Transitions For Explaining Quotes

Don’t waste your time trying to explain yourself to people that are committed to misunderstanding you. Instead, commit your time to explaining who they are to them. When you get a person to see the positive similarities you share, it begins to restore the loss of respect between you.

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.

Trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.

A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses.

We will go on producing myths, ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves but, like everything else about us, they are in constant transition and we must not fundamentalise any of them.

There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ... Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower... I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms. When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism. But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.

Now we’re going to transition into the pigeon pose,” the female instructor said serenely. “I don’t know what that is!” Lacey yelled at the TV. “Why don’t you ever explain it to us?” With that, yoga was over.

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: "The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps, He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory." Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never -seen- in the rocks. Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study. [Evolution’s Erratic Pace - "Natural History," May, 1977]

After a moment or two a man in brown crimplene looked in at us, did not at all like the look of us and asked us if we were transit passengers. We said we were. He shook his head with infinite weariness and told us that if we were transit passengers then we were supposed to be in the other of the two rooms. We were obviously very crazy and stupid not to have realized this. He stayed there slumped against the door jamb, raising his eyebrows pointedly at us until we eventually gathered our gear together and dragged it off down the corridor to the other room. He watched us go past him shaking his head in wonder and sorrow at the stupid futility of the human condition in general and ours in particular, and then closed the door behind us. The second room was identical to the first. Identical in all respects other than one, which was that it had a hatchway let into one wall. A large vacant-looking girl was leaning through it with her elbows on the counter and her fists jammed up into her cheekbones. She was watching some flies crawling up the wall, not with any great interest because they were not doing anything unexpected, but at least they were doing something. Behind her was a table stacked with biscuits, chocolate bars, cola, and a pot of coffee, and we headed straight towards this like a pack of stoats. Just before we reached it, however, we were suddenly headed off by a man in blue crimplene, who asked us what we thought we were doing in there. We explained that we were transit passengers on our way to Zaire, and he looked at us as if we had completely taken leave of our senses. 'Transit passengers? he said. 'It is not allowed for transit passengers to be in here.' He waved us magnificently away from the snack counter, made us pick up all our gear again, and herded us back through the door and away into the first room where, a minute later, the man in the brown crimplene found us again. He looked at us. Slow incomprehension engulfed him, followed by sadness, anger, deep frustration and a sense that the world had been created specifically to cause him vexation. He leaned back against the wall, frowned, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. 'You are in the wrong room,' he said simply. `You are transit passengers. Please go to the other room.' There is a wonderful calm that comes over you in such situations, particularly when there is a refreshment kiosk involved. We nodded, picked up our gear in a Zen-like manner and made our way back down the corridor to the second room. Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off.

I am always frightened of something which exists in the majority of people, but which I cannot explain. The young generation of the period of transition were like me. In our mind we despised our slavery, but we ourselves became cowardly slaves.

I'd forgotten, I said to him, how relieving the anonymity of city life could be. People weren't forever having to explain themselves here: a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand. Where I had lived before, in the countryside, each individual was the unique, often illegible representation of their own acts and aims. So much got lost or mistaken, I said, in the process of self-explanation; so many words failed to maintain an integral meaning.

I am always frightened of something which exists in the majority of people, but which I cannot explain. The young generation of the period of transition were like me. In our mind we despised our slavery, but we ourselves became cowardly slaves. Our hatred was deep and passionate, but barren, like the mad love of a eunuch.

For evolution to be true, there would have been innumerable transitional forms between different types of creatures. Therefore, for every known fossil species, many more must have existed to connect it to its ancestors and descendents [sic]. This is yet another example of evolutionary conclusions coming before the evidence. Really, the claim is an implicit admission that large numbers of transitional forms are predicted, which heightens the difficulty for evolutionists, given how few there are that even they could begin to claim were candidates. . . . Evolutionists believe that mutation provides new information for selection. But no known mutation has ever increased genetic information, although there should be many examples observable today if mutation/selection were truly adequate to explain the goo-to-you theory. . . . Adaptation and natural selection are biological facts; amoeba-to-man evolution is not. Natural selection can only work on the genetic information present in a population of organisms--it cannot create new information. For example, since no known reptiles have genes for feathers, no amount of selection will produce a feathered reptile. Mutations in genes can only modify or eliminate existing structures, not create new ones. If in a certain environment a lizard survives better with smaller legs, or no legs, then varieties with this trait will be selected for. This might more accurately be called devolution, not evolution. . . . Note that even if such a mutation were ever discovered, evolutionists would still need to find hundreds more to give their theory the observational boost it desperately needs.

There’s a fourth technique of motivational interviewing, which is often recommended for the end of a conversation and for transition points: summarizing. The idea is to explain your understanding of other people’s reasons for change, to check on whether you’ve missed or misrepresented anything, and to inquire about their plans and possible next steps.

Thus we see, that the mind can undergo many changes, and can pass sometimes to a state of greater perfection, sometimes to a state of lesser perfection. These passive states of transition explain to us the emotions of pleasure and pain. By pleasure therefore in the following propositions I shall signify a passive state wherein the mind passes to a greater perfection. By pain I shall signify a passive state wherein the mind passes to a lesser perfection. Further, the emotion of pleasure in reference to the body and mind together I shall call stimulation (titillatio) or merriment (hilaritas), the emotion of pain in the same relation I shall call suffering or melancholy. But we must bear in mind, that stimulation and suffering are attributed to man, when one part of his nature is more affected than the rest, merriment and melancholy, when all parts are alike affected. What I mean by desire I have explained in the note to Prop. ix. of this part; beyond these three I recognize no other primary emotion; I will show as I proceed, that all other emotions arise from these three.

Here’s a story I heard: somewhere there was a transgender woman trying to explain her transition to a geeky-but-otherwise-clueless friend. Nothing she tried could really convey what she was going through to him, until she described it in terms he could grasp. “It’s like I’m the Doctor,” she said. “Except I’m regenerating into a woman.” His eyes lit up. He got it then.

Once she believes his version of the relationship—that he is "good" and she is "bad," that he is "right" and she is "wrong," that her deficiencies are the cause of his blow-ups, and that he is acting this way only because he is trying to help her become a better person—she has stepped into a dangerous twilight zone of distorted perceptions. Accepting his version of reality means she must give up hers. It's Alice in Wonderland time. She may still know that she is being mistreated, but she invents "good reasons" to explain it away. What makes this transition so destructive to her is that she actually has begun to help him to abuse her. She suspends her own good judgement, joins him in his persecution of her, and finds explanations to justify his behavior.

