Women Multiply Quotes

Men and women who turn their lives over to God will discover that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He can deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, strengthen their muscles, lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their souls, and pour out peace.

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.

Hey you, dragging the halo- how about a holiday in the islands of grief? Tongue is the word I wish to have with you. Your eyes are so blue they leak. Your legs are longer than a prisoner's last night on death row. I'm filthier than the coal miner's bathtub and nastier than the breath of Charles Bukowski. You're a dirty little windshield. I'm standing behind you on the subway, hard as calculus. My breath be sticking to your neck like graffiti. I'm sitting opposite you in the bar, waiting for you to uncross your boundaries. I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech. But with me for a lover, you won't need catastrophes. What attracted me in the first place will ultimately make me resent you. I'll start telling you lies, and my lies will sparkle, become the bad stars you chart your life by. I'll stare at other women so blatantly you'll hear my eyes peeling, because sex with you is like Great Britain: cold, groggy, and a little uptight. Your bed is a big, soft calculator where my problems multiply. Your brain is a garage I park my bullshit in, for free. You're not really my new girlfriend, just another flop sequel of the first one, who was based on the true story of my mother. You're so ugly I forgot how to spell. I'll cheat on you like a ninth grade math test, break your heart just for the sound it makes. You're the 'this' we need to put an end to. The more you apologize, the less I forgive you. So how about it?

Men and women who turn their lives over to God will find out that he can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He will deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, strengthen their muscles, lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their souls, raise up friends, and pour our peace. Whoever will lose his life in God will find he has eternal life.

Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

Kusha felt a tinge of pride, exponentially multiplied by her Low-Grade inferiority complex, reading this footnote. It worsened when ads started coming up on her HOME page after reading it. The ads had horrible titles: Dream Youth For The Low Grades. Alternate Longevity. A Secret Pleasurable Way To Youth. Get Your Dream Citizenship With Pleasing Pleasure Contract. The last one is for non-citizens, of course. At least, she’s a citizen. But when Kusha discovered how many unevolved men and women enter such contracts just for citizenship, it made her face crease. As if she’d caught a nasty smell. For a moment, she even thought, she hated every High Grade in the world, including everyone in her adoptive family. Right now, standing in front of Meera, the hatred swells.

The curse that was laid upon Eve—her desire would be for her husband, and her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied—even shows us how patriarchy, subordination, and pain are part of the Fall. They were never God's original intent; they are a consequence of sin.

God had commanded: Be fruitful and multiply! It costs men nothing and women everything.

But why, why all the hurt? Because, said Mr. Halloway. You need fuel, gas, someting to run a carnival on, don't you? Women live off gossip, and what's gossip but a swap of headaches, sour spit, arthritic bones, ruptured and mended flesh, indiscretions, storms of madness, calms after the storms? If some people didn't have something juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them. Multiply their pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast obituaries, add all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread, square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival. All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They're a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people's sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn't care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That's the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.

It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey for the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he assured them, made his heart weep.

A seed today is a forest tomorrow.

The innocuous-sounding term “fertility treatment” enables the wealthy to breed their own kind, buying sperm and eggs at “baby centers” around the country. Abortion and birth control, meanwhile, are for evangelical conservatives a violation of God’s will that all people should be fruitful and multiply, and yet this same fear of unnatural methods of reproduction does not engender opposition to fertility clinics. Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor

Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us. When God bade mankind be fruitful and multiply, Doctor, He was thinking of the ugly as well as of the beautiful. I am convinced I might add, that the aesthetic criterion does not come from God but from the devil. In paradise no distinction was made between ugliness and beauty.

I've nursed a lifelong love affair with movement, straying ever farther from those I love most. But somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that I was always traveling with family - because the act of travel, to the extent that it separates us from our relatives, also extends, manifests, multiplies, and completes family.

In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia--a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitious and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in experession, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity.

The best couples share the load, divide the grief, and add to the peace, thereby multiplying joy.

Seeds multiply as they are sown.

But it was not merely her choice to be a witness of the dirty work on Tier 1A. It was her role. As a woman she was not expected to wrestle prisoners into stress positions or otherwise overpower them, but rather just by her presence, to amplify their sense of powerlessness. She was there as an instrument of humiliation...The MPs knew very little about their prisoners or the culture they came from, and they understood less. But at Fort Lee, before they deployed, they were given a session of “cultural awareness training,” from which they’d taken away the understanding—constantly reinforced by MI handlers—that Arab men were sexual prudes, with a particular hang-up about being seen naked in public, especially by women. What better way to break an Arab, then, than to strip him, tie him up, and have a "female bystander," as Graner describer Harman, laugh at him? American women were used on the MI block in the same way that Major David DiNenna spoke of dogs—as "force multipliers." Harman understood. She didn’t like being naked in public herself. To the prisoners, being photographed may have seemed an added dash of mortification, but to Harman, taking pictures was a way of deflecting her own humiliation in the transaction—by taking ownership of her position as spectator.

An irony: even as computer memory multiplies, our ability to hold on to personal memories remains a matter of will, bounded by the skull and expanded only by our capacity to tell stories.

Once they drugged women, induced labor, cut them open, sewed them up. No more. No anesthetics, even. Aunt Elizabeth said it was better for the baby, but also: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

As full and equal partners Adam and Eve were responsible to tend the garden, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, to subdue the earth, and to rule over the creatures. In other words, together they were given stewardship of the earth because they were equals.

eulogy for men for ruxandra men have doubles. women don't. men invent doubles for women so that they can both have a woman. women pretend that they too have a double to please their double-man. women may have many double-men who believe that they have a double-woman. one woman can be the author of dozens of imaginary women for their many double-men. one woman can make many women from stories. eve had to make up lillith, sheherezade had to make up 1001 women but there was only one eve and one sheherezade, the rest were men's dreams. women invented speech to multiply themselves while also multiplying men. women are the mothers of stories and the mothers of men. poor men whose only gift is to listen and whose only strength is being two.

I was walking on campus when I saw the statistic on the front page of a newspaper: one in four women, one in five? I don’t remember, it was just too many, too many women on campus had been sexually assaulted. But what got me was the graphic, rows of woman symbols, the kind you see on bathroom signs, across the entire page, all gray, with one in five inked red. I saw these red figures breathing, a little hallucination. My whole life had warped below the weight of the assault, and if you took that damage and multiplied it by each red figure, the magnitude was staggering. Where were they? I looked around campus, girls walking with earmuffs, black leggings, teal backpacks. If our bodies were literally painted red, we’d have red bodies all over this quad. I wanted to shake the paper in people’s faces. This was not normal. It was an epidemic, a crisis. How could you see this headline and keep walking? We’d deadened to the severity, too familiar a story. But this story was not old to me yet. A word came to my mind, another. I remember, after learning of the third suicide at school, people shook their heads in resignation, I can’t believe there’s been another. The shock had dimmed. No longer a bang, but an ache. If kids getting killed by trains became normalized, anything could. This was no longer a fight against my rapist, it was a fight to be humanized. I had to hold on to my story, figure out how to make myself heard. If I didn’t break out, I’d become a statistic. Another red figure in a grid.

baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat up and turn black-and-blue, the semen goes hot with Ebola, and the nipples may bleed. In women, the labia turn blue, livid, and protrusive, and there may be massive vaginal bleeding. The virus is a catastrophe for a pregnant woman: the child is aborted spontaneously and is usually infected with Ebola virus, born with red eyes and a bloody nose. Ebola destroys the brain more thoroughly than does Marburg, and Ebola victims often go into epileptic convulsions during the final stage. The convulsions are generalized grand mal seizures—the whole body twitches and shakes, the arms and legs thrash around, and the eyes, sometimes bloody, roll up into the head. The tremors and convulsions of the patient may smear or splatter blood around. Possibly this epileptic splashing of blood is one of Ebola’s strategies for success—it makes the victim go into a flurry of seizures as he dies, spreading blood all over the place, thus giving the virus a chance to jump to a new host—a kind of transmission through smearing. Ebola (and Marburg) multiplies so rapidly and powerfully that the body’s infected cells become crystal-like blocks of packed virus particles. These crystals are broods of virus getting ready to hatch from the cell. They are known as bricks. The bricks, or crystals, first appear near the center of the cell and then migrate toward the surface. As a crystal

Abortion and birth control, meanwhile, are for evangelical conservatives a violation of God’s will that all people should be fruitful and multiply, and yet this same fear of unnatural methods of reproduction does not engender opposition to fertility clinics. Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor

they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin. The skin develops red spots, called petechiae, which are hemorrhages under the skin. Ebola attacks connective tissue with particular ferocity; it multiplies in collagen, the chief constituent protein of the tissue that holds the organs together. (The seven Ebola proteins somehow chew up the body’s structural proteins.) In this way, collagen in the body turns to mush, and the underlayers of the skin die and liquefy. The skin bubbles up into a sea of tiny white blisters mixed with red spots known as a maculopapular rash. This rash has been likened to tapioca pudding. Spontaneous rips appear in the skin, and hemorrhagic blood pours from the rips. The red spots on the skin grow and spread and merge to become huge, spontaneous bruises, and the skin goes soft and pulpy, and can tear off if it is touched with any kind of pressure. Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands—literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one’s tongue. The tongue’s skin may be torn off during rushes of the black vomit. The back of the throat and the lining of the windpipe may also slough off, and the dead tissue slides down the windpipe into the lungs or is coughed up with sputum. Your

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior and always have been. Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she will give you a baby. If you give her a house, she will give you a home. If you give her groceries, she will give you a meal. If you give her a smile she will give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit!

Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods, the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will not hear his voice all day. He remembers what the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping. The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense of what is not. The January silence is the sound of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding, or the scraping calls of a single blue jay. Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute. Many days in the woods he wonders what it is that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure, but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit. He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying. For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning coldness of her head when he kissed her just after. There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness. It is, he decides, a quality without definition. How strange to discover that one lives with the heart as one lives with a wife. Even after many years, nobody knows what she is like. The heart has a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes, is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late. Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods, leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.

Of course, the final assault on Eve’s character comes from the so-called punishment she receives: pain that is multiplied in childbirth and magnified by men who point out that with every birth women are reminded of their subordinate place and propensity to sin. Such admonishments fail to account for the difference between something that is prescriptive (what should be; i.e., punishment) versus something descriptive (what will be, i.e., result).24 Since the Bible is the result of Divine inspiration and human experience, we realize that its authors were trying to make sense of their lives, lives that in this case involved significant pain during childbirth. As readers we cannot make an uncritical leap from how these writers understood their experience to confirmation that their perceptions were the same thing as God’s will. But because numerous people have failed to make such distinctions, they overlook the powerful insight conveyed in this narrative, choosing instead to blame Eve for sin and to point to childbirth as evidence of her disobedience.

I don’t mean this to sound cruel,” Tish began, “but it seems like part of your heart can never work if you don’t have kids. Like it will always be shut off.” “I agree,” Katie said. “I didn’t really become a woman until I felt Mackenzie inside me. I mean, there’s all this talk these days of God versus science, but it seems like, with babies, both sides agree. The Bible says be fruitful and multiply, and science, well, when it all boils down, that’s what women were made for, right? To bear children.” “Girl power,” Becca muttered under her breath.

What really amazes me is that survivors can be out in the world completely functional using maybe 20 percent of their capacity. Can you imagine what we'll be able to do when we let the other 80 percent out? If we were able to recover, stop the abuse, and heal everyone, the world we live in would be so phenomenal. If you think of all the ways in which you have been stunted, all the energy you have consumed simply to keep hanging on by your fingernails, all that you might have created or accomplished or simply enjoyed had you not had to stagger under the burden of abuse, you may have a formidable list. If you multiply that times the number of other women similarly struggling—not only now but also back through the decades and centuries—the result is awesome. Now, imagine all the women healed—and all that energy no longer used for mere survival but made available for creativity, nurturing relationships, working for peace and equality. The effect on the world would be monumental. We have never in recorded history lived in a time when women were, as a whole, empowered. We can only begin to imagine the riches.

What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Philosophers have pondered that question for centuries. I'm afraid the answer is disappointingly simple: Mating. That's it. Christians seem to think that life is a test, and that the goal is to get into Heaven. But that's like saying your job is to get a promotion. No, your job is to work. And then, if you worked hard, then you get promoted. Heaven is supposed to be a reward or promotion, for a job well done. And what's our job? "Be fruitful and multiply." We are here to mate and procreate. That's it. That's all there's to it. That's the meaning of life. Mating.

In the morning we shed our blue sheep’s clothing. Our border shirts came out of satchels and onto our backs. We preferred this means of dress for it was more flatout and honest. The shirts were large with pistol pockets, and usually colored red or dun. Many had been embroidered with ornate stitching by loving women some were blessed enough to have. Mine was plain, but well broken in. I can think of no more chilling a sight than that of myself all astride my big bay horse with six or eight pistols dangling from my saddle, my rebel locks aloft on the breeze and a whoopish yell on my lips. When my awful costume was multiplied by that of my comrades, we stopped feint hearts just by our mode of dread stylishness.

But things are shifting rapidly. Women’s achievements are multiplying. We don’t always have to prove that we’re acquiescent or complicit to enjoy the crumbs dispensed by the system of male power. The power that we require must be so solid and active that we can do without the sanction of men altogether. The seven female narrators of the “Decameron” should never again need to rely on the great Giovanni Boccaccio to express themselves. Along with their innumerable female readers (even Boccaccio back then knew that men had other things to do and read little), they know how to describe the world in unexpected ways. The female story, told with increasing skill, increasingly widespread and unapologetic, is what must now assume power.

employment attorney review your severance letter of agreement before you sign it. “Even if you decide not to negotiate your financial package, you may want to negotiate other things, like health insurance and references for your next job,” she explains. Go in with the expectation that you won’t get everything you ask for, but you will get more than what they originally offered. Weinberg recommends an often-used formula to calculate severance: number of years at the company multiplied by two weeks’ pay = severance total. Request back pay for unused vacation days, plus a portion of the bonus you were expected to receive at the end of the year. Request a written letter of recommendation and assurance that it will be upheld if a prospective employer calls for references, and ask for a written agreement that any noncompete clause in your original offer is at this point null and void.

