Unbelievable Performance Quotes

sufferers of depression, who can elect to keep their feelings private, experience chronic, unremitting emotional alienation. Each moment spent “passing” as normal deepens the sense of disconnection generated by depression in the first instance. In this regard, depression stands as a nearly pure case of impression-management. For depressed individuals, the social requirement to “put on a happy face” requires subjugation of an especially intense inner experience. Yet, nearly unbelievably, many severely depressed people “pull off the act” for long periods of time. The price of the performance is to further exacerbate a life condition that already seems impossibly painful

We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, will perform the unbelievable for the ungrateful

Neither our psychology nor that of the unbelievers can impart life to them. Unless the Holy Spirit Himself performs the work, all is vain.

In cases of organized and multi-perpetrator abuse when the abuse occurs in the context of rituals and ceremonies, some elements of the experience may have been staged specifically with the intention of encouraging the disbelief of others if the victim were to report the crime. For example, someone reporting such a crime may mention that the devil was present, or that someone well-known was there, or that acts of magic were performed. These were tricks and deceptions by the abusers-often experienced by the victims after being given medication or hallucinogenic drugs - that render the account unbelievable, make the witness sound unreliable, and protect the perpetrators. (page 120, Chapter 9, Some clinical implications of believing or not believing the patient)

There was so little to learn from that conversation, and yet it struck me that the very existence of the conversation itself was the lesson; art has nothing to do with Life's fickle intentions: write what you want. Draw what you want. Perform what you can. In the end, the unexpected twists -- the mutated cells, the choked arteries, the swerving vans -- will always tell the ending.

I pray that in the heat of planning, of running, of achieving and performing, that you would pause. Hear the Lord calling you to draw close to him. God loves you, and as unbelievable as it is, he wants to be with you. Find some time today to climb up in your Father’s arms, let him drive the universe, and just rest. He’s a strong dad. And you never get too big for his lap.

... no sensitive Christian can be satisfied with a distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness drawn only between communities, with each individual belonging unambiguously on one or the other side of the line. The behavior of "the righteous" is often very disappointing, while "the unrighteous" regularly perform in a manner that is much better than our theology might lead us to expect of them. Thus the need for a perspective that allows for both a rather slow process of sanctification in the Christian life and some sort of divine restraint on the power of sin in the unbelieving community. These theological adjustments to a religious perspective that might otherwise betray strong Manichean tones provide us with yet another reason for openness to a broad-ranging dialogue: Christians have good grounds for believing that their own weakness can be corrected by encountering the strengths of others.

Darling!” Alessandro exclaimed with a cold sneer as a police guard led him into a holding cell. “What are you doing here? Did you come to tell me that the crazy fog has lifted and you’re ready to resume your place by my side?” “Not in this lifetime. That nut house is not my home, and you really are crazy if you think I’m going anywhere with you.” Alessandro’s eyes flickered dangerously. “Careful, sweetheart. You are still my wife. Let’s not forget that, eh?” Bree shook her head. “You are unbelievable. Do you feel any remorse at all for what you did?” Alessandro clenched his jaw. “I believe I expressed my remorse quite thoroughly if you recall. I begged you to forgive me and I beg for nothing, Brianna. I laid myself bare and pleaded for you to understand but all you had for me were hateful words.” “Oh, was I supposed to believe that little performance?” Bree snapped, forcing herself to block out the image of his hands cupping her face, his tears mingling with her own. “It’s hard to know because I believed you when you looked me in the eye and told me you had nothing to do with what happened to Colin.

It was as if the plague had broken out in a country and news had been spreading around that in one or another place there was a man, a wise man, a knowledgeable one, whose word and breath was enough to heal everyone who had been infected with the pestilence, and as such news would go through the land and everyone would talk about it, many would believe, many would doubt, but many would get on their way as soon as possible, to seek the wise man, the helper, just like this this myth ran through the land, that fragrant myth of Gotama, the Buddha, the wise man of the family of Sakya. He possessed, so the believers said, the highest enlightenment, he remembered his previous lives, he had reached Nirvana and never returned into the cycle, was never again submerged in the murky river of physical forms. Many wonderful and unbelievable things were reported of him, he had performed miracles, had overcome the devil, had spoken to the gods. But his enemies and disbelievers said, this Gotama was a vain seducer, he would spent his days in luxury, scorned the offerings, was without learning, and knew neither exercises nor self-castigation.

