User Family Members Quotes

These narcissists, they lack empathy. They don’t see other people as having intrinsic value. They’re users. Even when it comes to their own family members.

When you contribute to a safer world for the truth, contribute to help stop violence and help end impunity: be vigilant, be alert, stay safe, protect your emotions and health from aggressive troublemakers and manipulators, and have a strong, diplomatic, clear and firm boundaries. Be honest, be factual, and have an indestructible firm coping mechanism ways while you could experience waves of digital aggression as they would like to silence you, discredit you, and they try to ruin your integrity, persona, reputation and credibility. The deceptive, evil manipulators plant lies and create intrigues, polemics mongering, gossip-mongering, and calumny committed by abusive political harridans, bitches and assholes who can shame you privately and publicly. Group cyber lynching, group cyberbullying, defamatory libellous slander is committed by these cyber aggressors who are also financial-political abusive parasites, pathological liar cyberbullies toxic manipulators, and repetitive abusers. Usually when the stakes are high, these manipulative, deceptive, dishonest, unscrupulous aggressive and vindictive, abusive toxic people would resort to any forms of aggression/abuse: digital or cyber aggression, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and psychological abuse, financial/economic abuse, and/or physical aggression. When a group of habitual, deceptive, toxic netizens, digital aggressors send you threats, disturb your family member with their concocted destructive lies, and they took hold a copy of your passport or ID - change it immediately. Document the threats, the libellous slander, done by these aggressive and abusive people who took advantage of you, used you, and abused you, and do not hesitate to report them to the right authorities. You have to learn how to handle these scammers, habitual offensive abusive offenders/perpetrators, manipulators, bullies, digital aggressors/aggression, cyber lynchers, coward, pathological liars, opportunistic users, economic/financial abusers, emotional, psychological and verbal abusers, and repetitive abusers without breaking the law. Even if they dehumanised you, shamed you and abused you for several years, do not and never dehumanise them. Always remember the three Rs of life: 1. Respect for self 2. Respect for others 3. Responsibility for all your actions ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from The S. Trilogy

English, in this light, is the odd one out, and what distinguishes it from its relatives is that it underwent marauding hordes of Vikings who never went home, and proceeded to speak the language, as they did so much else, Their Way. They never wrote down that they were doing so—most of them couldn’t write anyway. But Icelandic stands as virtual confirmation that adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is. The people who can still read ancient sagas live on a remote, undisturbed island. The people whose language became the most user-friendly member of the family live on an island nearer the Continent, that was, due to that proximity, lustily disturbed by invading migrants.

hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time.24 May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them.25 Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance—aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified, is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant.26 The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy.

[T]he definitional shift away from the medical/individual model makes room for new understandings of how best to solve the “problem” of disability. In the alternative perspective, which I call the political/relational model, the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being. For example, under the medical/individual model, wheelchair users suffer from impairments that restrict their mobility. These impairments are best addressed through medical interventions and cures; failing that, individuals must make the best of a bad situation, relying on friends and family members to negotiate inaccessible spaces for them. Under a political/relational model of disability, however, the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies. The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation.

How do companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, seemingly control users’ minds?” Nir Eyal, a prominent Valley product consultant, asked in his 2014 book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. “Our actions have been engineered,” he explained. Services like Twitter and YouTube “habitually alter our everyday behavior, just as their designers intended.” One of Eyal’s favorite models is the slot machine. It is designed to answer your every action with visual, auditory, and tactile feedback. A ping when you insert a coin. A ka-chunk when you pull the lever. A flash of colored light when you release it. This is known as Pavlovian conditioning, named after the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who rang a bell each time he fed his dog, until, eventually, the bell alone sent his dog’s stomach churning and saliva glands pulsing, as if it could no longer differentiate the chiming of a bell from the physical sensation of eating. Slot machines work the same way, training your mind to conflate the thrill of winning with its mechanical clangs and buzzes. The act of pulling the lever, once meaningless, becomes pleasurable in itself. The reason is a neurological chemical called dopamine, the same one Parker had referenced at the media conference. Your brain releases small amounts of it when you fulfill some basic need, whether biological (hunger, sex) or social (affection, validation). Dopamine creates a positive association with whatever behaviors prompted its release, training you to repeat them. But when that dopamine reward system gets hijacked, it can compel you to repeat self-destructive behaviors. To place one more bet, binge on alcohol—or spend hours on apps even when they make you unhappy. Dopamine is social media’s accomplice inside your brain. It’s why your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, pulsing with colorful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations. Those stimuli are neurologically meaningless on their own. But your phone pairs them with activities, like texting a friend or looking at photos, that are naturally rewarding. Social apps hijack a compulsion—a need to connect—that can be even more powerful than hunger or greed. Eyal describes a hypothetical woman, Barbra, who logs on to Facebook to see a photo uploaded by a family member. As she clicks through more photos or comments in response, her brain conflates feeling connected to people she loves with the bleeps and flashes of Facebook’s interface. “Over time,” Eyal writes, “Barbra begins to associate Facebook with her need for social connection.” She learns to serve that need with a behavior—using Facebook—that in fact will rarely fulfill it.