As for denying the existence of fairies, good and bad, you have to be blind not to see them. They are everywhere, and naturally I have links of affection or dislike with all of them. The wealthy, spendthrift ones squander fortunes in Venice or Monte Carlo: fabulous, ageless women whose birthdays and incomes and origins nobody knows, putting charms on roulette wheels for the dubious pleasure of seeing the same number come up more often than it ought. There they sit, puffing smoke from long cigarette-holders, raking in the chips, and looking bored. Others spend the hours of darkness hanging their apartments in Paris or New York with Gothic tapestries, hitherto unrecorded, that drive the art-dealers demented-gorgeous tapestries kept hidden away in massive chests beneath deserted abbeys and castles since their own belle epoque in the Middle Ages. Some stick to their original line of country, agitating tables at seances or organizing the excitement in haunted houses; some perform kind deeds, but in a capricious and uncertain manner that frequently goes wrong, And then there are the amorous fairies, who never give up. They were to be seen fluttering through the Val Sans Retour in the forest of Broceliande, where Morgan la Fee concealed the handsome knight Guyomar and many lost lovers besides, or over the Isle of Avallon where the young knight Lanval lived happily with a fairy who had stolen him away. Now wrinkled with age, the amorous ones contrive to lure young men on the make who, immaculately tailored and bedecked with baubles from Cartier, escort them through the vestibules of international hotels. Yet other fairies, more studious and respectable, devote themselves to science, whirring and breathing above tired inventors and inspiring original ideas-though lately the unimaginable numbers,the formulae and the electronics, tend to overwhelm them. The scarcely comprehensible discoveries multiply around them and shake a world that is not theirs any more, that slips through their immaterial fingers. And so it goes on-all sorts and conditions of fairies, whispering together, purring to themselves, unnoticed on the impercipient earth. And I am one of them.

When feminist theorizing of prostitution frames the practice as ordinary work which enables women to express ‘choice’ and ‘agency’, and represents trafficked women in debt bondage as simply ‘migrating for labour’, it serves to normalize the industry and support its growth. It air brushes the harms that girls and women suffer in prostitution and makes it very difficult for feminist activists to oppose the construction of prostitution industries as an ordinary part of economic development, and demand dignified work for women. Such theorizing also supports the campaign by the prostitution industry, sex work organizations and some governments to legalize or decriminalize prostitution. For the industry to prosper, toleration is good, but legalization is better. Thus the approaches that feminist theorists choose to take have important implications. The growth of the industry multiplies the harms that are an integral part of prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation whether ‘legal’ or not. The sex industry cannot be quarantined, set apart from the rest of the society for men to abuse the women caught within the industry in seclusion.

Thus the focal points of the Hebrew Paradise story, the woman, the man, the serpent, and the tree, were mostly likely re-interpretations of earlier Near Eastern iconography and mythology. An original myth and icon, which consisted of goddess, sacred snake, sacred tree, and male consort, perhaps the one who aroused the wrath of the goddess by eating her sacred fruit, become re-interpreted, among the Hebrews, into a story involving a foolish woman; a tree bearing fruit which must not be plucked but was plucked nonetheless by the foolish woman; a seductive snake; and a man who gave birth to a female. The Hebrew story not only changes the roles of the main characters in the story; it even shifts the birth process. The Hebrew myth, then, was not the earliest word on the status of women. The antecedents of the Hebrew myth show quite clearly that at least the idealized woman, the goddess, held high status in early Near Eastern societies. This early status was considerably altered later in time by the Hebrews. The Near Eastern goddess, among the Hebrews, degenerated into a mortal scapegoat, one responsible for the ‘greatly multiplied sorrow,’ and the subservience of women in the ensuing centuries.

SHOUT FOR JOY Shout triumphantly to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful songs. Psalm 100:1-2 HCSB The 100th Psalm reminds us that the entire earth should “Shout for joy to the Lord.” As God’s children, we are blessed beyond measure, but sometimes, as busy women living in a demanding world, we are slow to count our gifts and even slower to give thanks to the Giver. Our blessings include life and health, family and friends, freedom and possessions—for starters. And, the gifts we receive from God are multiplied when we share them. May we always give thanks to God for His blessings, and may we always demonstrate our gratitude by sharing our gifts with others. The 118th Psalm reminds us that, “This is the day which the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (v. 24, NASB). May we celebrate this day and the One who created it. If you can forgive the person you were, accept the person you are, and believe in the person you will become, you are headed for joy. So celebrate your life. Barbara Johnson God knows everything. He can manage everything, and He loves us. Surely this is enough for a fullness of joy that is beyond words. Hannah Whitall Smith A TIMELY TIP Every day should be a cause for celebration. By celebrating the gift of life, you protect your heart from the dangers of pessimism, regret, hopelessness, and bitterness.

In a way, Star Wars could be interpreted as an extended reflection on what might have happened if Jesus had said yes to Satan’s offer. Qui-Gon wants to train Anakin to be a member of the Jedi, a diverse group of humans and other creatures who have a special connection to “the Force” (a kind of cosmic, spiritual energy). He believes that Anakin is “the chosen one,” born to defeat the dark side and restore balance to the Force, but he must convince the Jedi Council. As the council begins to interview Anakin, Yoda (a froglike Jedi with unusual syntax) probes his fear: Yoda: How feel you? Anakin: Cold, sir. Yoda: Afraid are you? Anakin: No, sir. Yoda: See through you we can. Mace Windu: Be mindful of your feelings. Ki-Adi-Mundi: Your thoughts dwell on your mother. Anakin: I miss her. Yoda: Afraid to lose her I think, hmm? Anakin: What has that got to do with anything? Yoda: Everything! Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.20 Yoda’s words foreshadow the path that will lead Anakin to embrace evil and ultimately become Darth Vader. Nonetheless, many on the council believe Anakin to be the chosen one, spoken of by the prophets, and they allow him to train. In Episode II, Anakin’s fear becomes reality as his mother is kidnapped and killed by the sandpeople. Anakin is filled with rage, and he attacks their village, murdering not only the men but women and children as well. This scene augurs a later, even darker moment in Episode III, when Anakin will slay a gathering of children who are being trained as Jedis. As Yoda predicted, Anakin’s fear has multiplied and born fruit in anger, hate, and suffering.

What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again. Life had been so kind as to reveal the whole extent of this young girl’s life, had lent first one optical instrument, then another, to see her with, and then added to carnal desire the accompaniment, multiplying and diversifying it, of other desires, more spiritual and less easily satisfied, which lie inert and unaffected when it is merely a question of the conquest of a piece of flesh, but which, when they want to gain possession of a whole field of memories from which they have felt nostalgically exiled, surge up wildly around carnal desire, extend it, are unable to follow it to the fulfillment, the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it is sought, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire halfway and, the moment the memory of it returns, are there to escort it once more; to kiss, not the cheeks of the first woman who comes along—anonymous, devoid of mystery and glamour, however cool and fresh those cheeks may be—but those of which I had so long been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the savor, of a color I had so often contemplated. One sees a woman, a mere image in life’s scene, like Albertine silhouetted against the sea, and then it becomes possible to detach that image, bring it close, and gradually observe its volume, its colors, as though it had been placed behind the lenses of a stereoscope. For this reason, women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones.