This wild animal must be different. By the way,” he said, turning to Grant, “if they’re all born females, how do they breed? You never explained that bit about the frog DNA.” “It’s not frog DNA,” Grant said. “It’s amphibian DNA. But the phenomenon happens to be particularly well documented in frogs. Especially West African frogs, if I remember.” “What phenomenon is that?” “Gender transition,” Grant said. “Actually, it’s just plain changing sex.” Grant explained that a number of plants and animals were known to have the ability to change their sex during life—orchids, some fish and shrimp, and now frogs. Frogs that had been observed to lay eggs were able to change, over a period of months, into complete males. They first adopted the fighting stance of males, they developed the mating whistle of males, they stimulated the hormones and grew the gonads of males, and eventually they successfully mated with females. “You’re kidding,” Gennaro said. “And what makes it happen?” “Apparently the change is stimulated by an environment in which all the animals are of the same sex. In that situation, some of the amphibians will spontaneously begin to change sex from female to male.” “And you think that’s what happened to the dinosaurs?” “Until we have a better explanation, yes,” Grant said. “I think that’s what happened. Now, shall we find this nest?

I’ve always appreciated authors who explain their points simply, right up front. So here’s the argument in brief: 1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy. 2. Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries. 3. Applying the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better.

In one extreme case, WMATA planner William Herman complained that the system's main transfer station was badly named. He argued that '12th and G' was both confusing (several entrances would be on other streets) and too undistinguished for so important a station. Ever reasonable, Graham agreed to let Herman choose a better name. 'I'll let you know,' responded a relieved Herman. 'No,' Graham explained, 'I'll give you twenty seconds.' Stunned, Herman blurted out the first words that came into his head: 'Metro Center.' 'Fine, that's it, go on to the next one,' replied the general. And they did.

If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere? In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.

All family narratives take one of three shapes,” Marshall explained. First is the ascending family narrative: We came from nothing, we worked hard, we made it big. Next, the descending narrative: We used to have it all. Then we lost everything. “The most healthful narrative,” he continued, “is the third one.” It’s called the oscillating family narrative. We’ve had ups and downs in our family. Your grandfather was vice president of the bank, but his house burned down. Your aunt was the first girl to go to college, but she got breast cancer. Children who know that lives take all different shapes are much better equipped to face life’s inevitable disruptions.

In psychometric surveys, Yaden and his colleagues have asked people to think and write about their intense spiritual experiences, and then to answer questions about them. This allowed the researchers to sort the experiences into various types. Did they feature a sense of Unity? God? A Voice or Vision? Synchronicity? Awe? After classifying the experiences, the researchers asked what triggered them. And of a very long list, they found two items that consistently appeared as major triggers: “transitional period of life” and “being close to death.” In other words: an intense awareness of passing time—the hallmark of bittersweetness itself. Yaden’s work explains why “sad” music, like Leonard Cohen’s, isn’t really sad at all: why it’s rooted in brokenness, but points at transcendence.

If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance,” I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-youdidn’t” sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us. Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other people started reading me as female, they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience—with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions—completely off the hook.

The final misconception is that evolution is “just a theory.” I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that evolution is unproven, because (following an unuseful convention in the field) it is a “theory” (like, say, germ theory). Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: Numerous examples where changing selective pressures have changed gene frequencies in populations within generations (e.g., bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance). Moreover, there are also examples (mostly insects, given their short generation times) of a species in the process of splitting into two. Voluminous fossil evidence of intermediate forms in numerous taxonomic lineages. Molecular evidence. We share ~98 percent of our genes with the other apes, ~96 percent with monkeys, ~75 percent with dogs, ~20 percent with fruit flies. This indicates that our last common ancestor with other apes lived more recently than our last common ancestor with monkeys, and so on. Geographic evidence. To use Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with a fundamentalist insisting that all species emerged in their current forms from Noah’s ark—how come all thirty-seven species of lemurs that made landfall on Mt. Ararat in the Armenian highlands hiked over to Madagascar, none dying and leaving fossils in transit? Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal.

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.

When they come to explain about the two Transits of Venus, and the American Work filling the Years between, “By Heaven, a ‘Sandwich,’” cries Mr. Edgewise. “Take good care, Sirs, that something don’t come along and eat it!” His pleasure at being able to utter a recently minted word, is at once much curtailed by the volatile Chef de Cuisine Armand Allègre, who rushes from the Kitchen screaming. “Sond-weech-uh! Sond-weech-uh!,” gesticulating as well, “To the Sacrament of the Eating, it is ever the grand Insult!” Cries of “Anti-Britannic!” and “Shame, Mounseer!” Mitzi clutches herself. “No Mercy! Oh, he’s so ’cute!” Young Dimdown may be seen working himself up to a level of indignation that will allow him at least to pull out his naked Hanger again, and wave it about a bit. “Where I come from,” he offers, “Lord Sandwich is as much respected for his nobility as admired for his Ingenuity, in creating the great modern Advance in Diet which bears his name, and I would suggest,— without of course wishing to offend,— that it ill behooves some bloody little toad-eating foreigner to speak his name in any but a respectful manner.” “Had I my batterie des couteaux,” replies the Frenchman, with more gallantry than sense, “before that ridiculous little blade is out of his sheath, I can bone you,— like the Veal!

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 Fossil Record: No Sign of Intermediate Forms The clearest evidence that the scenario suggested by the theory of evolution did not take place is the fossil record. According to this theory, every living species has sprung from a predecessor. A previously existing species turned into something else over time and all species have come into being in this way. In other words, this transformation proceeds gradually over millions of years. Had this been the case, numerous intermediary species should have existed and lived within this long transformation period. For instance, some half-fish/half-reptiles should have lived in the past which had acquired some reptilian traits in addition to the fish traits they already had. Or there should have existed some reptile-birds, which acquired some bird traits in addition to the reptilian traits they already had. Since these would be in a transitional phase, they should be disabled, defective, crippled living beings. Evolutionists refer to these imaginary creatures, which they believe to have lived in the past, as "transitional forms." If such animals ever really existed, there should be millions and even billions of them in number and variety. More importantly, the remains of these strange creatures should be present in the fossil record. In The Origin of Species, Darwin explained: If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all of the species of the same group together must assuredly have existed... Consequently, evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains.

Suppose you entered a boat race. One hundred rowers, each in a separate rowboat, set out on a ten-mile race along a wide and slow-moving river. The first to cross the finish line will win $10,000. Halfway into the race, you’re in the lead. But then, from out of nowhere, you’re passed by a boat with two rowers, each pulling just one oar. No fair! Two rowers joined together into one boat! And then, stranger still, you watch as that rowboat is overtaken by a train of three such rowboats, all tied together to form a single long boat. The rowers are identical septuplets. Six of them row in perfect synchrony while the seventh is the coxswain, steering the boat and calling out the beat for the rowers. But those cheaters are deprived of victory just before they cross the finish line, for they in turn are passed by an enterprising group of twenty-four sisters who rented a motorboat. It turns out that there are no rules in this race about what kinds of vehicles are allowed. That was a metaphorical history of life on Earth. For the first billion years or so of life, the only organisms were prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself. But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus.35 These are the two-person rowboats in my example. Cells that had internal organelles could reap the benefits of cooperation and the division of labor (see Adam Smith). There was no longer any competition between these organelles, for they could reproduce only when the entire cell reproduced, so it was “one for all, all for one.” Life on Earth underwent what biologists call a “major transition.”36 Natural selection went on as it always had, but now there was a radically new kind of creature to be selected. There was a new kind of vehicle by which selfish genes could replicate themselves. Single-celled eukaryotes were wildly successful and spread throughout the oceans.

Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy-a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial "food" molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set). Moreover an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn't matter how much investment got poured into the country. "If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas." But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation-what some economists have called an "economic takeoff." The existence of that phase transition would also help explain why trade is so important to prosperity, Kauffman told Arthur. Suppose you have two different countries, each one of which is subcritical by itself. Their economies are going nowhere. But now suppose they start trading, so that their economies become interlinked into one large economy with a higher complexity. "I expect that trade between such systems will allow the joint system to become supercritical and explode outward." Finally, an autocatalytic set can undergo exactly the same kinds of evolutionary booms and crashes that an economy does. Injecting one new kind of molecule into the soup could often transform the set utterly, in much the same way that the economy transformed when the horse was replaced by the automobile. This was part of autocatalysis that really captivated Arthur. It had the same qualities that had so fascinated him when he first read about molecular biology: upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events-and yet with deep law hidden beneath.

What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife. Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.” Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities. The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts. Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.” One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.” That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

I have arranged the passages that I have chosen for reflection in roughly chronological order. The book of Jeremiah is not itself arranged chronologically, and there is far more in it than biography. That means that readers not infrequently puzzle over transitions and wrestle to find the appropriate settings for the sayings. I have not attempted to sort out these puzzles or explain the difficulties.

My concern always has been with how—not why—people make transitions out of relationships. Many times the people I talked to did not understand why themselves. Even when they thought they knew, the reasons changed, so that what seemed to explain it at one time often did not seem important six months later.

Chief Fabretti was trying to get up to speed before officially starting on Monday, Miriam explained, and was requesting a quick informal meet and greet with his transition team at his house up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

Supporting the grieving process The grief associated with a toddler’s separation from caregivers with whom he has had a strong attachment is unavoidable. To try to deny or avoid displays of grief is magical thinking on the part of adults. Acknowledging and supporting their child’s grief is one of the first acts of love adoptive parents can give their new son or daughter. The more directly involved toddlers are in the preparation and transition process, the less confused they will be about what is happening to them and the less they will rely on magical thinking to explain the loss of former caregivers. The more concrete the transition and placement processes are, the more toddlers will be able to process what is happening, and the less they will be fearful. Talking to toddlers during the preparation for and adjustment to a change in placement is intended to support grieving by confronting their magical thinking and assuring them that they are not responsible for the loss. Toddlers need to be told who will take care of them and be assured that someone will be with them at all times during the transition. Other messages that support the toddler’s grieving include: “It was not your fault that you moved. You didn’t do anything bad. It’s OK for you to cry and be mad. I’ll be right here to take care of you.

Control is another prevalent issue for young adopted children. After all, if you’d been separated, moved, had your name changed—your whole life changed in an instant—might you not worry about control? Adopted children know it’s not just a fantasy that things can happen to you. They know you can lose parents. You can be taken and moved. These things happened at least once to every child who is adopted. As a result they often need to know everything that is going to happen and to have it explained many times. They may have difficulty at night falling asleep. This difficulty is not simply a ploy to stay up later and later (although this may enter the picture), it’s an expression of the fact that when you go to sleep, you lose control. Some adopted children seem to adapt quickly to nearly any situation: it is a resilient skill. Internally, however, the transitions are very difficult.

1 = Very important. Do this at once. 2 = Worth doing but takes more time. Start planning it. 3 = Yes and no. Depends on how it’s done. 4 = Not very important. May even be a waste of effort. 5 = No! Don’t do this. Fill in those numbers before you read further, and take your time. This is not a simple situation, and solving it is a complicated undertaking. Possible Actions to Take ____ Explain the changes again in a carefully written memo. ____ Figure out exactly how individuals’ behavior and attitudes will have to change to make teams work. ____ Analyze who stands to lose something under the new system. ____ Redo the compensation system to reward compliance with the changes. ____ “Sell” the problem that is the reason for the change. ____ Bring in a motivational speaker to give employees a powerful talk about teamwork. ____ Design temporary systems to contain the confusion during the cutover from the old way to the new. ____ Use the interim between the old system and the new to improve the way in which services are delivered by the unit—and, where appropriate, create new services. ____ Change the spatial arrangements so that the cubicles are separated only by glass or low partitions. ____ Put team members in contact with disgruntled clients, either by phone or in person. Let them see the problem firsthand. ____ Appoint a “change manager” to be responsible for seeing that the changes go smoothly. ____ Give everyone a badge with a new “teamwork” logo on it. ____ Break the change into smaller stages. Combine the firsts and seconds, then add the thirds later. Change the managers into coordinators last. ____ Talk to individuals. Ask what kinds of problems they have with “teaming.” ____ Change the spatial arrangements from individual cubicles to group spaces. ____ Pull the best people in the unit together as a model team to show everyone else how to do it. ____ Give everyone a training seminar on how to work as a team. ____ Reorganize the general manager’s staff as a team and reconceive the GM’s job as that of a coordinator. ____ Send team representatives to visit other organizations where service teams operate successfully. ____ Turn the whole thing over to the individual contributors as a group and ask them to come up with a plan to change over to teams. ____ Scrap the plan and find one that is less disruptive. If that one doesn’t work, try another. Even if it takes a dozen plans, don’t give up. ____ Tell them to stop dragging their feet or they’ll face disciplinary action. ____ Give bonuses to the first team to process 100 client calls in the new way. ____ Give everyone a copy of the new organization chart. ____ Start holding regular team meetings. ____ Change the annual individual targets to team targets, and adjust bonuses to reward team performance. ____ Talk about transition and what it does to people. Give coordinators a seminar on how to manage people in transition. There are no correct answers in this list, but over time I’ve

I would talk with all bakers. I would explain what improvements I would be making to their systems such that, if they chose to, they could compete with me. Just because I am tasked with baking doesn’t mean that my skills should be limited to myself. I would open-source my factories and spread my value to the world. And I would still be better, eventually, or at something. I would sit and talk with the bakers and help them plan for the future. I would write letters on their behalf to the governments of the world asking for assistance in transferring them to work where they might have more meaningful output. If the governments of the world did not respond with aid I would do my best to acquire wealth so that I might support those I displace with my own hands. Those with ability to skilfully transition to other areas would be better off, just as all humans would, by living in a world where food is cheaper and better. Those, such as the elderly, who could not transition to a new source of income would have to be supported by me or by society as a whole.”  Myrodyn smiled, then covered his mouth. I suspected that he had not meant to display such a sign of joy. And

many in the social sciences like to think of themselves as “value neutral.” We don’t particularly believe in that. We do believe that social science should do its best to avoid distorting biases, to prevent ideologies from skewing its findings, in order in the end to describe and explain what is true about what is real in social life. But note that that depends not on “value neutrality” but on its opposite: on value commitments to truth, scientific integrity, accountability, and so on. Those are nothing if not values driven by beliefs in what is good. Good science is thus always based not on bracketing or setting aside particular human notions of what is good, but rather on an absolute commitment to particular goods, like telling the truth, being willing to be shown to be wrong, etcetera.