THE ABSENT ELEMENT IS what is expressed in the final sentence of the prayer recorded in Acts 4: “Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders” (v. 30). What gains unbelievers’ attention and stirs the heart is seeing the gospel expressed in power. It takes more than academic rigor to win the world for Christ. Correct doctrine alone isn’t enough. Proclamation and teaching aren’t enough. God must be invited to “confirm the word with signs following” (see Heb. 2:4). In other words, the gospel must be preached with the involvement of the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven.

He does not examine our performance to see if we are worthy. Rather, He looks to see if we are trusting in the merit of His Son as our only hope for securing His blessing. To repeat: We are saved by grace, and we are to live by grace every day of our Christian lives. If it is true that our relationship with God is based on His grace instead of our performance, why then are we so prone to fall into the good-day–bad-day type of thinking? It is because we have relegated the gospel to the unbeliever.

People seem drawn to Trump’s rallies in the same way that they are drawn to a professional wrestling match, and as with a professional wrestling match, they seem divided between people who believe all they see and hear, and those who know it’s partially a performance. The scariest thing about being at a Trump rally is that you don’t know who believes it and who doesn’t.

At that point in time, Gokul Rajaram was a legendary éminence grise in the ad-tech world. The so-called godfather of AdSense, Google’s secondary gold mine after AdWords, Gokul was a constant presence on the conference circuit, and an omnipresent adviser or investor in just about every advertising technology company worth talking about. He too had come to Facebook via a small acqui-hire, though really that had been just a career breather between his time at Google and his hiring at Facebook. University at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), followed by an American MBA, he was your standard-issue Indian techie, and probably that country’s most valuable export after steel and Tata Motors. “What’s the first thing you would change about Facebook Ads if we hired you?” There was about as much polish and prologue to Gokul as that of a North Korean diplomat. “I’d build a conversion-tracking system. It’s unbelievable you don’t have one yet.” A conversion-tracking system is software that tells you if an advertisement has worked in driving a conversion (or “sale” in marketing-speak), and lets you retweak your marketing campaigns based on performance. An ads system without conversion tracking is like a car without rearview mirrors; nay, it’s like a car without even rear or side windows. All you can see is forward, merrily driving along, not even understanding what’s behind you or what you just ran over. It’s a danger to yourself and others, and it was a sign of just how out-of-touch Facebook Ads management was that this somehow never got prioritized. From Gokul’s smile the conclusion was clearly . . . right answer! And so the conversation went, traversing various potential aspects of the Facebook Ads system, and what the company needed to build. It was a giddy Gokul—I’d soon learn he was almost always giddy—who escorted me out the door. The boys and I had arrived separately, assuming we’d get out at different times, and separately did we go back to the GrokPad. There, we compared notes. MRM and Argyris weren’t exactly rousing in their reviews of the experience. In fact, it was clear that the fascist vibe the company gave off had very much rubbed them the wrong way. They had never really liked Facebook, as either product or company, going back to our visits to their developer events. The daylong hazing had done nothing to charm them.

Journalists who cover Trump without being in the room will sometimes say that Trump’s crowd isn’t with him. But I can tell you, the crowd loves it. There is no rush for the exits, no howl of disgust. The first rally in the aftermath of the scuffle in Birmingham was as packed as the last—maybe more packed. People seem drawn to Trump’s rallies in the same way that they are drawn to a professional wrestling match, and as with a professional wrestling match, they seem divided between people who believe all they see and hear, and those who know it’s partially a performance. The scariest thing about being at a Trump rally is that you don’t know who believes it and who doesn’t.