I got back into my car and followed the trucks; at the end of the road, the Polizei unloaded the women and children, who rejoined the men arriving on foot. A number of Jews, as they walked, were singing religious songs; few tried to run away; the ones who did were soon stopped by the cordon or shot down. From the top, you could hear the gun bursts clearly, and the women especially were starting to panic. But there was nothing they could do. The condemned were divided into little groups and a noncom sitting at a table counted them; then our Askaris took them and led them over the brink of the ravine. After each volley, another group left, it went very quickly. I walked around the ravine by the west to join the other officers, who had taken up positions above the north slope. From there, the ravine stretched out in front of me: it must have been some fifty meters wide and maybe thirty meters deep, and went on for several kilometers; the little stream at the bottom ran into the Syrets, which gave its name to the neighborhood. Boards had been placed over this stream so the Jews and their shooters could cross easily; beyond, scattered pretty much everywhere on the bare sides of the ravine, the little white clusters were multiplying. The Ukrainian “packers” dragged their charges to these piles and forced them to lie down over them or next to them; the men from the firing squad then advanced and passed along the rows of people lying down almost naked, shooting each one with a submachine bullet in the neck; there were three firing squads in all. Between the executions some officers inspected the bodies and finished them off with a pistol. To one side, on a hill overlooking the scene, stood groups of officers from the SS and the Wehrmacht. Jeckeln was there with his entourage, flanked by Dr. Rasch; I also recognized some high-ranking officers of the Sixth Army. I saw Thomas, who noticed me but didn’t return my greeting. On the other side, the little groups tumbled down the flank of the ravine and joined the clusters of bodies that stretched farther and farther out. The cold was becoming biting, but some rum was being passed around, and I drank a little. Blobel emerged suddenly from a car on our side of the ravine, he must have driven around it; he was drinking from a little flask and shouting, complaining that things weren’t going fast enough. But the pace of the operations had been stepped up as much as possible. The shooters were relieved every hour, and those who weren’t shooting supplied them with rum and reloaded the clips. The officers weren’t talking much; some were trying to hide their distress. The Ortskommandantur had set up a field kitchen, and a military pastor was preparing some tea to warm up the Orpos and the members of the Sonderkommando. At lunchtime, the superior officers returned to the city, but the subalterns stayed to eat with the men. Since the executions had to continue without pause, the canteen had been set up farther down, in a hollow from which you couldn’t see the ravine. The Group was responsible for the food supplies; when the cases were broken open, the men, seeing rations of blood pudding, started raging and shouting violently. Häfner, who had just spent an hour administering deathshots, was yelling and throwing the open cans onto the ground: “What the hell is this shit?” Behind me, a Waffen-SS was noisily vomiting. I myself was livid, the sight of the pudding made my stomach turn. I went up to Hartl, the Group’s Verwaltungsführer, and asked him how he could have done that. But Hartl, standing there in his ridiculously wide riding breeches, remained indifferent. Then I shouted at him that it was a disgrace: “In this situation, we can do without such food!

What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again. Life had been so kind as to reveal the whole extent of this young girl’s life, had lent first one optical instrument, then another, to see her with, and then added to carnal desire the accompaniment, multiplying and diversifying it, of other desires, more spiritual and less easily satisfied, which lie inert and unaffected when it is merely a question of the conquest of a piece of flesh, but which, when they want to gain possession of a whole field of memories from which they have felt nostalgically exiled, surge up wildly around carnal desire, extend it, are unable to follow it to the fulfillment, the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it is sought, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire halfway and, the moment the memory of it returns, are there to escort it once more; to kiss, not the cheeks of the first woman who comes along—anonymous, devoid of mystery and glamour, however cool and fresh those cheeks may be—but those of which I had so long been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the savor, of a color I had so often contemplated. One sees a woman, a mere image in life’s scene, like Albertine silhouetted against the sea, and then it becomes possible to detach that image, bring it close, and gradually observe its volume, its colors, as though it had been placed behind the lenses of a stereoscope. For this reason, women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman’s body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static.

The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath of life to circulate throughout the entire cathedral. It seemed as though there escaped from him, at least according to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-Dame, and made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them believe that they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries and the fronts in motion. And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it waited on his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and filled with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit. One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all points of the structure. Now one perceived with affright at the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing, writhing, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the abyss, leaping from projection to projection, and going to ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo dislodging the crows. Again, in some obscure corner of the church one came in contact with a sort of living chimera, crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought. Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths were opened, here and there; one heard the dogs, the monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day, with outstretched neck and open jaws, around the monstrous cathedral, barking. And, if it was a Christmas Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit the death rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an air was spread over the sombre façade that one would have declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and that the rose window was watching it. And all this came from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken him for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its demon: he was in fact its soul.

There is no doubt that 'force multipliers' - squad automatic weapons - have changed the character of warfare once again, just as their predecessors did during the First World War, if perhaps not to quite the same degree. In the immediate future it seems that most armies will be using some form of 5.56mm machine-gun at squad level, be it a box-fed LSW or belt-fed SAW. If there is a cloud on the horizon where modern light machine-guns are concerned it is that they are not powerful enough for long-range work, or for penetrating cover and light armour. Nevertheless, the new generation of light machine-guns will remain in use well into the next century, not least because they are popular with the soldiers who operate them, the machine-gunners. Likewise, there will still be a place for the heavier GPMG, which does have the 'punch' that the LSW lacks. Machine-guns themselves have become lighter, and their operating principles both more secure and more efficient; the ammunition they use has shrunk to a quarter of its original size and become almost 100 percent reliable. The one important thing which has not changed dramatically is the human component; the attitude with which man faces the prospect of death in battle, and how he prepares himself to face that possibility quite deliberately, for it was the original invention of the machine-gun which reformed that. More than any other single 'advance' in weapons technology, the machine-gun allowed an individual (or actually, a small team of men) to dominate a sector of the battlefield. They had an inhuman advantage which simply had to be exploited if they were to be on the winning side, whether their opponents were Zulus, Sioux, or Dervishes, or other industrialized nations to be beaten into last place in the race toward economic supremacy. Whether the machine-gun has been as important, in any sense at all of the word, as it near-contemporary, the internal combustion engine - or even, date one say it, the bicycle or sewing machine - is still to be decided, but there is one clear, irrefutable fact connected with its short history: it has killed tens of millions of men, women and children and blighted the lives of tens of millions more.

