In the former you are a normal person, working a normal job. In the latter, you are an all-powerful deity capable of laying waste to entire cities with a few taps of the keyboard.

If in a more contemporary – and of course nocturnal – moment, one were to gaze celestial-ward and focus among the 300 stars which shine most brightly, they would typically be viewing an object that is coincidentally located nearly 400 light years aloft. This, in contrast to our sun’s rays which bide their transit to visual awareness for a mere 8 minutes and 20 seconds. Thus, the average image beheld will be yet occupying its existence at the conclusion of the Age of Discovery – meaning that its now moment will arrive on this orb well in advance of the glinting from the 150,000th yesterday of even the most conspicuously perceived of the 100 billion plus other stars coexisting this galaxy. To further simplify the matter, even if during this precise moment the scrutinized star were to core-collapse and become reborn as an invisible black hole, it would nonetheless – assuming averageness, as well as sufficient continuity of its gazer's lineage – persist as a celestial wonder under the watchful eye of one's prospective great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. Then quite plausibly several generations beyond the last. This of course, is taking into account only the nearest of them. The most remote star visible to the naked eye from earth is approximately 10,000 light years away – commonly known as Rho Cassiopeiae if you’re the curious sort – and is not only 450 times larger but 500,000 times brighter than our sun. Stars can likewise be squeezed into a collective ball – or globular cluster – allowing one’s eyes to telescope across 25,000 light years. Yet even this is relatively like yesterday if considering that the Andromeda (the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way) is also visible without optical aid in a moderately dark sky and projected to the earth’s surface as it was two-and-a-half million years ago – well before any human was around to gaze at all. If one were to then ponder the outer limits of actual telescopes, ocular time travel suddenly leaps forward – or more technically hindward – to as many as four-and-a-half billion years; which incidentally, is the approximate age of this planet itself. In any case, once glancing skyward one will tend to become unconsciously immersed into an unknowably distant past, even while experiencing a deepened fixation on the present. So too it is when becoming absorbed by the onset of a worthwhile story...

Art playing on its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object was still an art of great works. But art playing at re-cycling itself indefinitely by helping itself to reality? Most contemporary art is engaged in just this: appropriating banality, the throwaway, mediocrity as value and as ideology. In these innumerable installations and performances, what is going on is merely a compromise with the state of things - and simultaneously with all the past forms of the history of art. An admission of unoriginality, banality and worthlessness, elevated into a perverse aesthetic value, if not indeed a perverse aesthetic pleasure. Admittedly, it is claimed that all this mediocrity is sublimated in the transition to the level of art, which is distanced and ironic. But it is just as worthless and insignificant at that level as before. Transition to the aesthetic level rescues nothing. In fact the opposite is true: it is mediocrity raised to the second power. It claims to be worthless: 'I'm worthless, I'm worthless!' and it really is worthless!

A child’s attachment to his mother is a complicated yet crucial psychological business. In normal childhood development, at first the child’s whole world is the mother. Then, sometime between the infant and toddler stages, the child realizes that he’s separate from his mother and experiences separation anxiety, crying when she isn’t in sight. Often, to avoid the anxiety, he adopts an object that represents the security of the mother-child attachment. This becomes the transitional attachment object. It’s usually a blanket or a plush toy, and the toddler takes it everywhere, especially to bed. The transitional object helps the child bridge the gap between dependence and independence.

Dirac’s quantum mechanics thus allows us to do two things. First, to calculate which values a physical variable may assume. This is called “calculation of the spectrum of a variable”; it captures the granular nature of things. When an object (atom, electromagnetic field, molecule, pendulum, stone, star, and the like) interacts with something else, the values computed are those that its variables can assume in the interaction (relationism). The second thing that Dirac’s quantum mechanics allows us to do is to compute the probability that this or that value of a variable appears at next interaction. This is called “calculation of an amplitude of transition.” Probability expresses the third feature of the theory: indeterminacy, the fact that it does not give unique predictions, only probabilistic ones.

Since, pending more evidence, there is no reason to suppose that the so-called transitional objects play any special role in a child's development, cognitive or other, a more appropriate term for them would be simply 'substitute objects'.

What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.

Fall in love with Emotional Reason. Be objective. Make sense of things when you can and use meditation moments when you can't. The consciousness of Earth is based on shared beliefs. Those beliefs can change any time and at any moment because the Universe is always buzzing with curiosity wondering, “What am I, what am I?” Align yourself with that again. You are so much more than you think. You have a wealth of powers within you, so let’s wake them up and learn how to use them. The knowledge comes from within. This is an incredible time to be alive, the transition from sleep to awake.

We went out into the hall and I opened the door for her. The neighbours from the flat below were standing outside on the pavement in the grey afternoon, shabby in their coats. At the sound of the door they turned to look, their faces grim and suspicious, and Jane returned their look imperiously. I imagined her in the dusk of a Paris garden, untouched in her white dress, an object thirsting if not for interpretation then the fulfilment at least of an admiring human gaze, like a painting hanging on a wall, waiting.