I woke up every morning at six to study—because it was easier to focus in the mornings, before I was worn out from scrapping. Although I was still fearful of God’s wrath, I reasoned with myself that my passing the ACT was so unlikely, it would take an act of God. And if God acted, then surely my going to school was His will. The ACT was composed of four sections: math, English, science and reading. My math skills were improving but they were not strong. While I could answer most of the questions on the practice exam, I was slow, needing double or triple the allotted time. I lacked even a basic knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns and moving on to prepositions and gerunds. Science was a mystery, perhaps because the only science book I’d ever read had had detachable pages for coloring. Of the four sections, reading was the only one about which I felt confident. BYU was a competitive school. I’d need a high score—a twenty-seven at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort. I was sixteen, had never taken an exam, and had only recently undertaken anything like a systematic education; still I registered for the test. It felt like throwing dice, like the roll was out of my hands. God would score the toss. I didn’t sleep the night before. My brain conjured so many scenes of disaster, it burned as if with a fever. At five I got out of bed, ate breakfast, and drove the forty miles to Utah State University. I was led into a white classroom with thirty other students, who took their seats and placed their pencils on their desks. A middle-aged woman handed out tests and strange pink sheets I’d never seen before. “Excuse me,” I said when she gave me mine. “What is this?” “It’s a bubble sheet. To mark your answers.” “How does it work?” I said. “It’s the same as any other bubble sheet.” She began to move away from me, visibly irritated, as if I were playing a prank. “I’ve never used one before.” She appraised me for a moment. “Fill in the bubble of the correct answer,” she said. “Blacken it completely. Understand?” The test began. I’d never sat at a desk for four hours in a room full of people. The noise was unbelievable, yet I seemed to be the only person who heard it, who couldn’t divert her attention from the rustle of turning pages and the scratch of pencils on paper. When it was over I suspected that I’d failed the math, and I was positive that I’d failed the science. My answers for the science portion couldn’t even be called guesses. They were random, just patterns of dots on that strange pink sheet. I drove home. I felt stupid, but more than stupid I felt ridiculous. Now that I’d seen the other students—watched them march into the classroom in neat rows, claim their seats and calmly fill in their answers, as if they were performing a practiced routine—it seemed absurd that I had thought I could score in the top fifteen percent. That was their world. I stepped into overalls and returned to mine.

I dislike that kind of man. He has the Chaplin Disease; that particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge. Like all people with timid personalities his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he loves himself; a very tense situation. It's people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it's the most embarrassing thing in the world - a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups.

Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and useless—and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Decidedly Dreadful, and made him, too, into a thing of quiet and contemplative chin spittle. And there it lies, waving its toes at the strip lights, utterly unaware of the miracle it has performed—unaware, indeed, even of the very toes it wiggles, for it is the absolute Avatar of Unaware—and yet, look what it has done in all its unthinking, unknowing wigglehood. Look at it there, the small, wet, sour-smelling marvel that has changed everything. Lily

Church is not for pretenders and performers. Church is a place for pastors to preach principles of the faith in order to prepare believers to face the storms of life on the stage of an unbelieving world.

Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and useless—and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Decidedly Dreadful, and made him, too, into a thing of quiet and contemplative chin spittle. And there it lies, waving its toes at the strip lights, utterly unaware of the miracle it has performed—unaware, indeed, even of the very toes it wiggles, for it is the absolute Avatar of Unaware—and yet, look what it has done in all its unthinking, unknowing wigglehood. Look at it there, the small, wet, sour-smelling marvel that has changed everything. Lily Anne. Three small and very ordinary syllables. Sounds with no real meaning—and yet strung together and attached to the tiny lump of flesh that squirms there on its pedestal, it has performed the mightiest of magical feats. It has turned Dexter Dead for Decades into something with a heart that beats and pumps true life, something that almost feels, that so very nearly resembles a human being— There: It waves one small and mighty hand and that New Thing inside Dexter waves back. Something turns over and surges upward into the chest cavity, bounces off the ribs and attacks the facial muscles, which now spread into a spontaneous and unpracticed smile. Heavens above, was that really an emotion? Have I fallen so far, so fast? Yes,