Sometimes in church circles, we talk more about contentment (which is a good thing) but it can minimize the importance of ambition—that somehow it is more spiritual for Christians to be passive. This misunderstanding had slowed me down to the point where I wasn’t moving ahead at all. I learned that ambition is really a desire to grow. I realized that in order for me to obey God’s call to be “fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28), I needed to stop shutting down ambition just because I was afraid to be disappointed. The Hebrew word pārâ in that verse means “to bear fruit, to grow, to increase.”2 This is the essence of ambition—it’s the desire to step forward, to take risks, and expand our lives, instead of shrinking back.

The curse that was laid upon Eve—her desire would be for her husband, and her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied—even shows us how patriarchy, subordination, and pain are part of the Fall. They were never God’s original intent; they are a consequence of sin.2

She is sure of many things. She is certain that her daughter loves her in a way that will last forever. She's sure that she has this moment, this day, & maybe a few hours after that. She's sure of the past, & what might linger on the horizon only as far as she can see. She's certain that if you take your grief & you hold on tight to it, it multiplies & divides & soon conquers you so that it wins a war that was never meant to be started...She loved this friend, this woman, ... in way that opened up a world to her that changed her very heart, what can fit inside it, & where it was meant to go. She is sure that tomorrow is not guaranteed, & too many women & men wait so long to say something, feel something or go someplace, too damn long. ... She's not sure she will ever be done grieving.

What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? 'Are you talking about my community? You didn't even think highly enough of me to let me in on your little scheme, and now you think it will be God's gift to throw a bunch of poor women through a wormhole every day so they can take care of their children and collect their welfare checks at the same time? That's your solution? Time travel is easier than passing affordable child care? Jennifer said nothing. Alicia, of course, was right. Years ago she had chosen to name the center It Takes a Village because, from the beginning, she had hated the every-person-for-herself attitude that isolated and blame so many of the residents the agency worked with. Yet she had just suggested that the answer to the multiplying burdens face by single mothers, in particular, was not for the village to gather around them, but for these women to multiply themselves instead. The same answer, she thought, that she had applied to herself when her own burdens had seemed too much to bear.

People are ARITHEMTIC....There are those who DIVIDE and SUBTRACT .And then there are those that ADD and MULTIPLY....Which Arithmetic are you and what arithmetic do you have around you !

You can’t justify your existence by what you do. You can’t justify it through a promotion, a huge bonus, or the ability to feed your family all organic food. You can’t justify your existence through your holiday cards or your well-attended speech. You can’t justify it through your huge Twitter following or your mommy blog. These attempts to attain some measure of success are vanity, according to Ecclesiastes. What we long for is perfection—in our works and in who we are. This is only possible through Jesus—Jesus lived the perfect life we can’t, paid the penalty for our sins that we can’t, and rose from the dead so that one day we will rise if we trust Him for the gift of eternal life. What needs to be done has already been done! Until then, we invest. We invest what we’ve received so that we multiply His gifts for His glory.

So we should not be surprised when The Economist tells us that “in Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh or even Gaza City, small technology firms are multiplying.”18 We should not be surprised that in many Middle East cities women comprise 35 percent of Internet entrepreneurs, three times the global rate for such startups.19 We should not be surprised that in high-growth industries twice as many entrepreneurs are over fifty as are under twenty-five.20 Entrepreneurs are everywhere. Opportunities to nourish them are everywhere, too.

Men and women who turn their lives over to God will discover that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He will deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, strengthen their muscles, lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their souls, raise up friends, and pour out peace.

Looking more closely, there are two pathways that link energy and estrogen to higher rates of reproductive cancers among women in developed countries. The first is how many menstrual cycles women experience. The average woman in countries such as the United States, England, and Japan starts menstruating when she is twelve or thirteen years old, and she continues to menstruate until her early fifties. Because she has access to birth control, she gets pregnant only once or twice over her lifetime. Further, after she gives birth, she probably breast-feeds her babies for less than a year. All told, she can expect to experience approximately 350 to 400 menstrual cycles during her life. In contrast, a typical hunter-gatherer woman starts menstruating when she is sixteen, and she spends the majority of her adult life either pregnant or nursing, often struggling to get enough energy to do so. She thus experiences a total of only about 150 menstrual cycles. Since each cycle floods a woman’s body with powerful hormones, it is not surprising that reproductive cancer rates have multiplied in recent generations as birth control and affluence has spread. The other key pathway that links chronic positive energy balances with reproductive cancers among women is through fat. Earlier,

God often anoints women to be initiators. He did not create women just to follow the guys around. In fact, when He decided to send His only begotten Son into the world, He looked for a woman. He sent an angel to a virgin named Mary in Nazareth, and He did not ask her father’s permission or seek her fiancé’s approval before causing her to become supernaturally impregnated with the divine seed. God sought out a woman to do this miracle. He challenged the norms of culture and broke with patriarchal tradition. He did the same when He called Sarah, the wife of Abraham, to be the mother of our faith. Isaiah 51:1–2 tells all of us, both men and women, to look to Sarah as a role model: “Listen to me, all you who are serious about right living and committed to seeking God. Ponder the rock from which you were cut, the quarry from which you were dug. Yes, ponder Abraham, your father, and Sarah, who bore you. Think of it! One solitary man when I called him, but once I blessed him, he multiplied.” T

1And as to the death of the giants, wheresoever their spirits depart from their bodies, let their flesh, that which is perishable, be without judgment. Thus shall they perish, until the day of the great consummation of the great world. A destruction shall take place of the Watchers and the impious. 2And now to the Watchers, who have sent you to pray for them, who in the beginning were in heaven, 3Say, In heaven have you been; secret things, however, have not been manifested to you; yet have you known a reprobated mystery. 4And this you have related to women in the hardness of your heart, and by that mystery have women and mankind multiplied evils upon the earth. 5Say to them, Never therefore shall you obtain peace.

A mission leader recognizes that while she can progress independently, momentum only occurs when people align with, act on, and amplify a message. The amplification makes a messenger’s mission multiply and eventually creates a movement worth following.

Gradually, then rapidly and ever more widely, the Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and American life. Men, women, and children left home and family, authority and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house not men but machines. Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex; economic maturity (the capacity to support a family) came later; children no longer were economic assets; marriage was delayed; premarital continence became more difficult to maintain. The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. Women were “emancipated”—i.e., industrialized; and contraceptives enabled them to separate intercourse from pregnancy. The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry. The rebellious youth was no longer constrained by the surveillance of the village;

