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Thread: great paragraphs from what you're reading

  1. #41
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    At least I already have on the walk suit, and after a week of sleeping in it, the thing reeks of my sweat, not someone else's. It's this positive outlook on life that got me through three and a half tours of duty and the last six months of my first beacon stint. I'm a chipper guy, once you get to know the raw, dark dread and petrified fear that lurks in my breast and that I battle with every waking moment and that sometimes has me sobbing into my palms when no one is around and makes it really hard to be in crowds or to stand any loud sounds and has me thinking I'll probably never be in a functional relationship again, platonic or otherwise. Once you get that, you have to say to yourself, "Hey, why's this guy so damn happy all the time?"

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    Mathieu felt himself growing pale with rage. He sat down again, laid his left hand flat on the table, and said suavely:

    "Too much for me? Certainly not, Ivich, I find it charming. It's a game for a noble lady, I suppose."

    He jabbed the knife into his palm and felt almost nothing. When he took his hand away, the knife remained embedded in his flesh, straight up, with its haft in the air.

    "Oh-h-h!" shrieked Ivich. "Pull it out! Pull it out at once!"

    "You see," said Mathieu with clenched teeth; "anybody can do that."

    He felt benignantly impressive and was a little afraid that he might faint. But a sort of dogged satisfaction and the malice of a silly schoolboy took possession of his mind. It was not only to defy Ivich that he had stuck the knife into his hand, it was as a challenge to Jacques, and Brunet, and Daniel, and to his whole life. "I'm a ghastly kind of fool," he thought. "Brunet was right in saying that I'm a grown up child." But he couldn't help being pleased.

  3. #43

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    Deleuze and Guattari applaud becoming, and their work is peppered with references to figures from the arts and literature that have dared to enter into this world of unpredictable transitions: “from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowery, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the body without organs.”2 Indeed, as they tell us, literature is akin to schizophrenia in the way that there is no ultimate goal, no attainable summit that it is reaching towards, and in itself it is only a process, a production of something. A previously held fact is destroyed by each of these authors: for Ginsberg, it was the destruction of traditional norms of sexuality, and for Miller and Kerouac, likewise, it is the ability to explode bourgeois morality system. Each were able to uproot themselves not only from the social’s mores and traditions, but founding themselves capable of conducting physical exoduses from the territories that had harbored them through much of their previous lives. Furthermore, each is in tune with heightened degrees of empathy and perception; they are able to focus their gaze on something and tease out the intangible in it – an intangible that transforms something within each of them. In a similar manner, the schizophrenic, even in his or her delirium, can find themselves ‘tuned in’ to the things around them:

    ''It’s a given that in the practice of institutional psychotherapy that the schizophrenic who is most lost in himself will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details about your private life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know, and that he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret. It’s not a mystery. The schizophrenic has lightening-like access to you; he is focused, so to speak, directly on those links that constitute a series in his subjective system''

  4. #44
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    It may be objected, “But some received principles, especially on the highest and most vital subjects, are more than half-truths. The Christian morality, for instance, is the whole truth on that subject and if any one teaches a morality which varies from it, he is wholly in error.” As this is of all cases the most important in practice, none can be fitter to test the general maxim. But before pronouncing what Christian morality is or is not, it would be desirable to decide what is meant by Christian morality. If it means the morality of the New Testament, I wonder that any one who derives his knowledge of this from the book itself, can suppose that it was announced, or intended, as a complete doctrine of morals. The Gospel always refers to a preexisting morality, and confines its precepts to the particulars in which that morality was to be corrected, or superseded by a wider and higher; expressing itself, moreover, in terms most general, often impossible to be interpreted literally, and possessing rather the impressiveness of poetry or eloquence than the precision of legislation. To extract from it a body of ethical doctrine, has never been possible without eking it out from the Old Testament, that is, from a system elaborate indeed, but in many respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people. St. Paul, a declared enemy to this Judaical mode of interpreting the doctrine and filling up the scheme of his Master, equally assumes a preexisting morality, namely, that of the Greeks and Romans; and his advice to Christians is in a great measure a system of accommodation to that; even to the extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery. What is called Christian, but should rather be termed theological, morality, was not the work of Christ or the Apostles, but is of much later origin, having been gradually built up by the Catholic Church of the first five centuries, and though not implicitly adopted by moderns and Protestants, has been much less modified by them than might have been expected. For the most part, indeed, they have contented themselves with cutting off the additions which had been made to it in the Middle Ages, each sect supplying the place by fresh additions, adapted to its own character and tendencies. That mankind owe a great debt to this morality, and to its early teachers, I should be the last person to deny; but I do not scruple to say of it, that it is, in many important points, incomplete and one-sided, and that unless ideas and feelings, not sanctioned by it, had contributed to the formation of European life and character, human affairs would have been in a worse condition than they now are. Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) “thou shalt not” predominates unduly over “thou shalt.” In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compromised away into one of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life: in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each man’s feelings of duty from the interests of his fellow-creatures, except so far as a self-interested inducement is offered to him for consulting them. It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established; who indeed are not to be actively obeyed when they command what religion forbids, but who are not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for any amount of wrong to ourselves. And while, in the morality of the best Pagan nations, duty to the State holds even a disproportionate place, infringing on the just liberty of the individual; in purely Christian ethics that grand department of duty is scarcely noticed or acknowledged. It is in the Koran, not the New Testament, that we read the maxim —“A ruler who appoints any man to an office, when there is in his dominions another man better qualified for it, sins against God and against the State.” What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honor, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.
    ~John Stuart Mil