Once humanity is sufficiently connected via our information technologies, Teilhard predicted, we will all fuse into a single universal mind—the noosphere—enacting the Kingdom of Heaven that Christ promised. This is already happening, of course, at a pace that is largely imperceptible—though during periods when I am particularly immersed in the internet, I’ve felt the pull of the gyre. I sense it most often in the speed with which ideas go viral, cascading across social platforms, such that the users who share them begin to seem less like agents than as hosts, nodes in the enormous brain. I sense it in the efficiency of consensus, the speed with which opinions fuse and solidify alongside the news cycle, like thought coalescing in the collective consciousness. We have terms that attempt to catalogue this merging—the “hive mind,” “groupthink”—though they feel somehow inadequate to the feeling I’m trying to describe, which expresses itself most often at the level of the individual. One tends to see it in others more readily than in oneself—the friends whose sense of humor flattens into the platform’s familiar lexicon, the family members whose voices dissolve into the hollow syntax of self-promotion—though there are times when I become aware of my own blurred boundaries, seized by the suspicion that I am not forming new opinions so much as assimilating them, that all my preferences can be predicted and neatly reduced to type, that the soul is little more than a data set. I don’t know exactly what to call this state of affairs, but it does not feel like the Kingdom of God.

To all those who shared their experience of GIDS as service users or as their family members, thank you for telling your stories. Ellie, Jack, Phoebe, Hannah, ‘Jacob’, ‘Michelle’, ‘Diana’, ‘Harriet’ – thank you for trusting with me with such personal accounts, and, in some cases, highly sensitive information.

During the process of redesigning the NPR News mobile app, senior designer Libby Bawcombe wanted to know how to make design decisions that were more inclusive to a diverse audience, and more compassionate to that audience’s needs. So she led a session to identify stress cases for news consumers, and used the information she gathered to guide the team’s design decisions. The result was dozens of stress cases around many different scenarios, such as: • A person feeling anxious because a family member is in the location where breaking news is occurring • An English language learner who is struggling to understand a critical news alert • A worker who can only access news from their phone while on a break from work • A person who feels upset because a story triggered their memory of a traumatic event13 None of these scenarios are what we think of as “average.” Yet each of these is entirely normal: they’re scenarios and feelings that are perfectly understandable, and that any of us could find ourselves experiencing. That’s not to say NPR plans to customize its design for every single situation. Instead, says Bawcombe, it’s an exercise in seeing the problem space differently: Identifying stress cases helps us see the spectrum of varied and imperfect ways humans encounter our products, especially taking into consideration moments of stress, anxiety and urgency. Stress cases help us design for real user journeys that fall outside of our ideal circumstances and assumptions.14 Putting this new lens on the product helped the design team see all kinds of decisions differently.

Having an Aspie parent influences a child in unexpected ways, no matter how hard their parents try to compensate or how socially adept the child seems to be. There are unusual habits and behaviors that every child considers normal, often right up until one family member goes out into the world and discovers otherwise. This is true of all families, but it may be more pronounced in families where one or both parents are on the spectrum. A partner or spouse with a different set of parenting abilities can go a long way toward helping an autistic parent “mind the gap” when it comes to parenting. My