The main problem facing immigrant communities was to change the sort of sociability they practiced from an ascriptive to a voluntary form. That is, the traditional social structures they brought with them were based on family, ethnicity, geographic origin, or some other characteristic with which they were born. For the first generation that landed in the United States, they created the trust necessary for revolving credit associations, family restaurants, laundries, and grocery stores. But in subsequent generations they could become a constraint, narrowing the range of business opportunities and keeping descendants in ethnic ghettoes. For the most successful ethnic groups, the sons and daughters of first-generation immigrants had to learn a broader kind of sociability that would get them jobs in the mainstream business world or in the professions. The speed with which immigrants could make the transition from a member of an ethnic enclave to assimilated mainstream American explains how the United States could be both ethnically diverse and strongly disposed to community at the same time. In many other societies, the descendants of immigrants were never permitted to leave their ethnic ghetto. Although solidarity within the ethnic enclave remained high, the society as a whole was balkanized and conflicted. Diversity can have clear benefits for a society, but is better taken in small sips than in large gulps. It is easily possible to have too diverse a society, in which people not only fail to share higher values and aspirations but even fail to speak the same language. The possibilities for spontaneous sociability then begin to flow only within the cleavage lines established by race, ethnicity, language, and the like. Assimilation through language policy and education must balance ethnicity if broader community is to be possible. The United States presents a mixed and changing picture. If we take into account factors like America’s religious culture and ethnicity, there are ample grounds for categorizing it simultaneously as both an individualistic and a group-oriented society. Those who see only the individualism are ignoring a critical part of American social history. “Yet the balance has been shifting toward individualism rapidly in the last couple of decades, so it is perhaps no accident that Asians and others see it as the epitome of an individualistic society. This shift has created numerous problems for the United States, many of which will play themselves out in the economic sphere.

This resiliency of hunting and gathering is now thought to explain why it survived for two million years before giving way to agriculture. In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture.

China and oil, remember? Okay, here goes. This caught me by surprise—China is the second largest importer of oil in the world, after only you-know-who. Its economy grows at nearly 10 percent and its appetite for oil is all but insatiable, growing at 8 percent a year. You see, they decided to go with cars instead of sticking with mass transit.” “Big mistake,” Jeff said. “Cars are a dead end.” “Maybe, but you need an enormous infrastructure to support a thriving car industry and it is a quick way to provide jobs while giving the industrial base a huge boost. Plus, factories that produce cars can easily be converted to military needs.” She gave him a cockeyed smile. “Remember that crack about cars when you go shopping for one next month. I’ve seen you trolling the Web sites. Anyway, within twenty years they’ll have more cars than the U.S. and that same year they’ll be importing just as much oil as we do. So here’s the deal. They don’t have it. Want to guess where they get it from?” “The Middle East?” “No surprise, huh? And who is their biggest supplier?” “Iran. Right?” “You guessed, but yes, that’s right. They signed a deal saying if Iran would give them lots of oil, China would block any American effort to get the United Nations Security Council to do anything significant about its nuclear program. They’ve been doing a lot of deals with each other ever since.” He slipped his computer into his bag. “That explains a lot.” “Oh yeah, these two countries are very cozy indeed. Anyway, China gets most of its oil from Iran. And they don’t just need oil—they need cheap oil because they sell the least expensive gasoline in the world. I think that’s to keep everybody happy driving all those new cars.

Is there a larger metaphysical moral to be drawn from the above analysis of the metaphysics of time and change? I have defined the essence of change as the actualization of a pre-existing potentiality. I have also defined instants as the limits of a process of infinite potential division. It is my contention that these two potentialities are but different aspects of one and the same radical potentiality that lies at the heart of nature itself. Both are necessary for the explanation of change. The actualization of potentiality would not be possible without the potentiality that characterizes time; and if, as I would also contend (without space for a defense here) there is no time without change, the potentiality at the root of time would not be possible without the eduction of form from potentiality that is the essential note of change. In change, form succeeds form: every coming-to-be is a passing-away and every passing-away is a coming-to-be. Change is, then, a continuous process of loss and gain that is without gap and without contradiction. Change is instantaneous: without instants as limits it could not take place. To search for an actual instant of change, however, is to search in vain, for there are no actual instants at all. To search for a transition that does not consist in the actualization of potentiality is to search for a chimera. Transition there must be, and without the exceedingly small there is no transition; but to look for it in the exceedingly small is to miss its presence in the process at large. Ultimately the process is unfathomable – as unfathomable as the very potentiality that explains the finitude of the material universe and everything within it. In metaphysics, this is all the explanation we can hope for. In metaphysics, this is all the explanation we need.

If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.

But lest some suppose, from what has been said by us, that we say that whatever happens, happens by a fatal necessity, because it is foretold as known beforehand, this too we explain. We have learned from the prophets, and we hold it to be true, that punishments, and chastisements, and good rewards, are rendered according to the merit of each man’s actions. Since if it be not so, but all things happen by fate, neither is anything at all in our own power. For if it be fated that this man, e.g., be good, and this other evil, neither is the former meritorious nor the latter to be blamed. And again, unless the human race have the power of avoiding evil and choosing good by free choice, they are not accountable for their actions, of whatever kind they be. But that it is by free choice they both walk uprightly and stumble, we thus demonstrate. We see the same man making a transition to opposite things. Now, if it had been fated that he were to be either good or bad, he could never have been capable of both the opposites, nor of so many transitions. But not even would some be good and others bad, since we thus make fate the cause of evil, and exhibit her as acting in opposition to herself; or that which has been already stated would seem to be true, that neither virtue nor vice is anything, but that things are only reckoned good or evil by opinion; which, as the true word shows, is the greatest impiety and wickedness. But this we assert is inevitable fate, that they who choose the good have worthy rewards, and they who choose the opposite have their merited awards. For not like other things, as trees and quadrupeds, which cannot act by choice, did God make man: for neither would he be worthy of reward or praise did he not of himself choose the good, but were created for this end; nor, if he were evil, would he be worthy of punishment, not being evil of himself, but being able to be nothing else than what he was made.

Population momentum is a consequence of the demographic transition. Population momentum explains why a population will continue to grow even if the fertility rate declines. Population momentum occurs because it is not only the number of children per woman that determine population growth, but also the number of women in reproductive age. Eventually, when the fertility rate reaches the replacement rate and the population size of women in the reproductive age bracket stabilizes, the population achieves equilibrium and population momentum comes to an end. Population momentum has implications for population policy for a number of reasons. 1. With respect to high-fertility countries (for example in the developing world), a positive population momentum, meaning that the population is increasing, states that these countries will continue to grow despite large and rapid declines in fertility. 2. With respect to lowest-low fertility countries (for example in Europe), a negative population momentum implies that these countries may experience population decline even if they try to increase their rate of fertility to the replacement rate of 2.1. For example, some Eastern European countries show a population shrinkage even if their birth rates recovered to replacement level. Population momentum can become negative if the fertility rate is under replacement level for a long period of time.