River searched the world for her girls. She dug up every anthill she could find. The army ants were too frightened to tell her what they'd done, but they did tell her that the ant god had gone to live among the humans. River searched for Ant. She dug through entire lineages trying to find him. When, after three hundred years, the sky god dared to mention the neglected waters of the world, she dried up entire countries out of spite. This is our River, one god reminded the other, our sweet River. Let us help, not hinder. And so they sent emissaries from every spirit realm, second daughters and minor spirits of similar powers, godlings all, promising their aid for a hundred years. But River's grief became their own. They forgot their mothers and their brothers and the lovers they'd promised to return to; they forgot that they'd had a past before this grief removed everything form inside of them. How, they wondered, can a body feel full to bursting with grief but also hollow? These godlings of land and air and memory resisted this loss of themselves, but River's sorrow drowned them. Their husbands, their children, their homes became like reflections in a rough stream, fractured beyond recognition. They tore the world apart. Unprecedented rains. Earthquakes that ravaged every region. One godling who had come from the house of flames sent an entire cite on fire trying to find River's girls. It was a dark century for humankind and godkind alike. Then the female godlings got craftier in their search. They made themselves visible to human eyes, tempting men and women, threatening men and women, building a network of spies across the globe who lit candles and prayed to them and passed this new religion on to their children. Every new convert was a new set of eyes in the world, a new set of ears to catch whispers of men who didn't seem to fit in, or men who rose to ungodly success but never seemed to pray. Many a good man was lost to angry godlings who peeled his skin away, searching for the god that might be hidden inside. But after seven hundred fruitless years and countless human believers in her service, it dawned on River that she might never see her twins again. She collapsed where she stood, and every emissary lay down as well. Dust settled on them, then grime and so much debris that they became part of the earth, hills of hips and buttocks and woe. All but one. That only one who felt the rage of River, multiplied by that most powerful feeling that won't let a person rest: guilt. River's sister, not quite goddess. The guilt turned in her belly like a ship in a storm. She'd slept while her sister's children were taken. Blame, so like a god itself, shadowed her, occupied her bed like a lover, whispered to her like a dearest friend. Her name was eventually forgotten.

Lady Fatima was chosen from all women to be the Mother source of Muhammad's lineage, the core of the generation of Muhammad. Through her, the progeny of the Prophet multiplies - through a woman.

Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas describes sex relations: Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man’s head or at his hands. The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time … made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves…. They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality….

This is a fairy tale of blood and bullets. The story of two women and three men who cannot die. Mostly. Their names are Andy, Nicky, Joe, Booker, and Nile. Nile joins them. Booker left them. This is what happens next...

The first exodus comes in the midst of a plot that should be familiar to anyone who has read the garden story in Genesis. The people of Israel are fruitful and multiply and fill the land, but the serpent-like king is tricksy, and he attacks the women, with a view to destroying their male descendants. Yet in contrast to the garden story, the women outmaneuver him.

Recovery is a resumption of the work that was not completed when the woman was a girl. It is a coming into her own. It is an opportunity to resume the normal process of development that was sidetracked, perhaps first by constrained roles, perhaps by trauma, and then multiplied many times by hiding in the addiction. Her development was sidetracked by not accepting her needs as legitimate and not finding healthy ways to meet them, by not even knowing her needs. And so this is what recovery is: a developmental process of finding and building a new self. Recovery is a process of radical growth and change. When you are in recovery, you give birth to a new self. [...] Many women initially think that recovery means a move from bad to good. They think that being addicted is evidence of shameful neediness, of deep and lasting failures. Recovery is not a move from bad to good, but from false to real. [...] It is reality, being real, that now guides her rather than her efforts to be good or bad.

Recovery is a resumption of the work that was not completed when the woman was a girl. It is a coming into her own. It is an opportunity to resume the normal process of development that was sidetracked, perhaps first by constrained roles, perhaps by trauma, and then multiplied many times by hiding in the addiction. Her development was sidetracked by not accepting her needs as legitimate and not finding healthy ways to meet them, by not even knowing her needs. And so this is what recovery is: a developmental process of finding and building a new self. Recovery is a process of radical growth and change. When you are in recovery, you give birth to a new self. [...] Many women initially think that recovery means a move from bad to good. They think that being addicted is evidence of shameful neediness, of deep and lasting failures. Recovery is not a move from bad to good, but from false to real. [...] It is reality, being real, that now guides her rather than her efforts to be good or bad.

I have the power to multiply Like all women, I am more than one

We want justice! We want justice!’ We chanted at the Western Oil Company building; the mirrored glass showed our reflections multiplied as though we were millions. This gave us courage and we shouted louder, even when the men with guns also multiplied. Then we started singing. I copied the women around me as closely as possible. Grandma had taught me many songs but I did not know that one. We sang in unison, like a choir that had been practising all year for that one song. Grandma started it. It was an Ijaw song called Wo Ekilemo. Praise him. Her voice was low and quiet, but one by one we joined in. The sound of us women singing was so powerful that the glass moved on the expensive windows, and people inside the building started shutting the windows, even the high-up ones. The slams made us sing even louder. I imagined the white men on the other side of the windows, watching us as they drank their tea. I wondered if they understood why we were protesting. I wondered if they even cared. The security men waving their guns started swaying, as if their bodies were disobeying their commands. They were Ijaw, too, you see. They removed their hats, and rocked from side to side. I sang loudly until the part that said ‘I have overcome death, poverty and sickness’. I could not sing that part. My mind kept flashing to Ezikiel’s face. But then I joined in again, and our voices rose so high I thought they might reach Allah’s ears. Then we all took off our clothes. ‘There is nothing more powerful than a naked woman,’ Grandma said. ‘Nothing in the world.

No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one; time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one-the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy or available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby cafe, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it-fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a sate of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world- this hollow, disenchanted world.

tax collector’s booth. Most people in the Roman Empire did not like tax collectors; Jewish people viewed them as traitors. For assessment purposes, tax collectors were allowed to search anything except the person of a Roman lady; any property not properly declared was subject to seizure. In Egypt, tax collectors were sometimes so brutal that they were known to beat up aged women in an attempt to learn where their tax-owing relatives were hiding. Ancient documents reveal that when harvests were bad, on occasion an entire village, hearing that a tax collector was coming, would leave town and start a village somewhere else. People sometimes paid tax collectors bribes to prevent even higher fees being extorted. Some scholars consider Levi a customs officer who would charge tariffs on goods passing through Capernaum. Such tariffs were small by themselves (often less than 3 percent) but drove up the cost of goods because they were multiplied by all the borders they passed through. Customs officers could search possessions; customs income normally went to local governments run by elites who were cooperative with Rome. Others regard Levi as collecting taxes from local residents, likely working especially for agents of Galilee’s ruler, Herod Antipas.

My dream for the young ladies I coach is that they never measure themselves with someone else’s yardstick, or simply by wins and losses. I would like them to know that real success is achieved when you set your own worth, fulfill your own destiny, and stand up for what you know to be right. And I want these young women, the leaders of tomorrow, to go forth and multiply: what we have learned, we now must teach.

For me, that connection was revealed in the 1960s, which marked the birth of consciousness. Our minds expanded on a mass scale like never before. Civil rights for minorities, women’s rights, gay rights; a politically active youth movement; the belief that questioning your government was a patriotic responsibility; environmental awareness; expansion of Eastern thinking; the end of colonialism; psychoactive substances; and of course, the Renaissance in all the Arts. That consciousness was founded on a few basic spiritual principles. The first was our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the Earth, and the vast gap between Western and Semitic religious belief, on one side, and American Indian, African, and Asian belief, on the other. Genesis 1:28 says, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion.’” What “God” meant by “subdue” and “have dominion” can (and should) be debated, but Western religion took it to suggest man’s superiority over the Earth. Man the conqueror. The other tradition—American Indians, Africans, Asians—did not believe that humans were superior to the Earth; rather, they believed that they were meant to live in harmony with it. This difference affected how we viewed our most essential relationship and contributed to a fundamental sense of alienation. That alienation was the first component of our spiritual bankruptcy. That was the theme explored more deeply on Revolution, but it would overlap with this one.