I'm a bartender. How can I stop when surrounded by smoke and smokers at every turn?" I recall attempts where I hoped smoking friends would be supportive in not smoking around me, and not leave their packs lying around to tempt me. While most tried, it usually wasn't long before they forgot. I recall thinking them insensitive and uncaring. I recall grinding disappointment and intense brain chatter, that more than once seized upon frustrated support expectations as this addict's excuse for relapse. Instead of expecting them to change their world for me, the smart move would have been for me to want to extinguish my brain's subconscious feeding cues related to being around them and their addiction. The smart move would have been to take back my world, or as much of it as I wanted. As I sit here typing in this room, around me are a number of packs of cigarettes: Camel, Salem, Marlboro Lights and Virginia Slims. I use them during presentations and have had cigarettes within arms reach for years. Don't misconstrue this. It is not a smart move for someone struggling in early recovery to keep cigarettes on hand. But if a family member or best friend smokes or uses tobacco, or our place of employment sells tobacco or allows smoking around us, we have no choice but to work toward extinguishing tobacco product, smoke and smoker cues almost immediately. And we can do it! Millions of comfortable ex-users handle and sell tobacco products as part of their job. You may find this difficult to believe, but I've never craved or wanted to smoke any of the cigarettes that surround me, even when holding packs or handling individual cigarettes during presentations. Worldwide, millions of ex-smokers successfully navigated recovery while working in smoke filled nightclubs, restaurants, bowling alleys, casinos, convenience stores and other businesses historically linked to smoking. And millions broke free while their spouse, partner or best friend smoked like a chimney. Instead of fighting or hiding from the world, take it back. Why allow our circumstances to wear us down? Small steps, just one moment at a time, embrace challenge. Extinguish use cues and claim your prize once you do, another slice of a nicotine-free life. Recovery is about taking back life. Why fear it? Instead, savor and relish reclaiming it. Maybe I'll have a crave tomorrow. But it's been so many years (since 2001) that I'm not sure I'd recognize it. Why fear our circumstances when we can embrace them? They cannot

Manson attracted the attention of another woman, Patricia Krenwinkel, on Manhattan Beach in 1967. Krenwinkel later said that Manson was the first person who had ever told her she was beautiful and that she had sex with him on the first night they met. Thoroughly transfixed by Manson and desperate to become one of his girls, Krenwinkel left her job, car, apartment, and last paycheck behind and returned with the budding family to San Francisco. Krenwinkel gave Manson her father’s credit card and the foursome survived for a while by stealing and writing bad checks. Susan “Sadie” Atkins was the next woman to join the Manson Family. Atkins was an ex-convict who was supporting herself by topless dancing. Manson was drawn to Atkins when he learned that she had danced in a cabaret led by the self-styled leader of the Satanic Church, Anton LaVey. Atkins was a heavy drug-user when she met Manson and was easily convinced to join his family and to set about recruiting more members, preferably male. Atkins was able to lure Bruce Davis to join the family in the fall of 1967, the first male member and a man who was later described as Manson’s right-hand man. Davis met the family when they were in Oregon. Manson had traded his minibus for a full-size yellow school bus and had taken his family on a tour of the American West; he had decided the family should move to Los Angeles. The Haight had become too dangerous, Manson said, life would be better for the family in L.A. What he didn’t tell his family was that the real reason he wanted to move to Los Angeles was to pursue his dreams of stardom. Charles Manson was looking for a record deal.

These are all hopeful developments, but there is still a very long road ahead, literally and figuratively, for Saudi women. Saudi Arabia’s government is now the largest investor in the transportation company Uber, having provided $ 3.5 billion in funding from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. The director of the fund, a member of the royal family, was given a seat on Uber’s board. But, while Uber helps Saudi women get from place to place, it is not a way for women to drive themselves. Saudi Arabia is using a modern smartphone app as a means to enforce the long-standing ban. In fact, about eighty percent of Saudi Uber’s users are Saudi women.

devices with the simple message of “Clear.” Delays were inexcusable and perhaps catastrophic. A delay meant the Sat-Trak, and especially its user, had been compromised in some manner. A delay of fifteen minutes activated Plan B, which called for Denny and Trey to grab the manuscripts and move to a second safe house. If either Denny or Trey failed to report, the entire operation, or what was left of it, was to be aborted. Jerry, Mark, and Ahmed were to leave the country immediately. Bad news was transmitted by the simple message “Red.” “Red” meant, with no questions asked and no time for delay, that (1) something has gone wrong, (2) if possible get the manuscripts to the third safe house, and (3) by all means get out of the country as quickly as possible. If anyone was nabbed by the cops, silence was expected. The five had memorized the names of family members and their addresses to ensure complete loyalty to the cause and to each other. Retaliation was guaranteed. No one would talk. Ever. As ominous as these preparations were, the mood was still light, even celebratory. They had pulled off a brilliant crime and made a perfect escape. Trey, the serial escapee, relished telling his stories. He was successful because he had a plan after each escape, whereas most guys spent their time thinking only of getting out. Same with a crime. You spend days and weeks planning and plotting, then

Midwest Book Review: "Finding Peace, One Piece at a Time" is especially commended to the attention of family members charged with the responsibility of dealing with the possessions of a loved one who has passed. Exceptionally well organized and presented, "Finding Peace, One Piece at a Time" is a unique and impressively 'real world practical' little compendium of advice, instruction and insight that is unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library collections. Thoroughly 'user friendly' in tone, commentary and style, it should be noted that "Finding Peace, One Piece at a Time" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $11.72). —Helen Dumont, Reviewer