I made up my mind I was going to learn something about IBM computers. So I enrolled in an IBM school for retailers in Poughkeepsie, New York. One of the speakers was a guy from the National Mass Retailers’ Institute (NMRI), the discounters’ trade association, a guy named Abe Marks. ABE MARKS, HEAD OF HARTFIELD ZODY’S, AND FIRST PRESIDENT, NMRI: “I was sitting there at the conference reading the paper, and I had a feeling somebody was standing over me, so I look up and there’s this grayish gentleman standing there in a black suit carrying an attaché case. And I said to myself, ‘Who is this guy? He looks like an undertaker.’ “He asks me if I’m Abe Marks and I say, ‘Yes, I am.’ “ ‘Let me introduce myself, my name is Sam Walton,’ he says. ‘I’m only a little fellow from Bentonville, Arkansas, and I’m in the retail business.’ “I say, ‘You’ll have to pardon me, Sam, I thought I knew everybody and every company in the retail business, but I never heard of Sam Walton. What did you say the name of your company is again?’ “ ‘Wal-Mart Stores,’ he says. “So I say, ‘Well, welcome to the fraternity of discount merchants. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the conference and getting acquainted socially with everyone.’ “ ‘Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Mr. Marks, I didn’t come here to socialize, I came here to meet you. I know you’re a CPA and you’re able to keep confidences, and I really wanted your opinion on what I am doing now.’ So he opens up this attaché case, and, I swear, he had every article I had ever written and every speech I had ever given in there. I’m thinking, This is a very thorough man.’ Then he hands me an accountant’s working column sheet, showing all his operating categories all written out by hand. “Then he says: ‘Tell me what’s wrong. What am I doing wrong?’ “I look at these numbers—this was in 1966—and I don’t believe what I’m seeing. He’s got a handful of stores and he’s doing about $10 million a year with some incredible margin. An unbelievable performance! “So I look at it, and I say, ‘What are you doing wrong? Sam—if I may call you Sam—I’ll tell you what you are doing wrong.’ I handed back his papers and I closed his attaché case, and I said to him, ‘Being here is wrong, Sam. Don’t unpack your bags. Go down, catch a cab, go back to the airport and go back to where you came from and keep doing exactly what you are doing. There is nothing that can possibly improve what you are doing. You are a genius.’ That’s how I met Sam Walton.” Abe

A religion that did not exist seven years ago, subsuming the world in ten. Unbelievable! Is it because the idea of salvation through eternity is so seductive? No, Mr. Cates. The Electric Church is growing so quickly because it forcibly recruits new members. They murder their new members, they perform surgery on their new members, and they control their new members postprocess via hardwired circuitry.” Suddenly

But here was Chase, showing me quite clearly that my mannerisms were just as ridiculous as anyone else’s. It was unbelievably infuriating to have him copy me right back at me, and it still didn’t explain the most important part of the question. “Why do you have to do it, too?” I said. He shook his head, one quick jerk to the side, as if I was the one asking stupid questions. “I’m learning you,” he said. “For my character.” “Couldn’t you learn Vince instead?” I said, and even to me I sounded peevish. Chase shook his head. “My character isn’t gay,” he said quite seriously. By the end of work on Thursday, I was very willing to become gay myself if it meant that Chase would stop copying me. I watched him as he aped everything I did, each small unconscious tic, and I learned that I slurped my coffee, washed my hands too long, and stared at the ceiling pursing my lips when I was talking on the phone. I have never had any problems with my self-esteem; I like Dexter very much, just the way he is. But as Chase’s performing-monkey act went on and on, I discovered that even the healthiest self-image can erode under a barrage of constant, solemn mockery.

It is obedience to Christ, not prophesying or performing miracles, that proves authentic Christianity. God has used many unbelievers to preach and perform miracles. He used Balaam to prophesy his will to Balak (Num. 22–24). Several places in 1 Samuel record that King Saul prophesied. Power was given not only to Peter, James, and John but also to the traitor Judas Iscariot to preach and perform miracles (Luke 9:1–2). Unbelievers may preach, but only believers obey. It is obedience to God’s commands, not our religious acts, that proves our faith to be true.