Their combined efforts mean kingdom work is multiplied. Far from being shamed in the city gates, her husband is regarded with greater esteem because he has such a wife. And he is first to sing her praises.

Of course, it was a lie, and that bald man in a blue suit was definitely harassing her, teasing her with dirty, rude jokes. Nothing physical from the body of a High Grade can heal. No matter if it’s blood or sperm or saliva or even a discarded hair or nail—as some fraudulent religious groups claim, taking advantage of Low Grades’ fascination with the living gods among them. Though, the archive mentions a however as a footnote: ***However, when they pass strong prana (the energy controllable by the evolved, High Grade humans) to the sick or wounded, it heals, no matter whether they are plants or animals. Their prana flows strongly when they feel strong emotions. Some people say their sperm heals, but it’s not the semen. It’s the strong prana-boosts the High Grades experience when they reach climax during intimacy … Kusha felt a tinge of pride, exponentially multiplied by her Low-Grade inferiority complex, reading this footnote. It worsened when ads started coming up on her HOME page after reading it. The ads had horrible titles: Dream Youth For The Low Grades. Alternate Longevity. A Secret Pleasurable Way To Youth. Get Your Dream Citizenship With Pleasing Pleasure Contract. The last one is for non-citizens, of course. At least, she’s a citizen. But when Kusha discovered how many unevolved men and women enter such contracts just for citizenship, it made her face crease. As if she’d caught a nasty smell. For a moment, she even thought, she hated every High Grade in the world, including everyone in her adoptive family. Right now, standing in front of Meera, the hatred swells.

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up? The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love. Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch. And no one knows this better than politicians. Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say totalitarian, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree Be fruitful and multiply. In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.

God names women, along with men, as his image bearers. Furthermore, God's first word about women completely shatters the notion that boys are more valuable than girls. God isn't calling men and asking women to hang back. He gives both male and female the exact same identity--to be his image bearers. He gives both the exact same rsponsibilities when he entrusts all of creation to his image bearers, calling them to be fruitful and multiply and to rule and subdue the whole earth (Genesis 1:26, 28). Words spoken here encompass every human being, every facet of human life, and every square inch of earth, and leave every other conceivable view of women (or of men) in the dust.

In Genesis God is multiplying the mystery of the Trinity in his image bearers by creating another individual who stands on level ground with the man and is completely different from, yet one with him. The oxygen hasn't grown thin after all. God is still vision casting--this time for male/female relationships.

Why does it spiral downward, why do things tend to look more and more hopeless? For the same reason that red Dodge pickups seem to proliferate on the highways as soon as you buy one and that pregnant women appear out of nowhere approximately eight months before your baby is due. The more attention you shine on a particular subject, the more evidence of it will grow. Attention is like light and air and water. Shine attention on obstacles and problems and they multiply lavishly.

When things go wrong – war, natural disaster, pandemic – all the usual data gaps we have seen everywhere from urban planning to medical care are magnified and multiplied. But it’s more insidious than the usual problem of simply forgetting to include women. Because if we are reticent to include women’s perspectives and address women’s needs when things are going well, there’s something about the context of disaster, of chaos, of social breakdown, that makes old prejudices seem more justified. And we’re always ready with an excuse. We need to focus on rebuilding the economy (as we’ve seen, this is based on a false premise). We need to focus on saving lives (as we will see this is also based on false premise). But the truth is, these excuses won’t wash. The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest.

Old women like Peta Ponce have the power to fold time over and confuse it, they multiply and divide it, events are refracted in their gnarled hands as in the most brilliant prism, they cut the consecutive happening of things into fragments they arrange in parallel form, they bend those fragments and twist them into shapes that enable them to carry out their designs.

It had all seemed so simple after they broke the curse, when everything felt like a fairy tale. Back then, Belle would have said that their love would be enough to weather them through any storm, and she still believed it. But she hadn't anticipated that the storms would grow and multiply, or that she would find herself adrift, unsure of what side of the battle line she should stand upon. A part of her feared that by marrying a prince and living in a castle, she would become someone she didn't recognize, someone like those ignorant courtiers who had access to the best books and educations money could buy but used them to make their worlds smaller. And then another part of her feared that by resisting the change, she would move further and further away from Lio, and she didn't want that either. Her heart belonged to Lio, but what about the rest of her? Where would she be if she hadn't met him, and if the embers of revolution were stoked all the way to Aveyon? Would she be fighting alongside the men and women she had seen in the gardens of the Palais-Royal?

In 1999, a bunch of researchers published a study of about 1,600 adults examined in order to come up with equations to estimate kidney function. Just plug in the patient’s creatinine, age (because adults tend to lose muscle mass as we get older), and gender (because men tend to have more muscle mass than women), and voila!—an estimate of kidney function. Most laboratories can do this for us now. A rising creatinine level in the blood means the kidneys are not able to pee creatinine out as well as they used to, so the person’s estimated kidney function is lower. But wait—if the patient is Black, the study determined that you have to multiply by 1.2 to get a more accurate estimate. This finding was attributed to Blacks in the study having higher muscle mass than Whites and, therefore, higher amounts of creatinine in their bodies. Laboratories report the eGFR, and just below it, the eGFR if Black. Of course one of the problems with generalizations is that they aren’t always true. In medicine, in particular, they make us lazy and we often accept them without question—especially when they are in line with our underlying assumptions and beliefs. Like the belief that Black and African are inherently different from White and European at a DNA level, a belief that dates back to the days when American researchers were measuring Black-White differences in skull size to prove Black inferiority and justify slavery. But I wonder how often health-care providers make the mental adjustment that the “race adjustment” is really a proxy for muscle mass rather than just focusing on the race of the person in front of them when they are assessing lab results. I wonder if the person in front of them were a White male bodybuilder how many would tell him the race-adjusted estimate of kidney function, or a skinny Black woman the non-race-adjusted estimate. Then too I wonder how many health-care practitioners realize that equations derived from the original study of 1,600 people only included about 200 Blacks—and no American Samoans, no Hispanics, no Asians. These groups have very different body frames, but all are simply “not Black” in our equations. The implication, then, is that only Black people are different. This shortcut has the potential for a significant negative impact on Black patients who happen to not have a high muscle mass. Patients like Book of Eli. When the non-race-adjusted eGFR is 20 (when a person can be placed on the waiting list), the race-adjusted value is closer to 25. Just as the difference between eGFRs of 20 and 10 can be several years for many patients, so can the difference between 25 and 20. Years of accruing time on the kidney transplant waiting list when thirteen people on the waiting list die every day waiting for a kidney.