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    "Virtue, therefore, is conquered by the 'way of the world' because its purpose is, in fact, the abstract, unreal essence, and because its action as regards reality rests on distinctions which are purely nominal. It wanted to consist in bringing the good into actual existence by the sacrifice of individuality, but the side of reality is itself nothing else but the side of individuality. The good was supposed to be that which has an implicit being, and to be opposed to what is; but the in-itself, taken in its real and true sense, is rather being itself. The in-itself is, in the first instance, the abstraction of essence in contrast to reality; but an abstraction is precisely what is not true, but exists only for consciousness, which means, however, that it is itself what is called real; for the real is that which is essentially for an other, or is being. But the consciousness of virtue rests on this distinction between the in-itself and being, a distinction which has no truth. The 'way of the world' was supposed to be the perversion of the good because it had individuality for its principle; only, individuality is the principle of the real world; for it is precisely individuality that is consciousness, whereby what exists in itself exists equally for an other; it does pervert the Unchangeable, but it perverts it in fact from the nothing of abstraction into the being of reality."

    -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
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    Solar eclipse of June 29, 1927 ~ Virginia Woolf

    Now I must sketch out the Eclipse.

    About 10 on Tuesday night several very long trains, accurately filled (ours with civil servants) left Kings Cross. In our carriage was Vita [Sackville-West] and Harold [Nicolson], Quentin [Bell], L [Leonard Woolf] and I. Before it got dark we kept looking at the sky: soft fleecy; but there was one star, over Alexandra Park. The Nicolsons got sleepy: Harold curled up with his head on Vitas knee. She looked like Sappho by Leighton, asleep; so we plunged through the midlands; made a very long stay at York. Then at 3 we got our sandwiches. Then we had another doze, or the Nicolsons did; then here was a level crossing, at which were drawn up a long line of motor omnibuses and motors, all burning pale yellow lights. It was getting grey - still a fleecy mottled sky. We got to Richmond about 3.30; it was cold, and the Nicolsons had a quarrel about Vitas luggage. We went off in the omnibus ...

    There were also many motor cars. These suddenly increased as we crept up to the top of Bardon Fell. Here were people camping beside their cars. We got out, and found ourselves very high, on a moor, boggy, heathery, with butts for grouse shooting. There were grass tracks here and there, and people had already taken up positions. So we joined them, walking out to what seemed the highest point looking over Richmond. One light burnt down there. Vales and moors stretched, slope after slope, round us. It was like the Haworth country. But over Richmond, where the sun was rising, was a soft grey cloud. We could see by a gold spot where the sun was. But it was early yet. We had to wait, stamping to keep warm, Leonard kept looking at his watch. Four great red setters came leaping over the moor. There were sheep feeding behind us. There were thin places in the cloud, and some complete holes. The question was whether the sun would show through a cloud or through one of these hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping - it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world - druids on Stonehenge. At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over - this is one shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: and the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again; and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills, at first with a glittering and aetheriality. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind - fresh, various - here blue, and there brown: all new colours, as if washed over and repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. We were bitterly cold. I should say that the cold had increased as the light went down. One felt very livid. Then - it was all over till 1999.

  7. #47

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    Of course, the vision of the future she paints is all about the past: she aims to acknowledge why people voted for Sen Sanders — and argue that those are the reasons they should vote for her.


    She apes his moral clarity in her anaphora: “It isn’t right . . . It isn’t right . . . It isn’t right . . .” Then she uses a pivotal antithesis: “Now, people — people have every right to be angry. But they’re also hungry. They’re hungry for solutions.”