Sometimes, You Just Need a Vibrator Coach Sommer introduced me to a Russian medical massage specialist who recommended I use the plug-in (not cordless) model of the Hitachi Magic Wand on its high setting. I’ve never experienced such heights of ecstasy. Thanks, Vladmir! Just kidding. In this case, it’s for relaxing hypertonic muscles (i.e., muscles that are tense even though they shouldn’t be). Just place the wand on your muscle belly (not insertion points) for 20 to 30 seconds, which is often all it takes at the proper hertz. Tension headaches or a stiff neck? It’s great for relaxing the occipitals at the base of the skull. Warning: Having Hitachi Magic Wands lying out around your house can go terribly wrong—or terribly right. Good luck explaining your “hypertonic muscles.” As one friend said to me, “I think my wife has that same problem. . . .”   Gymnast Strong Unusual and Effective Bodyweight Exercises In less than eight weeks of following Coach Sommer’s protocols, I saw unbelievable improvement in areas I’d largely given up on. Try a few of my favorite exercises, and you’ll quickly realize that gymnasts use muscles you didn’t even know you had. QL Walk—An Unusual Warmup

AlphaPoint Completes Blockchain Trial Together with Scotiabank AlphaPoint, a fintech company, devoted to blockchain technological innovation, has accomplished a successful proof technology together with Scotiabank, a major international bank based in Barcelone, Canada. From the trial, Scotiabank sought to learn and examine how the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform could be leveraged inside across a selection of use situations. When questioned if AlphaPoint and Scotiabank intended to further build this job, Igor Telyatnikov, president and also COO regarding AlphaPoint, advised Bitcoin Journal that he was not able to comment especially on the subsequent steps in the particular Scotiabank-AlphaPoint effort. He performed, however, suggest that AlphaPoint is about to reveal several additional media shortly. “We have a couple of other significant announcements that is to be announced inside the coming calendar month, including a generation launch using a systemically crucial financial institution, ” said Telyatnikov. “2017 will be shaping around be an unbelievable year for that distributed journal technology market as a whole and then for AlphaPoint also. ” Within the multi-month venture, trade studies were published upon deployment of the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform, which usually ran concurrently on Microsoft’s Azure impair and AlphaPoint hardware. Inside real-time, typically the blockchain community converted FIXML messages to be able to smart deals and produced an immutable “single truth” across the complete network. The particular Financial Details eXchange (FIX) is a sector protocol used for communicating stock options information inside specific digital messages. Including information about getting rates, market info and buy and sell orders. Using trillions involving dollars bought and sold annually around the Nasdaq only, financial providers entities are usually investing seriously in maximizing electronic buying and selling to increase their particular speed monetary markets and decrease costs. Blockchain technology may help them help save $8-12 million per annum, which includes savings up to 70 percent throughout reporting, 50 % in post-trade and 50 % in consent, according to a report by Accenture and McLagan.

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The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution. Shanghai!

Then again, almost nobody passed the test of our mockery. Almost anything said or done by anybody was in some way undermined by an unconscious assumption or blind spot or standpoint issue which the speaker or actor suffered from. Everyone was disdained, oneself especially. The performance of kicking in one’s own rotten ideological floorboards was something we called “reflexivity.” This was a cop-out, of course, but it was a smart cop-out. Being smart—which we confused with being knowledgeable—was less about seeing something for what it was than about critically viewing one’s act of seeing, and then critically viewing oneself critically viewing one’s originally seeing self, and so on infinitely, as in an Escher, without vertigo. In practice, it led to abandoning all attempts to actually absorb anything, and defaulting to an ironic or camp focus on obviously trash TV and comic books and music, and expressing a perverse but real admiration for brazenly rich or crooked or right-wing people, whom we associated with authenticity and transparency, the idea being that human beings purporting to act in good faith were either operators or people who had mistaken their lucky success for merit. It sounds unbelievable, but that’s how small-minded and envious we were. That isn’t to say that perspectivism doesn’t have value, because of course it does. But it does not solve the problem. One remains an American idiot.

The Upside of Disaster “What’s very fortunate, beautiful, wonderful, and also, in a weird way, tragic about modern society, is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz in London or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avezzano, Italy, early in the 20th century, [things change]. In Avezzano, something like 95% of the population was killed. I’m going from memory, but unbelievable casualty, just like a nuclear strike. . . . People had to rely on each other, so everyone—upper-class people, lower-class people, peasants, and nobility—sort of crouched around the same campfires. One of the survivors said, ‘The earthquake gave us what the law promises but does not, in fact, deliver, which is the equality of all men.