But what exactly explained this transformation? To learn more, I plunged into the neuroscience and biochemistry of storytelling; I interviewed experts on the psychological and emotional benefits of life reminiscence; I tracked down pioneers in the nascent disciplines of narrative gerontology, narrative adolescence, and narrative medicine. What I found was a young-but-growing field built around the idea that reimagining and reconstructing our personal stories is vital to living a fulfilling life.

The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.' These words marked an abrupt transition from a previously solid conventional wisdom in which biologists held that organisms adapt to, but do not change, their environments and in which Earth scientists held that geological forces alone could explain the evolution of the atmosphere, crust and oceans.

The transition into the Age of Aquarius closely approximates the move into the Egyptian Age of “the Awakening” and the beginning of a new 65,000-year major cycle.

Moving along the precession of Equinoxes, we are on the verge of transitioning out of the 2,160 year age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. Pisces has the simplified energy of "I believe," which created 2,160 years of believing. Aquarius is the age of "insight and knowledge.

Transitions between epochs and shifting the consciousness and spiritual awareness of an entire planet is a slow process. The gains may seem small at first. Given enough time, they will grow substantially. Just as a single drop on a tin roof barely makes a sound, thousands of raindrops operating in unison are deafening.

We are currently close to transitioning out of the 2,160 -year Piscean Age into the Age of Aquarius. Pisces has the simplified energy of "I believe," which created 2,160 years of believing. Aquarius is the age of "insight and knowledge." It is an age of increased human wisdom, awareness, and expanding consciousness. This transition into Aquarius coincides with the rising of the information age.

You don’t know it, but these are the last moments of the brief courtship you get to have with yourself as a female human being in 1990s America, a courtship in which you do not “love yourself” or “hate yourself” (because those terms would not have made sense to you) but instead have a profound sense of satisfaction with the world around you and your apparent role in it. Then something happens to you. It’s not a single-event trauma. Your parents do not get divorced. No one dies. You are not abused. And yet. Something happens to you. And because you cannot trace what happens to you to a single, traumatic event, you struggle to explain it, struggle for years to admit that anything happened to you at all. But it did. It’s obvious, visible in your face, your posture. A friend in middle school tells you that her mom has asked her, “What happened to Jessica?” What happened to you? It’s a big fish of a question, large and slippery. When you are twelve years old, a book titled Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls becomes a national best-seller. The author, Mary Pipher, writes, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.” Pipher argues that while adolescence has always been a difficult transition for boys and girls alike, there is something in the cultural air of the early 1990s that has spawned an epidemic of depression, self-mutilation, and eating disorders.

This transition into Aquarius coincides with the expanding information age we have entered.

Like a Buddhist master, Rheginos’ teacher, himself anonymous, goes on to explain that ordinary human existence is spiritual death. But the resurrection is the moment of enlightenment: “It is … the revealing of what truly exists … and a migration (metabolē—change, transition) into newness.”45 Whoever grasps this becomes spiritually alive. This means, he declares, that you can be “resurrected from the dead” right now: “Are you—the real you—mere corruption? … Why do you not examine your own self, and see that you have arisen?

Going from one meeting to the next, starting to work on one project and soon after having to transition to another is just part of life in organizations,” Leroy explains. The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

What phenomenon is that?” “Gender transition,” Grant said. “Actually, it’s just plain changing sex.” Grant explained that a number of plants and animals were known to have the ability to change their sex during life—orchids, some fish and shrimp, and now frogs. Frogs that had been observed to lay eggs were able to change, over a period of months, into complete males.

Finally, the theory explained why the resistance drops so abruptly at a certain temperature. It’s much the same reason that water freezes suddenly at 0 degrees Celsius. Both processes are phase transitions, victories of self-organization over random jittering. At the freezing point, water molecules calm down just enough to allow their attractive forces to bond them into a crystal. Similarly, at the superconducting transition temperature, the atomic lattice calms down just enough to allow electrons to form Cooper pairs and coalesce into a Bose-Einstein condensate. In both cases, a fraction of a degree drop in temperature makes all the difference.

This helps to explain why I went from 1974 to 1978 without opening another store, something that could be viewed as inexcusable, given the success of Whole Earth Harry. Again, however, I did the right thing for the wrong reason. When Fair Trade on milk and alcohol blew up in our face in late 1976, we were not locked into too many stores that had been built on the assumption that those 1930s laws would last forever. Among other things, this saved us from having increased our huge investment in liquor licenses, which plunged in value when Fair Trade ended. It left us in better shape to transition from Whole Earth Harry to Mac the Knife, a powerhouse that could draw people from twenty-five miles around, provided you leased stores with the boulevard access that would make that possible.

More to the point, nonlinearity helps explain why we all feel so overwhelmed all the time. Trained to expect that our lives will unfold in a predictable series of stately life chapters, we’re confused when those chapters come faster and faster, frequently out of order, often one on top of the other. But the reality is: We’re all the clouds floating over the horizon, the swirl of cream in the coffee, the jagged dash of lightning. And we’re not aberrations because of this; we’re just like everything else.

Finally, there’s a self-help problem that isn’t unique to the science of happiness: it’s easier to change minds than to change behaviors. As Harvard professor of psychology Tal Ben-Shahar explains, we’re often more willing to learn something new than we are to actively adapt our lives. “Making the transition from theory to practice is difficult: changing deeply rooted habits of thinking, transforming ourselves and our world, requires a great deal of effort,” he writes. “People often abandon theories when they discover how difficult they are to put into practice.”8 Either we never try or we get bored or frustrated quickly.

Even if making precise predictions about which societies will prosper relative to others is difficult, we have seen throughout the book that our theory explains the broad differences in the prosperity and poverty of nations around the world fairly well. We will see in the rest of this chapter that it also provides some guidelines as to what types of societies are more likely to achieve economic growth over the next several decades. First, vicious and virtuous circles generate a lot of persistence and sluggishness. There should be little doubt that in fifty or even a hundred years, the United States and Western Europe, based on their inclusive economic and political institutions, will be richer, most likely considerably richer, than sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central America, or Southeast Asia. However, within these broad patterns there will be major institutional changes in the next century, with some countries breaking the mold and transitioning from poor to rich. Nations that have achieved almost no political centralization, such as Somalia and Afghanistan, or those that have undergone a collapse of the state, such as Haiti did over the last several decades - long before the massive earthquake there in 2010 led to the devastation of the country's infrastructure - are unlikely either to achieve growth under extractive political institutions or to make major changes toward inclusive institutions. Instead, nations likely to grow over the next several decades - albeit probably under extractive institutions - are those that have attained some degree of political centralization. In sub-Saharan Africa this includes Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, nations with long histories of centralized states, and Tanzania, which has managed to build such centralization, or at least put in place some of the prerequisites for centralization, since independence. In Latin America, it includes Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, which have not only achieved political centralization but also made significant strides toward nascent pluralism. Our theory suggests that sustained economic growth is very unlikely in Colombia. Our theory also suggests that growth under extractive political institutions, as in China, will not bring sustained growth, and is likely to run out of steam. Beyond these cases, there is much uncertainty. Cuba, for example, might transition toward inclusive institutions and experience a major economic transformation, or it may linger on under extractive political and economic institutions. The same is true of North Korea and Burma (Myanmar) in Asia. Thus, while our theory provides the tools for thinking about how institutions change and the consequences of such changes, the nature of this change - the role of small differences and contingency - makes more precise predictions difficult.