    Translation: “You voted for Bernie because you’re angry; I’m angry too but I’m the one who can actually do something about it.” She dresses herself in Mr Sanders’s colours of campaign finance reform; Wall Street versus Main Street; equality; even campaign donors “giving less than $100”. Above all she makes defeat a virtue: “I know what it’s like to stumble and fall . . . it’s whether you get back up.”
    Losing in New Hampshire, in this account of it, gives Mrs Clinton the one thing she has always lacked: outsider chic

  8. #48

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    In Hewitt’s approach conflict resolution or
    problem solving is shaped by pre-defined semantics which are, so to speak, equivalent
    to a pre-existing social structure. But where is the structure and its semantics coming
    from? This question reveals the blind spot of pre-defined semantics which cannot show
    how social structures emerge from social interactions. OISS, in other words, cannot
    see that social structures are nothing else but routines of conflict resolution resulting
    from previously resolved problems or conflicts (Gasser 1991). However, any sociologically
    appropriate model of artificial sociality must be able to handle the „uncomputational“
    paradox that its communication structures must have pre-existed before they
    can emerge and that they must emerge before they can come into existence. How can
    DAI learn from the way the paradox is treated by sociology? Of course, the difficult
    point here is not sociological appropriateness as such but rather decoding the sociological
    paradox of structuration as a guideline for the construction of technological scalability.
    In order for a social framework to be produced by communication or interaction
    – or in technical terms: in order to develop a program that is able simultaneously
    to solve distributed problems by communication protocols and to generate communication
    protocols for distributed problem-solving – it would be necessary to pre-program
    an institutional framework that could itself shape the intentions, convictions and goals
    of the individual actors and, what is of equal importance - also do the whole in reverse!
    (Malsch 1998b)
    However, the translation of a sociological problem into an engineering question is
    but a starting point for further investigations. And more questions will arise: how is
    “personal” direct communication flanked with “impersonal” generalized media (Parsons)
    or capital resources (Bourdieu) of social exchange (e.g. power, money, expertise,
    culture) and how are these resources reinforced in personal interaction
    (Malsch/Schulz-Schaeffer 1997)?

  9. #49
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    So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.

    But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.

    Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having felt that he is losing by slow degrees all reason for living, incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.

    Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.

    There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly been described. That madness or another…. We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules – outside of which the species feels threatened – which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.

    It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled...

    http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutle...Surrealism.htm

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

  10. #50
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    Dreams are the weird before the death. Everything always breaks down and dies- so how can we then be saved from it all? Well the short and blunt answer is that you can't. Because it is so horrible and tragic, - when nothing we do matters, the only thing that matters is simply being kind to each other. Not kind in the way of "eww nice guy = no sex." But in the way of uplifting a friend. There is being fake nice to hide being a coward, or hide being naive about the way the world works- but there is the greater kind of kindness that is never a weakness, but always a strength. If we are not our feelings (and we are not) - we are not our body either. And not our thoughts. We are how we treat others- we are the bounces we give back and the heaviness that we inflict. That is how you ascend and twist and coil and work your way through the complicated gears of life. Is it manipulative? Yes. Suck it up. It's the roadblock to those that are cruel- not selling enough sweet, poisonous honey. You are going to die and be horrified anyway. But you are not that either.

    (Yes I am so narcissistic as to quote something that I myself have wrote. Bite me.)

  11. #51
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    Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn't understand: the absence of caprice in what the police did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all.

    They were opening a bottle.
    Or shutting a tap.
    Cracking an egg to make an omelette.

    The twins were too young to know that these were only history's henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear - civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.

    Men's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

    Men's Needs.

    What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war, after all, or genocide) of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God's Purpose, revealing herself to an underage audience.

    There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived it.

    History in live performance.

    If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he as a fellow creature- had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.

    Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn't tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn't hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn't rape him. Or behead him.

    After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.