The following is a quotation from the Mahābhārata that describes our present era and the immediately preceding yuga, revealing a progressive deterioration of humanity’s moral fiber. Again, in the dvāpara-yuga the moral order (dharma) exists [only] half. [God] Vishnu becomes yellow, and the Veda is now fourfold [i.e., the original wisdom is split into the four Vedic hymnodies]. Thence, some [adhere to] four Vedas, others to three Vedas, or two Vedas, or a single Veda, while yet others have no hymns [at all]. Thus, owing to the broken traditions, rites become manifold and creatures, fond of austerities and almsgiving, become rajas-motivated2. Due to ignorance about the single Veda, the Vedas become multiple and because of the collapse of truth, few adhere to truthfulness. Many diseases appear for those who have fallen from truth, and there are desires and disasters caused by fate. Afflicted by these, [some] men perform very severe austerities; others, filled with [worldly] desires or desiring heaven, conduct sacrifices. Thus with the onset of the dvāpara, creatures perish through their lawlessness. In the kali-yuga, O Kaunteya, the moral order (dharma) exists by one quarter only. With the onset of this tamas-motivated3 age, O Keshava [i.e., God Vishnu] becomes black (krishna). The Vedic ways of life end, and so do the moral order, sacrifice, and rites. Plagues, disease, sloth, blemishes such as anger, as well as calamities, sickness, and afflictions prevail. In the course of the yugas, the moral order diminishes increasingly. With the diminution of the moral order, the people (loka) diminish. This description of the kali-yuga is not as daunting as it is in some other scriptures. But the message is clear enough: Ours is a sinister age. What thinking person would not agree? Can we not, by now, fill a whole library with tales of human foolishness, of humanity’s thoughtless interference with the life-world and its almost unbelievable lack of concern for fellow beings, both human and nonhuman? Is there no hope, then, for humankind? Is historian Oswald Spengler’s dark prophecy of the decline of the West (and with it, also of the East) coming true?4 Or are there, today, forces at work that countermand the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age? This latter appears to be the case. It could not be otherwise. Or else our species would have perished long ago, right at the outset of the kali-yuga. The kali-yuga, then, does not signal total spiritual darkness or inevitable doom. Inverting a popular maxim, one can perhaps say that where there is shadow there is also light. Here and there, the present dark age is pierced by shafts of light. It is not without its benign counterbalancing influences.

destroy your wild lusts and passions, you will gratify God more, and you will work for Him more magnificently than if you scourge yourself until you issue blood or tire yourself out with fasting more than any elderly desert hermit. For even if you redeem hundreds of Christian slaves from the unbelievers and liberate them, it will not save you, if you continue to be a slave to your passions. And no matter what work you perform, however wonderful, and with whatever labor and sacrifice you might achieve it, it will not guide you toward your goal, if you do not pay attention to your passions, allowing them the liberty to live and work in you.

Eve taught me to look at the overall picture, to read the cards as art and intuition as much as a science. Women were more in touch with that innate sense than men. Women resonated with the cards. Rather than read the cards in order, I let the entire pattern seep in. I understood the 8 of Clubs and the Ace of Spades. The Queen of Diamonds, I sensed, would be a real person to provide the essentials of life. Then my heart sank when I saw the two Jacks, the Pretenders, the Liars who would upset my balance on the one hand, and try to exert power over me on the other. They framed the 2 of hearts. The Jacks would jeopardize my love life. I’d have to be wary in that domain. It had been quite a while since I had taken a lover. With this news, I would wait. I’d return to New York City, and meet two people who would be my Ace and my Queen. I took the calendar from the wall near the telephone, and sat down on Nestor’s chair. I stared at it, unbelieving; it had been six months since Nestor’s passing. I had spent half a year sorting through Nestor’s things, working, making no new friends, and taking no lovers. I had performed my duties, including marking the calendar mechanically. I operated in a daze. Several people had asked me if they could help. I didn’t understand, but now I knew. I had lost all sense of time and of myself, and I needed to rejoin life. My nineteenth birthday was just six months away. I would stay in Key West until then. In the interim, I would decide what I wanted to keep from Nestor’s legacy and, as he wished, place the rest.

It always seemed to me that the biggest obstacle to successful training is that the body adjusts so quickly. Do the same sequence of lifts every day, and even if you keep adding weight, you’ll see your muscle growth slow and then stop; the muscles become very efficient at performing the sequence they expect. The way to wake up the muscle and make it grow again is to jolt it with the message “You will never know what’s coming. It will always be different from what you expect. Today it’s this, tomorrow it’s something else.” One day it’s ultraheavy weights; the next day high reps.