dissociation, “the escape when there is no escape.”An infant typically seeks his parents when alarmed, so when a parent actually causes alarm the infant is in an unsolvable situation in which it can neither approach or avoid. Neurobiologically this represents a simultaneous and uncoupled hyperactivation of the sympathic and the parasympathic circuits. This is subjectively experienced as a sudden transition into emotional chaos. Sieff asked what might cause a mother to behave in such a harmful way with her baby. Schore answered that this is not a conscious voluntary but an unconscious involuntary response, and that typically women who cannot mother their child in an attuned way are suffering from the consequences of their own unresolved early emotional trauma. The experience of a female infant with her mother influences how she will mother her own infants. Thus if early childhood trauma remains unconscious and unresolved it will inevitably be passed down the generations. Additionally, Sieff asked what role the father plays in a child’s emotional development. Schore explained that children form a second attachment relationship to the father especially during the second year. The quality of the attachment to the father is independent of that to his mother. At eighteen months there are two separate attachment dynamics in operation. It also appears that the father is critically involved in the development of a toddler’s regulation of aggression. This is true of both sexes, but particularly of boys who are born with a greater aggressive endowment than girls. Afterwards, a long discussion followed where Schore highlighted the damaging effects of long bouts of unregulated shame for the toddler, the differences between shame and guilt, and the enduring consequences of early chronic shame. Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of

The cynic knows very well that the symbolic fiction is just a fiction and also “knows” that the imaginary field beneath this symbolic fiction is a reservoir of truth. For the cynic, the status of the imaginary does not come into question. This represents a radical change in the status of belief—this insistence upon the authority of one’s own eyes and the rejection of symbolic authority. In (Per)versions of Love and Hate, Renata Salecl explains this transition through a reference to Groucho Marx: “When Groucho Marx was caught in an obvious lie, his response was: ‘Whom do you believe—my words or your eyes?’ The belief in the big Other is the belief in words, even when they contradict one’s own eyes. What we have today is therefore precisely a mistrust in mere words (that is, in the symbolic fiction). People want to see what is behind the fiction.” This turn away from belief in the symbolic fiction and toward the image beneath it reaches its apotheosis in the postmodern cynic.

Maria knows people who transitoned years before she did, even a couple people who started transitioning like a decade before she did. They're not fuckups. But they're not, like, buddhas, either. She's thought of them as buddhas, in her life, and then been disappointed when they've explained that their enlightenment consists of the same platitudes that every enlightenment consists of: Fuck what people think, and I dunno man, and There is no center at the center of things. It's like, cool, but then how do you repair the damage that a fucking lifetime of not giving a fuck about your life did to you? (185-186)

John Judis and Ruy Teixeira identified a useful distinction between members of this seemingly homogenous demographic—a distinction that can help to explain why two white-collar Americans might vote in opposite ways. They suggested that a group they call “professionals” tend toward the Democratic side. These professionals are typically white-collar workers with college or advanced degrees. They include “academics, architects, engineers, scientists, computer analysts, lawyers, physicians, registered nurses, teachers, social workers, therapists, fashion designers, interior decorators, graphic artists, writers, editors, and actors.” In the 1950s, according to Judis and Teixeira, such professionals represented only 7 percent of the workforce. Today, after a decades-long transition from a blue-collar, industrial economy to one where the engine of growth is ideas and services, they represent more than 15 percent of American workers.

Tea and toast were the rule after long-haul flying. It was one of the great mysteries of the universe, that a person could be fed continuously over the course of a twenty-four-hour transit only to arrive at her destination ravenous. Science was also yet to explain the unique humanizing properties of strawberry jam and butter on warm toast.

The Triple Transformation The Indian seer explains three consecutive stages of this transformation for those who follow the journey of personal transformation (i.e. yoga), Sri Aurobindo, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the supramental. One passes from the outer surface consciousness to the inner consciousness in the first step of the Triple Transformation; the mental subconscious, the subliminal beyond, until one meets the real spirit, that is, the true psychic consciousness. At the spiritual one has separated from the ego-consciousness, one is able to understand and control the limits of one's physical, essential, and emotional nature, and one is brought into contact with celestial, fundamental powers and realities. This is the Transformation of the Psychic. At a further point one grows further in one's being towards other realms of consciousness, like Further Consciousness, Illuminated Thought, and Intuitive Mind. It is an access to the world above, an ascent to the upper of one's lower consciousness and the descent to the bottom of the latter. This is the transformation of the Spirit, beyond the Psychic Transformation. Beyond that there is still the Supramental transition, where one rises to the level of the Supermind, for a radical transformation of the being out of the confusion that is the basis of our being, and into a modern working that transcends the emotional, essential, and physical dimensions. One could be the Supramental Being. These three types are the Triple Transformation which would happen in succession. When one opens up to the Supramental Consciousness, that is, the Force, one lives, one experiences all its advantages. It can change nature, cause falsehoods to evaporate, generate information where misinformation resides, correct problems, give the full truth and awareness, expose solutions that simultaneously provide harmony for multiple parties, require infinite possibilities, possibilities that can transcend space and time, etc.

Dissident psychiatrist John Weir Perry had a theory. He believed that visionaries, prophets, and mad persons are able to descend into the deepest level of the unconscious and access new myths that guide societies in making transitions in times of crisis. Those who are leaders may 'deliver the new myth' that is going to be accepted for the next phase of the culture's evolution. He explained the dynamic in The Heart of History, 'The poetic and prophetic souls possessing the great vision of the new way would become the mouthpieces of the psyche in its dynamic upheaval of renewal. Their effect upon the culture of the world would be to stir a momentous rush of enthusiasm into new concerns.

The transition of the human mind from its initial and infantile state of disconnectedness from the rest of the universe to a state of unity with the universe requires the exercise of four types of freedoms, Einstein explains: freedom from self, freedom of expression, freedom of time, and freedom of independence.

In the spring of 2020, Biden began describing himself as a “transition candidate,” explaining, “We have not given a bench to younger people in the party, the opportunity to have the focus and be in focus for the rest of the country. There’s an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.” Ben Rhodes, an adviser to Obama in the White House, told me, “It’s actually a really powerful idea. It says, ‘I’m a seventy-seven-year-old white man, who was a senator for thirty years, and I understand both those limitations and the nature of this country.’ Because, no matter what he does, he cannot completely understand the frustration of people in the streets. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a reality.” A senior Obama administration official observed that Biden’s acknowledgment also contained a subtler message: “This country needs to just chill the fuck out and have a boring president.” To

The minority stress model is also, conveniently, the go-to explanation for the phenomenon of detransition. A speaker at the AACAP 2022 annual meeting41 explained that when, after social transition and medical treatments, people decide to turn back and live in congruence with their sex, it does not necessarily mean they regret transitioning. “For a small minority, gender trajectories are non-linear and dynamic.” These individuals have “evolving paths.” It is simply “a shift in expression,” and “internal and external factors” must be considered, including family and society stigma. Conservative homes and the military were mentioned.