  12. #52

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    These changes have created a more polarised and unequal class structure. However, many have become fascinated by the power of money and lifestyles of celebrities. And in this context, there is a symbiotic relationship between rentier (the upper classes or superegos) and the lumpen (the lower classes or the ids). In this relationship, the rentier eats most of the cake made of easy money based on a principle of profit. Meanwhile, the lumpen lives with a hope of one day catching up with the status of rentier. This continuous hope, fueled by the promise of continued consumption, kills the lumpen day by day without them ever noticing. In this relationship, while the rentier is free to do anything they want behind closed doors, the lumpen feels free to do so in streets. Because of that, we see people who we would never expect to find together in a photograph, such as aristocrats of various ranks, rentiers and celebrities who are regarded as national treasures in their countries.

    author looks delta #deltarant
    Last edited by Kalinoche buenanoche; 02-19-2016 at 01:42 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Freud, Civilization and its discontent
    The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two "Heavenly Powers", eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what results?
    Eros vs Thanatos

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    The power of Chaos Theory as a model is that it can approximately model a wide variety of phenomena that previous theories could not. Pre-chaos science approached phenomena in terms of isolating one element of an event or situation and studying it. For example, the dominant approach to understanding our senses is to study each sense in isolation of the others. This can tell us a lot about each sense, but is not an accurate way of describing how we experience our senses. It is a very common human tendency to confuse the map with the territory, that is, to act as though the models we use to interpret experience actually are the experience.

    .......

    Chaos magic recognizes the power and malleability of belief, and consequently uses belief as a tool for magical action. That we can quickly allow beliefs to form the bedrock of our interpretation of reality allows us to manipulate the ability for magical purposes.

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    Quote Originally Posted by lungs View Post
    The power of Chaos Theory as a model is that it can approximately model a wide variety of phenomena that previous theories could not. Pre-chaos science approached phenomena in terms of isolating one element of an event or situation and studying it. For example, the dominant approach to understanding our senses is to study each sense in isolation of the others. This can tell us a lot about each sense, but is not an accurate way of describing how we experience our senses. It is a very common human tendency to confuse the map with the territory, that is, to act as though the models we use to interpret experience actually are the experience.

    .......

    Chaos magic recognizes the power and malleability of belief, and consequently uses belief as a tool for magical action. That we can quickly allow beliefs to form the bedrock of our interpretation of reality allows us to manipulate the ability for magical purposes.
    I've definitely read this before but i don't know where.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Contra View Post
    I've definitely read this before but i don't know where.
    http://www.amazon.com/Condensed-Chao.../dp/1935150669

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    Hmm.. i didn't read a book on it. Must've been a blog or something quoting the book-- or plagiarizing. Thanks though.

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    ‘The complexity of things becomes more close,’ said Bernard, ‘here at college, where the stir and pressure of life are so extreme, where the excitement of mere living becomes daily more urgent. Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie. What am I? I ask. This? No, I am that. Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel — then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard, in public, bubbles; in private, is secretive. That is what they do not understand, for they are now undoubtedly discussing me, saying I escape them, am evasive. They do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard. I am abnormally aware of circumstances. I can never read a book in a railway carriage without asking, Is he a builder? Is she unhappy? I was aware today acutely that poor Simes, with his pimple, was feeling, how bitterly, that his chance of making a good impression upon Billy Jackson was remote. Feeling this painfully, I invited him to dinner with ardour. This he will attribute to an admiration which is not mine. That is true. But “joined to the sensibility of a woman” (I am here quoting my own biographer) “Bernard possessed the logical sobriety of a man.” Now people who make a single impression, and that, in the main, a good one (for there seems to be a virtue in simplicity), are those who keep their equilibrium in mid-stream. (I instantly see fish with their noses one way, the stream rushing past another.) Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville — all fish in mid-stream. But you understand, YOU, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs — they have given up calling for a self who does not come), you understand that I am only superficially represented by what I was saying tonight. Underneath, and, at the moment when I am most disparate, I am also integrated. I sympathize effusively; I also sit, like a toad in a hole, receiving with perfect coldness whatever comes. Very few of you who are now discussing me have the double capacity to feel, to reason. Lycett, you see, believes in running after hares; Hawkins has spent a most industrious afternoon in the library. Peters has his young lady at the circulating library. You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely energized to the top of your bent — all save Neville, whose mind is far too complex to be roused by any single activity. I also am too complex. In my case something remains floating, unattached.
    ..

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    What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own death, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death. . . .
    ..

  20. #60

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    Lately I’ve been experiencing a new temporal sensation that’s odd to articulate, but I do think is shared by most people. It’s this: until recently, the future was always something out there up ahead of us, something to anticipate or dread, but it was always away from the present.
    But not any more. Somewhere in the past few years the present melted into the future. We’re now living inside the future 24/7 and this (weirdly electric and buzzy) sensation shows no sign of stopping — if anything, it grows ever more intense. Elsewhere I’ve labelled this experience “the extreme present” — or another label for this new realm might be “the superfuture”. In this superfuture I feel like I’m clamped into a temporal roller coaster and, at the crest of the first hill, I can see that my roller coaster actually runs off far into the horizon. Wait! How is this thing supposed to end?
    Is it ever going to end? Help! I want a pill called 1995! I want a one-year holiday from change! But that’s not going to happen.