My father believed just as strongly in training our brains. After Mass on Sunday, he’d take us on a family outing: visiting another village, maybe, or seeing a play, or watching him perform with the police band. Then in the evening we had to write a report on our activities, ten pages at least. He’d hand back our papers with red ink scribbled all over them, and if we had spelled a word wrong, we had to copy it fifty times over. I loved my father and really wanted to be like him.

The influence of the biased selection is not on the believability of H but rather on the capability of the test to have unearthed errors. The error probing capability of the testing procedure is being diminished. If you engage in cherry picking, you are not “sincerely trying,” as Popper puts it, to find flaws with claims, but instead you are finding evidence in favor of a well-fitting hypothesis that you deliberately construct – barred only if your intuitions say it’s unbelievable. The job that was supposed to be accomplished by an account of statistics now has to be performed by you. Yet you are the one most likely to follow your preconceived opinions, biases, and pet theories.

Shiro can’t accuse me of looking out the windows all the time anymore because they have all been shuttered.  Watching the thick, boron nitride nanotube shutters slide down and lock into place over the big lounge windows was somewhat sobering.  But it’s not the least of what’s to come. Tonight we will enter our crew quarters where we will be stuck for six days while the space station performs the perihelion maneuver.  We will come within four solar radii—that’s a blistering 2,784,000 kilometers from the sun—and will accelerate to a mind-blowing speed of 341,546 kilometers per hour.  The maneuver itself will last just over twenty-nine hours as we travel all the way around the back side of the sun, but we need to be shielded from the worst of the solar radiation both on the approach and the departure. All the numbers make it sound simple, but the fact of the matter is this is by far the most dangerous part of our journey.  Despite NASA’s best efforts to shield the spacecraft, it very well might not have been enough.  We will be traveling around a star, an unbelievably immense body of power and energy producing the might of six trillion nuclear bombs every second.  (I would start thinking of myself as a bit of a brainiac, but I only know this because Commander Sykes told me.)  With flares and coronal mass ejections (some of which occur once every five days or more), we could easily be obliterated by an incoming blast of superheated gas.

The word of promise was all he had to show, and he counts that enough to set his faith on work.  But alas! some make comfort the ground of faith, and experience their warrant to believe.  They will believe when God manifests himself to them, and sends in some sensible demonstration of his love to their souls; but, till this be done, the promise hath little authority to silence their unbelieving cavils, and quiet their misgiving hearts into a waiting on God for the performance of what there is spoken from God's own mouth.

The big-name, big-budget film stars fell away with the last Autolite show, and from 1955 on, the leads were largely carried by radio people. Suspense is the happiest of stories for the confirmed audiophile. Of the 945 shows broadcast, at least 900 are available, most in superior sound, many in full fidelity. The first two years contain shows that may strike the ear of a modern listener as contrived or stilted. Things look up with the arrival of Roma Wines and a budget. The celebrated Sorry, Wrong Number is here in all its versions, though this listener joins those who find it rather boring: the remarkable performance by Agnes Moorehead is lost in its unbelievable premise. So much better were The Diary of Sophronia Winters, The Most Dangerous Game, August Heat, The House in Cypress Canyon, and the marvelous Mission Completed, which cast James Stewart as a paralyzed war veteran driven to murder by the sight of a man who resembles his former Japanese torturer.

In 2011 India’s Test team was crowned as world cricket’s leading side for the first time in its history. The foundations for this global domination can be traced to a decade earlier, when a career-defining performance by VVS Laxman helped to turn a whole series on its head as India, in the face of a seemingly unassailable deficit, staged an unbelievable recovery to go on and overpower what many considered to be the finest cricket team ever assembled.

People were always talking about how few performers there are at the top of the ladder, but I was always convinced there was room for one more. I felt that, because there was so little room, people got intimidated and felt more comfortable staying on the bottom of the ladder. But, in fact, the more people that think that, the more crowded the bottom of the ladder becomes! Don’t go where it’s crowded. Go where it’s empty. Even though it’s harder to get there, that’s where you belong and where there’s less competition.