The general manager of the Cleveland transit system, D. C. Hyde, argued in 1952 that parking was doing the opposite of what its builders believed: “Destroying buildings and using valuable land for more and more parking lots and garages hastens decentralization. . . . It is just as sensible to stop doing things that bring more automobiles into already congested areas as it is to stop buying drinks for a person who is already drunk.

Evidence against Darwinian Evolution Darwinism is unable to say how life could have emerged from non-life. The more we learn about the complexity of the cell, the deeper the problem becomes. If Darwinian evolution were true, we should find millions of transitional forms in the fossil record, but the missing links are still missing. Darwinists say natural selection is evidence of macroevolution. However, natural selection, which is basic science, simply demonstrates change within species. This is called microevolution. Critiquing Darwinism does not make a person anti-science. We all share the same scientific evidence. The question is, what theory or interpretive framework best explains the evidence?

Does my brother, Connor Holstrom, remain in the Bone Quarter, or has his soul passed through the Dead Gate?” The Astronomer whispered, “Luna above.” He fiddled with one of the faintly glowing rings atop his hand. “This question requires a … riskier method of contact than usual. One that borders on the illegal. It will cost you.” Bryce said, “How much?” Scam-artist bullshit. “Another hundred gold marks.” Bryce started, but Ithan said, “Done.” She turned to warn him not to spend one more coin of the considerable inheritance his parents had left him, but the Astronomer hobbled toward a metal cabinet beneath the dials and opened its small doors. He pulled out a bundle wrapped in canvas. Bryce stiffened at the moldy, rotten earth scent that crept from the bundle as he unfolded the fabric to reveal a handful of rust-colored salt. “What the fuck is that?” Ithan asked. “Bloodsalt,” Bryce breathed. Tharion looked to her in question, but she didn’t bother to explain more. Blood for life, blood for death—it was summoning salt infused with the blood from a laboring mother’s sex and blood from a dying male’s throat. The two great transitions of a soul in and out of this world. But to use it here … “You can’t mean to add that to their water,” Bryce said to the Astronomer. The old male hobbled back down the ramp. “Their tanks already contain white salts. The bloodsalt will merely pinpoint their search.

Did not Kant find in the French Revolution the transition from the inorganic form of the state to the organic? Did he not ask himself whether there was any event which could be explained only in terms of a moral disposition of mankind, an event which would demonstrate once and for all the ‘tendency of mankind toward the good'? Kant’s answer: ‘This is the Revolution.’ The instinct which errs without fail, anti-nature as instinct, German decadence as philosophy — that is Kant!

7. Provide alternative explanations for anxiety. One of the primary reasons stereotype threat reduces performance is that the ensuing anxiety distracts a student from the task at hand. So one way to keep performance high is to help kids explain away the anxiety. For example, one study taught middle school students about the difficulties of transitioning to middle school and about the anxiety and worry that many students feel in their classes. They emphasized that this was normal and temporary and would get better over time. Those students were no longer vulnerable to stereotype threat. Some kids have been taught that the anxiety they feel may actually boost their performance (in other words, it is good anxiety). Those kids were also protected from stereotype threat.

You can get some idea of the untapped potential of agriculture by reading F. H. King’s fascinating 1911 book, Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, which explains how these regions sustained enormous populations for millennia on tiny amounts of land, without mechanization, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. Instead, they relied on sophisticated crop rotation, interplanting, and ecological relationships among farm plants, animals, and people. They wasted nothing, including human manure.Their farming was extremely labor-intensive, although, according to King, it was usually conducted at a leisurely pace. In 1907 Japan’s fifty million people were nearly self-sufficient in food; China’s land supported, in some regions, clans of forty or fifty people on a three-acre farm; in the year 1790 China’s population was about the same as that of the United States today!

The transition that we make with age reflects not only our growing experience and shifting philosophies, but also a changing willingness to engage in or condone violence. Young men are the revolutionaries, the superstar computer programmers, the best athletes, the most courageous soldiers, the bravest mountaineers, and the most creative musicians, but they are also the most vicious gang members and nearly all the suicidal terrorists.

Organizations seeking to commercialize open source software realized this, of course, and deliberately incorporated it as part of their market approach. In a 2013 piece on Pando Daily, venture capitalist Danny Rimer quotes then-MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos as saying, “The relational database market is a $9 billion a year market. I want to shrink it to $3 billion and take a third of the market.” While MySQL may not have succeeded in shrinking the market to three billion, it is interesting to note that growing usage of MySQL was concurrent with a declining ability of Oracle to sell new licenses. Which may explain both why Sun valued MySQL at one third of a $3 billion dollar market and why Oracle later acquired Sun and MySQL. The downward price pressure imposed by open source alternatives have become sufficiently visible, in fact, as to begin raising alarm bells among financial analysts. The legacy providers of data management systems have all fallen on hard times over the last year or two, and while many are quick to dismiss legacy vendor revenue shortfalls to macroeconomic issues, we argue that these macroeconomic issues are actually accelerating a technology transition from legacy products to alternative data management systems like Hadoop and NoSQL that typically sell for dimes on the dollar. We believe these macro issues are real, and rather than just causing delays in big deals for the legacy vendors, enterprises are struggling to control costs and are increasingly looking at lower cost solutions as alternatives to traditional products. — Peter Goldmacher Cowen and Company

Tate explained that James was able to achieve this magic through the use of the first-person narrator. Tate said that the first person is the most difficult form because the writer is locked inside the head of the narrator and can’t get out. He can’t say “meanwhile, back at the ranch” as a transition to another subject because he is imprisoned forever inside the narrator. But so is the reader! And that is the strength of the first-person narrative. The reader does not see that the governess is the villainess because what the governess sees is all the reader ever sees.

I sat down with Governor Reagan, and we chatted a little bit. Then I explained why we needed the aircraft. He said to me at the end of it, ‘Prince, let me ask you this question. Does this country consider itself a friend of America?’ I said, ‘Yes, since King Abdulaziz, my grandfather, and President Roosevelt met. Until now, we are very close friends.’ Then Reagan asked a second question. ‘Are you anticommunist?’ I said, ‘Mr. Governor, we are the only country in the world that not only does not have relationships with communists, but when a communist comes in an airplane in transit, we don’t allow him to get out of the airplane at our airport.

only 1 of every 3 young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of employment during the average month in 2005” and just 23 percent worked full time. That so few African American dropouts find any kind of work explains how their annual earnings can be so low—an excess of zero earnings drives down the average. Wilson (2008, 58, figure 4.1) adds that the black-white employment gap widens as one descends the education ladder, from 86 percent versus 88 percent among male college graduates in 2005, to 57 percent versus 73 percent among high school graduates, to 33 percent versus 54 percent among high school dropouts.12

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.