  21. #61
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    EXPERIENCE!!

    Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts." We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence."

    We can see other people's behavior, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behavior.

    The other person's behavior is an experience of mine. My behavior is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other's behavior to the other's experience of my behavior. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is interexperience.

    I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behavior. You see my behavior. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot "see" my experience of you. My experience of you is not "inside" me. It is simply you, as I experience you. And I do not experience you as inside me. Similarly, I take it that you do not experience me as inside you.

    "My experience of you" is just another form of words for "you-as-I-experience-you," and "your experience of me" equals "me-as-you-experience-me." Your experience of me is not inside you and my experience of you is not inside me, but your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you.

    I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience is man's invisibility to man. Experience used to be called the Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences.

    If, however, experience is evidence, how can one ever study the experience of the other? For the experience of the other is not evident to me, as it is not and never can be an experience of mine.

    I cannot avoid trying to understand your experience, because although I do not experience your experience, which is invisible to me (and nontastable, nontouchable, nonsmellable, and inaudible), yet I experience you as experiencing.

    I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on.

    The study of experience of others is based on inferences I make, from my experience of you experiencing me, about how you are experiencing me experiencing you experiencing me...

    Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience. It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with interexperience. It is concerned with your behavior and my behavior as I experience it, and your and my behavior as you experience it.

    Since your and their experience is invisible to me as mine is to you and them, I seek to make evident to the others, through their experience of my behavior, what I infer of your experience, through my experience of your behavior.

    This is the crux of social phenomenology.

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    The Lucifer Principle is a complex of natural rules, each working together to weave a fabric that sometimes frightens and appalls us. Every one of the threads in that tapestry is fascinating, but the big picture is more astonishing still. At its heart, the Lucifer Principle looks something like this: The nature scientists uncover has crafted our viler impulses into us: in fact, these impulses are a part of the process she uses to create. Lucifer is the dark side of cosmic fecundity, the cutting blade of the sculptor's knife. Nature does not abhor evil; she embraces it. Shes use sit to build. With it, she moves the human world to greater heights of organization, intricacy, and power.

    Death, destruction, and fury do not disturb the Mother of our world; they are merely parts of her plan. Only we are outraged by the Lucifer Principle's consequences. And we have every right to be . For we are casualties of nature's callous indifference to life, pawns who suffer and die to live out her schemes. One result: from our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart. From our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals comes our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we abhor—murder, torture, genocide, and war.

    For millennia, men and women have looked at the ruins of their lost homes and at the precious dead whom they will never see alive again, then have asked that spears be turned to pruning hooks and that mankind be granted the gift of peace; but prayers are not enough. To dismantle the curse that Mother Nature has built into us, we need a new way of looking at man, a new way of reshaping our destiny. — Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces of History

  23. #63

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    The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space.
    Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is
    confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of
    that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad
    space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move
    to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an
    open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself
    in a closed space (hold the fort)

  24. #64
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    “Pray, what little girl may that be?” inquired this very sensible man. “Surely her mother must be crazy, to let her go out in such bitter weather as it has been to-day, with only that flimsy white gown and those thin slippers!”

    “My dear husband,” said his wife, “I know no more about the little thing than you do. Some neighbour’s child, I suppose. Our Violet and Peony,” she added, laughing at herself for repeating so absurd a story, “insist that she is nothing but a snow-image, which they have been busy about in the garden, almost all the afternoon.”

    As she said this, the mother glanced her eyes toward the spot where the children’s snow-image had been made. What was her surprise, on perceiving that there was not the slightest trace of so much labour!—no image at all—no piled up heap of snow—nothing whatever, save the prints of little footsteps around a vacant space!

    “This is very strange!” said she.

    “What is strange, dear mother?” asked Violet. “Dear father, do not you see how it is? This is our snow-image, which Peony and I have made, because we wanted another playmate. Did not we, Peony?”

    “Yes, papa,” said crimson Peony. “This be our ‘ittle snow-sister. Is she not beau-ti-ful? But she gave me such a cold kiss!”


    http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/171/americ...ldish-miracle/

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

  25. #65
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    “I believe I should have crushed with my scorn the philosopher who first uttered this terrible but profoundly true thought,” said de Marsay. “You are all far too keen-sighted for me to say any more on that point. These few words will remind you of your own follies.