I was very close to the age where I would have been sent to train, but was saved from that fate when we were forced out of Pinyudo, all forty thousand of us, by the Ethiopian forces that overthrew President Mengistu. ... The area near the river was marshy and the group was soaked, wading through the heavy water. The river, when we arrived, was high and moving quickly. Trees and debris flew with the current. The first shots seemed small and distant. I turned to follow the sound. I saw nothing, but the gunfire continued and grew louder. The attackers were nearby. The sounds multiplied, and I heard the first screams. A woman up the river spat a stream of blood from her mouth before falling, lifeless, into the water. She had been shot by an unseen assailant, and the current soon took “her toward my group. Now the panic began. Tens of thousands of us splashed through the shallows of the river, too many unable to swim. To stay on the bank meant certain death, but to jump into that river, swollen and rushing, was madness. “The Ethiopians were attacking, their Eritrean cohorts with them, the Anyuak doing their part. They wanted us out of their country, they were avenging a thousand crimes and slights. I paddled and kicked. I looked again for the spot on the riverbank where I had last seen the crocodiles. They were gone. —The crocodiles! —Yes. We must swim fast. Come. There are so many of us. We’re at a mathematical advantage. Swim, Achak, just keep paddling. A scream came from very close. I turned to see a boy in the jaws of a crocodile. The river bloomed red and the boy’s face disappeared. —Keep going. Now he’s too busy to eat you. We were halfway across the river now, and my ears heard the hiss under the water and the bullets and mortars cracking the air. Each time my ears fell below the surface, a hiss overtook my head, and it felt like the sound of the crocodiles coming for me. I tried to keep my ears above the surface, but when my head was too high, I pictured a bullet entering the back of my skull. ... I pushed my face into the dirt, but secretly I watched the slaughter below. Thousands of boys and men and women and babies were crossing the river, and soldiers were killing them randomly and sometimes with great care. There were a few SPLA troops fighting from our side of the river, but for the most part they had already escaped, leaving the Sudanese civilians alone and unprotected. The Ethiopians, then, had their choice of targets, most of them unarmed. “they chased the Sudanese from their land with machetes and the few rifles they possessed. They hacked and shot those running to the river, and they shot those flailing across the water. Shells exploded, sending plumes of white twenty feet into the air. Women dropped babies in the river. Boys who could not swim simply drowned... Some of the dead were then eaten by crocodiles. The river ran in many colors that day, green and white, black and brown and red. “—Come here!" a woman said. I looked to find the source of the voice, and turned to see an Ethiopian woman in a soldier’s uniform. —Come here and I will help you find Pochalla! she said. The other boys began walking toward her. —No! I said. —See how she’s dressed! —Don’t fear me, she said. I am just a woman! I am a mother trying to help you boys. Come to me, children! I am your mother! Come to me! The unknown boys ran toward her. Achor stayed with me. When they were twenty feet from her, the woman turned, lifted a gun from the grass, and with her eyes full of white, she shot the taller boy through the heart. I could see the bullet leaving his back. His body kneeled and then fell on its side, his head landing before his shoulder. “Run! he said, grabbing my shirt from behind. We ran from her, diving into the grass and then crawling and hurtling away fom the woman, who was still shouting at us. "Come back!" she said. "I am your mother, come back, my children!

Be fruitful and multiply” is both a blessing and a command. The union of one man with one woman is intended to produce children. This command is the antithesis of the pro-abortion and pro-homosexual agenda. It is not possible for two men or two women to produce a child. God created “male and female,” making marriage between two men or two women a clear violation of the law of God. God will only bless the union He created; therefore He blessed the union of marriage between a man and a woman with children,

Once Mom and Ossie and I spent an afternoon alone together in her hospital room. We were watching the small TV above her head politely, as if the TV were a foreign dignitary giving an unintelligible lecture, and waiting for any news from Dr. Gautman. As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies In Waiting. A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl--they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances--anyhow, these pink chameleons, voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall. "Oh, but we DID want to dance!" the actresses cry at the end of the scene, their faces changing almost totally. All these angry multiplying women. Hopes were like these ladies, Mom told us. Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart. Our mom had become agitated as the movie credits rolled: There had never been a chance for them! What STUPID women. That day we watched TV with her until the hospital began to empty, until the lights went white as a screech and the room grew so quiet...

One problem with the black man is too much emphasis on the miraculous, which indicates to them that they can circumvent principles, practices, philosophies, processes, procedures, and planning to achieve greatness. There is nothing more delusionary than that. The miraculous is a circumstantial intervention of divinity in the affairs of humanity. That Jesus multiplied bread and fish did not prevent men and women from opening bakeries and fishing the next day. The black man would have started a "Fish and Bread Multiplication" ministry. This kind of mindset makes religion an assassin of the intellect and creates a bunch of irresponsible citizenry that outsources their problems to God, when He expects them to use their brains. Problems that can be solved with our minds are outsourced to God in prayers.

I don't mean this to sound cruel," Tish began, "but it seems like part of your heart can never work if you don't have kids. Like it will always be shut off." "I agree," Katie said. "I didn't really become a woman until I felt Mackenzie inside me. I mean, there's all this talk these days of God versus science, but it seema like, with babies, both sides agree. The Bible says be fruitful and multiply, and science, well, when it all boils down, that's what women were made for, right? To bear children." "Girl power," Becca muttered under her breath.

I am convinced that the greatest need of the church today is more men, women, boys, and the girls who have abandoned their dreams, possessions, and treasures at the feet of the cross and rise up to be the disciples that the scripture points us to and multiply the gospel to the ends of the Earth (Acts 1:8)

Briefly, there are two types of cells that we inherit from our parents —body cells and germ cells. These cells are composed of chromosomes containing genes—a separate gene for each mental and physical characteristic. The body cells, dividing, multiplying, changing, growing, determine the sort of individual we are to be; the germ cells, remaining practically unchanged from our conception, determine what characteristics our progeny will inherit, through us, from our progenitors and from us. "I determined that heredity could be controlled through the transference of these genes from one individual to another. I learned that the genes never die; they are absolutely indestructible—the basis of all life on earth, the promise of immortality throughout all eternity. "I was certain of all this, but I could carry on no experiments. Scientists scoffed at me, the public laughed at me, the authorities threatened to lock me up in a madhouse. The church wished to crucify me. "I hid, and carried on my research in secret. I obtained genes from living subjects—young men and women whom I enticed to my laboratory on various pretexts. I drugged them and extracted germ cells from them. I had not discovered at that time, or, I should say, I had not perfected the technique of recovering body cells. "In 1858 I managed, through bribery, to gain access to a number of tombs in Westminster Abbey; and from the corpses of former kings and queens of England and many a noble lord and lady I extracted the deathless genes.

Keynes cut a magnificent figure: six feet three, and superbly tailored; an authority on wines, fine foods and beautiful women; patron of the arts, and master of the English language which he only distorted by design. He, too, posed as the possessor of elusive secrets, key to the Higher Mysteries of economics and public finance…. An alchemist who succeeded in substituting paper for gold, a mystifier who claimed that money multiplied itself in the spending, Keynes compelled bankers to do his bidding and imposed his schemes on the highest personages in an age of political unreason. (Martin, 1966, p. 323)

Reproduction isn’t what sets us apart from animals,” Catriona said. “Every wild creature multiplies and raises its young.