Tendler explained, “NYC Transit had way too much to do with not enough resources, human or financial. I wanted to be equitable across the city and be more sensitive to lower-income communities that were not getting as much attention.” She referred to the Upper East Siders as “whiners” and thought the retailers were exaggerating the impacts on construction. “People don’t go out of their way to do their dry cleaning,” she said. She had a point. Although storefront vacancies on Second Avenue did rise after construction began, the recession also caused a spike in vacancies on First and Third Avenues.55

After the MTA released its $14.4 billion plan in November 1980, a governor’s aide told Ravitch that Carey was not interested in entertaining a fare hike or a tax package for the MTA. Carey preferred holding down the fare rather than financing a multibillion-dollar capital program. The governor also saw Ravitch’s proposal as a threat to Westway. A coalition of thirty-seven civic and environmental groups had filed suit in federal court to stop the highway project. They wanted the state to take the federal transportation funds designated for the project and use them for transit improvements instead. If Carey admitted that the transit system was underfunded and starved for capital, it would have played into the hands of the Westway opponents.48 Faced with resistance in Albany, Ravitch began a lobbying effort that no state official other than Robert Moses at the height of his powers could have undertaken. He started by pleading with the governor and his staff, explaining that without new sources of revenue he would have to dramatically raise the fare. Then he took his case directly to the public. Rather than minimizing the transit system’s problems, Ravitch made sure that reporters learned about all the delays and breakdowns occurring in MTA facilities. He visited editorial boards and told them, “If you don’t pay attention, the politicians won’t.” He talked to every reporter who called. Unlike his predecessors, he admitted that the MTA’s services, particularly during peak hours, were “deteriorating at an accelerated rate.” The newspapers, he said, were “my shield and my sword.

A thermodynamic chart reveals these to be transitions at a constant temperature at which the entropy of a material changes dramatically. In other words, paradoxically, during phase transitions materials can absorb heat without getting hotter and can reject heat without getting colder.

... explained to him how nature is not criminal. How common it was for certain African men on expedition to engage in what might be called "reciprocal sex." How it was common for these men to declare more love for their boy wives than their girl wives. And then why wouldn't Sir Richard Oslet, the hunter said, allow himself, as such to no longer feel pain. And that was the moment, Oslet explained, when hge realized he loved Sowning, that what he had always felt for Downing was love, and Oslet begged Downing's forgiveness. But how could he possibly have know any sooner when there was no language to describe how he felt, no currency, and to even attempt to speak of it would have smacked of revolt, but hopeless revolt, one toward a freedom that Oslet knew did not exist. For Britian, didn't Downing know was perfectly to content to ignore them, so long as there was ambiguity. And hadn't Downing grown up reading, as Oslet had, for decades about the thousands of souls who tried to love one another unambiguously, or those who got caught and were tried allover England at the Courts of Assize, the quarter sessions, and hung? Was Downing so think as to be unaware of the Offenses Against the Person Act, asnd risk the bopth of them landing locked up for years as men were in Redding Jail... Nature, Oslet said the hunter had said, ... unlike man does nothing in vain. God is Nature, and because God is Nature, he created nothing in vain. Therefore, the soul can never expire. It is immortal and in perpetual transit.

Upon transitioning, each and every one of us will acquire an experiential understanding of the impact our actions and inactions had on others. When I explain life reviews, I don’t want to give the impression that it’s a one-time screening of a movie reel of flashbacks

If it is the struggle for power that explains the motivation of those who crafted the genocide, then it is the combined fear of a return to servitude and of reprisals thereafter that energized the foot soldiers of the genocide. The irony is that--whether in the Church, in hospitals, or in human rights groups, as in fields and homes--the perpetrators of the genocide saw themselves as the true victims of an ongoing political drama, victims of yesterday who may yet be victims again. That moral certainly explains the easy transition from yesterday's victims to killers the morning after.

The first point to notice is that the Transition cannot be explained by climatic change alone: human change was not the direct result of marked environmental change. The crucial period did see a colder climate peaking at about 35,000 years ago, but Neanderthals had survived previous climatic instability.

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?

Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially: “Going from one meeting to the next, starting to work on one project and soon after having to transition to another is just part of life in organizations,” Leroy explains. The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

Given the barbaric acts ISIS displays on TV and the Internet, it’s reasonable to assume that some kind of pathology is what drives people from comfortable lives in the West into the arms of ISIS. Social science researchers, however, take issue with that assumption; the attraction, they say, is far more complicated. “These young people are not psychopaths,” Scott Atran, an anthropologist wrote in the September 4, 2016, issue of the Guardian, “but rather everyday young people in social transition, on the margins of society, or amidst a crisis of identity.” He explained that recruits for ISIS from Western countries are in transitional stages in their lives—between jobs, schools, relationships, countries—and are looking for new families.

Fred Layman, (AKA The Club Doctor) is a veteran golf course and clubs in transition operations director/consultant. The Way I See It The Height of a Kite One sunny day, a mother and her son were outside flying a kite. The son loved watching the kite glide through the sky and cheered as it flew higher and higher. Eventually, the kite reached the end of its string and could not go any higher. After pleading with his mom to break the string, she finally agreed and cut the string to release the kite. Shortly after, a gust of wind made the kite spiral uncontrollably, and it crashed to the ground. As the son looked very sad and disappointed, the mother explained, “Just like the kite, we may reach a certain level in life and feel like things may be holding us back, such as friends, family, or rules. We feel the desire to become free from those strings, but it’s important to remember that those strings will help us remain stable and fly higher than we can without them.” Here’s the way I see it: Dan Pearce once said it best, “Who do you want to surround yourself with? People who can pull you up to their level of greatness? Or people who will happily pull you down to theirs?” Fred W. Layman III, USPTA Elite, Director of Operations The Windermere Club, is the president of an Augusta, GA based Club Consulting Company, Fred Layman Ventures.

began taking their churches above ground. They rented buildings and started running services the way we do in America. It was great for a while, but these pastors became so discouraged. I wish I could convey the frustration and desperation in their voices. They talked about the good old days, when their people were risking their lives and radically sharing the gospel, making disciples. But now these pastors were lamenting the way their people attend services and expect the leaders to feed them and cater to them. They had seen this same transition in Korea and were terrified it would happen in their context as well. All anyone wanted was a Jesus and a church that served their needs and kept them comfortable. What started as a movement became a bunch of people sitting safely in services. My mind flashed back to five years prior when my daughter and I went to an underground gathering in China. Young people were praying so passionately, begging God to send them to the most dangerous places. They were actually hoping to die as martyrs! I had never seen anything like it. I still can’t get over the fearless passion for Jesus this church embodied. As they shared stories of persecution, I sat in amazement and asked for more stories. After a while, they asked why I was so intrigued. I told them the church in America was nothing like this. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it was to try to explain to them that people attend ninety-minute services once a week in buildings and that’s what we call “church.” I told them about how people switch churches if they find better teaching, more exciting music, or more robust programs for their kids. As I described church life in America, they began to laugh. Not just small chuckles; they were laughing hysterically. I felt like a stand-up comedian, but I was simply describing the American church as I’ve experienced it. They found it laughable that we could read the same Scriptures they were reading and then create something so incongruent.