    “A great lady if ever there was one, a widow without children — oh! all was perfect — my idol would shut herself up to mark my linen with her hair; in short, she responded to my madness by her own. And how can we fail to believe in passion when it has the guarantee of madness?

    “We each devoted all our minds to concealing a love so perfect and so beautiful from the eyes of the world; and we succeeded. And what charm we found in our escapades! Of her I will say nothing. She was perfection then, and to this day is considered one of the most beautiful women in Paris; but at that time a man would have endured death to win one of her glances. She had been left with an amount of fortune sufficient for a woman who had loved and was adored; but the Restoration, to which she owed renewed lustre, made it seem inadequate in comparison with her name. In my position I was so fatuous as never to dream of a suspicion. Though my jealousy would have been of a hundred and twenty Othello-power, that terrible passion slumbered in me as gold in the nugget. I would have ordered my servant to thrash me if I had been so base as ever to doubt the purity of that angel — so fragile and so strong, so fair, so artless, pure, spotless, and whose blue eyes allowed my gaze to sound it to the very depths of her heart with adorable submissiveness. Never was there the slightest hesitancy in her attitude, her look, or word; always white and fresh, and ready for the Beloved like the Oriental Lily of the ‘Song of Songs!’ Ah! my friends!” sadly exclaimed the Minister, grown young again, “a man must hit his head very hard on the marble to dispel that poem!”

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

  26. #66
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    Quote Originally Posted by yen View Post
    I don't read, I do

    - yen
    love

    The end

    Too short!
    -
    Dual type (as per tcaudilllg)
    Enneagram 5 (wings either 4 or 6)?


    I'm constantly looking to align the real with the ideal.I've been more oriented toward being overly idealistic by expecting the real to match the ideal. My thinking side is dominent. The result is that sometimes I can be overly impersonal or self-centered in my approach, not being understanding of others in the process and simply thinking "you should do this" or "everyone should follor this rule"..."regardless of how they feel or where they're coming from"which just isn't a good attitude to have. It is a way, though, to give oneself an artificial sense of self-justification. LSE

    Best description of functions:
    http://socionicsstudy.blogspot.com/2...functions.html

  27. #67
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    "In your terms, while you live, and in the most pertinent terms of intimate sensation, your reality must be what you perceive in the framework of your time, and what you create within that framework, as it is experienced. Therefore, I entreat you not to behave as if man will destroy himself in some future - not to behave as if man is an imbecile, doomed to extinction, a dimwitted, half-crazy animal in a brain gone amuck."

    "None of the prophesied destruction man so fears is a reality in your time; nor, for all of the critical prophets through the ages, and the forerunners of doom, has the creativity of man destroyed itself in those terms."

    "There are those who make careers of condemning the faults and failings of others, or of the species itself, and because of that attitude man's great energy and good intent remain invisible. Man is in the process of becoming. His works are flawed - but they are the flawed apprentice works of a genius artist in the making, whose failures are indeed momentous and grotesque only in the light of his sensed genius, which ever leads him and directs him onward."

    "When you are considering the future in your terms, constructive achievements are as realistic as destructive ones. In those terms, each year of man's existence in fact justifies a more optimistic rather than pessimistic view. You cannot place man's good intent outside of the physical context, for outside of that context you do not have the creature that you know. You cannot say that nature is good, but spawned man, which is a cancer upon it, for nature would have better sense. You cannot say, either, that Nature - with a capital N - will destroy man if he offends her, or that Nature - with a capital N - has little use for its own species, but only wants to promote Life - with a capital L - for Nature is within each member of each species; and without each member of each species, Nature - with a capital or a small N - would be nonexistent."

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

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    "Do you know what I am thinking of?"

    "No."

    "Of a plan that has come into my head."

    "And what is this plan?"

    "I can't tell you yet, but I can tell you what the result would be. The result would be that in a month I should be free, I should have no more debts, and we could go and spend the summer in the country."

    "And you can't tell me by what means?"

    "No, only love me as I love you, and all will succeed."

    "And have you made this plan all by yourself?"

    "Yes."

    "And you will carry it out all by yourself?"

    "I alone shall have the trouble of it," said Marguerite, with a smile which I shall never forget, "but we shall both partake its benefits."

    I could not help flushing at the word benefits; I thought of Manon Lescaut squandering with Desgrieux the money of M. de B.

    I replied in a hard voice, rising from my seat:

    "You must permit me, my dear Marguerite, to share only the benefits of those enterprises which I have conceived and carried out myself."