The psychological basis of all grief and mourning is attachment. Attachment and dependence occur because we feel incomplete within ourselves; therefore, we seek objects, people, relationships, places, and concepts to fulfill inner needs. Because they are unconsciously utilized to fulfill an inner need, they come to be identified as “mine.” As more energy is poured into them, there is a transition from identifying with the external objects as “mine” to being an actual extension of “me.” Loss of the object or person is experienced as a loss of our own self and an important part of our emotional economy. Loss is experienced as a diminution of the quality of ourselves, which the object or person represented. The more emotional energy invested in the object or person, the greater will be the feeling of loss and the greater the pain associated with the undoing of the bonds of dependence. Attachment creates a dependency, and dependency, because of its nature, intrinsically carries with it a fear of loss.

Back home, I carefully washed my hands with soap, did the same to my face, then sat down on the floor and watched the day transition into night. As the dresser and the floor and the walls and the places where they met sank into blue, I stared at my hands, my skin, and the outline of my body taking on the same blue as every other object in the room. I flipped my hands over occasionally, made a fist or spread my fingers. There were so many wrinkles, so many joints in my fingers, veins bulging from the backs of my hands.

But there is a crucial moment, a point of no return, for which we must always remain vigilant. the corner is turned the instant our friends' support turns from compassion to pity. It is the moment those around us began to think of us as victims. We must catch this transition when it happens because we must refuse their pity. We must reject it as if it is contaminated, because psychologically speaking, it is. Unless we are survivors of truly tragic circumstances or we have gone through authentic and terrible hardships, it is always extremely detrimental to accept pity from others and embrace victimhood. By succumbing to the special attention pity offers us, the convenience of lowered expectations, and other secondary gains associated with being objections of others' sorrow, we become victims in our own eyes as well as those of others.

The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows: Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror. Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage. Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government. Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West. Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.

A start can and should be carefully designed, like an object. A beginning can and should be nurtured, like a plant. Starts take place on a schedule, as a result of decisions. They are signaled by announcements: “On March 25, the 24 district branches will be consolidated into 6 regional offices.” Beginnings, on the other hand, are the final phase of this organic process that we call “transition,” and their timing is not set by the dates written on an implementation schedule. Beginnings follow the timing of the mind and heart.

ACCEPT THE REALITY AND IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECTIVE LOSSES Don’t argue with what you hear. In the first place, it will stop the conversation, and you won’t learn any more. In the second place, loss is a subjective experience, and your “objective” view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant. Finally, you’ll just make your task more difficult by convincing people that you don’t understand them—or, worse yet, that you don’t care what they feel and think.

The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws. Any social organization will therefore tend to discourage or play down analyses that anticipate its demise. This alone helps ensure that history’s great transitions are seldom spotted as they happen. If you know nothing else about the future, you can rest assured that dramatic changes will be neither welcomed nor advertised by conventional thinkers. You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why. If you wish to understand the great transition now under way, you have little choice but to figure it out for yourself.

From the outside, looking at a woman objectively, there’s no obvious single transition point which marks the beginning of this odyssey. Menarche, the first occurrence of menstruation and a gateway to adulthood, is easily identifiable; pregnancy, a gateway to motherhood, is even more visible. But the features of menopause — that final, great biological upheaval in a woman’s life — aren’t nearly so obvious from the outside and are often deliberately concealed. To add to the complexity, the passage lasts for a much longer period of time. Usually, it starts during our “midlife” years. Perimenopause, sometimes called “menopause transition,” kicks off several years before menopause itself, and is defined as the time during which our ovaries gradually begin to make less estrogen. This usually happens in our forties, but in some instances it can begin in our thirties or, in rare cases, even earlier. During perimenopause, the ovaries are effectively winding down, and irregularities are common. Some months women continue to ovulate — sometimes even twice in the same cycle — while in other months no egg is released. Though four to six years is the average span, perimenopause can last for as little as a year or it can go on for more than ten. Menopause is usually declared after twelve months have passed without a period. In the US, the average age at which menopause is recorded is fifty-one years, though around one in a hundred women reach this point before the age of forty. Four years is the typical duration of menopause, but around one in ten women experiences physical and psychological challenges that last for up to twelve years — challenges which include depression, anxiety, insomnia, hot flashes, night sweats, and reduced libido. Sometimes, these challenges are significant; at their most severe they can present as risks to physical or mental health, and women need help to manage them.

Some kind of partial romance can suffice for some people throughout their lives, serving as an end in and of itself. One thinks, for example, of George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated epistolary romances, in which he eschewed an actual meeting with the object of his affection; or of Kafka’s, which suffered serious, ultimately fatal, damage when Kafka gave way to the inevitable insistence upon an occasional meeting in person. For others, partial romance is a transitional phase, serving as a slow induction into love itself.