    "What does that mean?"

    "It means that I have a strong suspicion that M. de G. is to be your associate in this pretty plan, of which I can accept neither the cost nor the benefits."

    "What a child you are! I thought you loved me. I was mistaken; all right."

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

  29. #69
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    "Gigantopithecus (from the Ancient Greek γίγας gigas "giant", and πίθηκος pithekos "ape") is an extinct genus of ape that existed from perhaps nine million years to as recently as one hundred thousand years ago, in what is now China, India, and Vietnam, placing Gigantopithecus in the same time frame and geographical location as several hominin species. The fossil record suggests that individuals of the species Gigantopithecus blacki were the largest known apes that ever lived, standing up to 3 m (9.8 ft), and weighing up to 540 kg (1,190 lb)."

  30. #70
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    Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. The night was of so inky a blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen, which was all to the good, but it was also of the most solemn stillness so that a horse’s hoof, or a child’s cry, could be heard at a distance of half a mile. Many a time did Orlando, pacing the little courtyard, hold his heart at the sound of some nag’s steady footfall on the cobbles, or at the rustle of a woman’s dress. But the traveller was only some merchant, making home belated; or some woman of the quarter whose errand was nothing so innocent. They passed, and the street was quieter than before. Then those lights which burnt downstairs in the small, huddled quarters where the poor of the city lived moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by one, were extinguished. The street lanterns in these purlieus were few at most; and the negligence of the night watchman often suffered them to expire long before dawn. The darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of his lantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his holsters; and did all these things a dozen times at least till he could find nothing more needing his attention. Though it still lacked some twenty minutes to midnight, he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn parlour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of canary wine to a few seafaring men, who would sit there trolling their ditties, and telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville, till they toppled off the benches and rolled asleep on the sanded floor. The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He listened to every footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout and each wail from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress cut his heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. Yet, he had no fear for Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would come alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her footfall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.

    So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with expectation was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realize that these were raindrops falling; the blows were the blows of the rain. At first, they fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hundred; then ran themselves together in a steady spout of water. It was as if the hard and consolidated sky poured itself forth in one profuse fountain. In the space of five minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin.

    Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shelter beneath the lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard. The air was thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning rose from the downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be heard above it. The roads, pitted as they were with great holes, would be under water and perhaps impassable. But of what effect this would have upon their flight he scarcely thought. All his senses were bent upon gazing along the cobbled pathway — gleaming in the light of the lantern — for Sasha’s coming. Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain strokes. But the phantom vanished. Suddenly, with an awful and ominous voice, a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair of anguish in Orlando’s soul, St Paul’s struck the first stroke of midnight. Four times more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover, Orlando had made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would come. But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and the eighth, and to his apprehensive mind they seemed notes first heralding and then proclaiming death and disaster. When the twelfth struck he knew that his doom was sealed. It was useless for the rational part of him to reason; she might be late; she might be prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate and feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her deceit and his derision. The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him rushed forth from concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes, each more poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees. The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard. There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings. But Orlando stood there immovable till Paul’s clock struck two, and then, crying aloud with an awful irony, and all his teeth showing, ‘Jour de ma vie!’ he dashed the lantern to the ground, mounted his horse and galloped he knew not where.

  31. #71
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    I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind.


    “To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles … ” (Shakespeare)


    And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.


    But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. So how does a man find a goal? Not a castle in the stars, but a real and tangible thing. How can a man be sure he’s not after the “big rock candy mountain,” the enticing sugar-candy goal that has little taste and no substance?


    The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.


    So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?


    The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.) There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.


    I’m going to steer clear of the word “existentialism,” but you might keep it in mind as a key of sorts. You might also try something called “Being and Nothingness” by Jean-Paul Sartre, and another little thing called “Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre.” These are merely suggestions. If you’re genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you’re doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.) But back to the answer. As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

  32. #72
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    Converting Minutes to Equivalent Hours

    Frequently, it is necessary to convert minutes into equivalent hours when solving speed, time, and distance problems. To convert minutes to hours, divide by 60 (60 minutes = 1 hour). Thus, 30 minutes is 30/60 = 0.5 hour. To convert hours to minutes, multiply by 60. Thus, 0.75 hour equals 0.75 × 60 = 45 minutes.

    Time T = D/GS

    To find the time (T) in flight, divide the distance (D) by the GS. The time to fly 210 NM at a GS of 140 knots is 210 ÷ 140, or 1.5 hours. (The 0.5 hour multiplied by 60 minutes equals 30 minutes.) Answer: 1:30.

    Distance D = GS X T

    To find the distance flown in a given time, multiply GS by time. The distance flown in 1 hour 45 minutes at a GS of 120 knots is 120 × 1.75, or 210 NM.

    GS GS = D/T

    To find the GS, divide the distance flown by the time required. If an aircraft flies 270 NM in 3 hours, the GS is 270 ÷ 3 = 90 knots.

  33. #73
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    Sum

    In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
    You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

    You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it's agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

    But that doesn't mean it's always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can't take a shower until it's your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you've forgotten someone's name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.

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    Then, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the tele-phone, and the telegraph – bush, grapevine or otherwise – became old hat. The telephone had a great effect on the English language. For one thing, it made the previously obscure greeting hello wildly popular. Before the telephone, people had wished each other good mornings, days and nights; but as the person on the other end of the line might not deserve a good day, people needed an alternative. Alexander Bell himself insisted on beginning a phone call with the bluff nautical term ahoy, but it didn’t catch on and so hello rose to become the standard English greeting.

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    Soul-Shards

    ONE gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.” The bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

    After a few minutes of emotional pondering — soul-searching, quite literally — I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines.

    “In the living room we have a book of the Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad — and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frédéric Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority — to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frédéric Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards — scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frédéric Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being — his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions — and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”

    Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange.

    @Park

  36. #76

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    Markets are multiplicities. Markets are rhizomes. The rhizomatic model of flows effectuates an immanence of markets without capitalism, which D&G call dromocracy.

    ....

    ...

    The denizen of a dromocracy is an operator. The operator is an artisan. And as such she always seeks to operate on and with and by matter, experimenting with its divergent evolutionary capacities, of loving, respecting, and coaxing, but always demanding more from matter, i.e. of more than what matter even knows itself to be capable. The operators of a dromocracy are cartographers, decalcomaniacs –and thus, as we will see in Part IV, are hedgers-speculators-arbitragers all at once– always following a line of flight, submitting to singularities, perpetually reaffirming their self-made becomings of fate with affirmation and joy.

    @_@
    Last edited by Kalinoche buenanoche; 06-01-2016 at 08:52 PM.

  37. #77

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    “Where does the city without gates begin? Perhaps inside that fugitive anxiety, that shudder that seizes the minds of those who, just returning from a long vacation, contemplate the imminent encounter with mounds of unwanted mail or with a house that’s been broken into and emptied of its contents. It begins with the urge to flee and escape for a second from an oppressive technological environment, to regain one’s senses and one’s sense of self.”

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    I had an uncle who was the presiding judge over a court that heard trials by jury. These are the courts that handle capital offenses. He told us stories from these cases that we could understand, even as children. They always began with him saying: “Most things are complicated, and guilt always presents a bit of a problem." He was right. We chase after things, but they’re faster than we are, and in the end we can never catch up. I tell the stories of people I’ve defended. They all had their stories, and they weren’t so different from us. All our lives we dance on a thin layer of ice; it’s very cold underneath, and death is quick. The ice won’t bear the weight of some people and they fall through. That’s the moment that interests me. If we’re lucky, it never happens to us and we keep dancing. If we’re lucky.

    My uncle was in the navy during the war and lost his left arm and right hand to a grenade. Despite this, he didn’t give up for a long time. He loved going hunting, and had a little private blind. His gun was custom-made for him and he could use it with one hand. One day he went into the woods, put the double-barreled shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He was wearing a black rollneck sweater; he’d hung his jacket on a branch. His head exploded. I saw the photos a long time later. He left a letter for his best friend, in which he wrote that he’d simply had enough. The letter began with the words “Most things are complicated, and guilt always presents a bit of a problem.” I still miss him. Every day.

  39. #79
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    Man's hesitation between fear and desire, between the terror of being possessed by uncontrollable forces and the will to overcome them, is grippingly reflected in the virginity myths. Dreaded or desired or even demanded by the male, virginity is the highest form of the feminine mystery; this aspect is simultaneously the most troubling and the most fascinating. Depending on whether man feels crushed by the powers encircling him or arrogantly believes he is able to make them his, he refuses or demands that his wife be delivered to him as a virgin. In the most primitive societies, where woman's power is exalted, it is fear that dominates; woman has to be deflowered the night before the wedding. Marco Polo asserted that for the Tibetans, "none of them wanted to take a virgin girl as wife." A rational explanation has sometimes been given for this refusal: man does not want a wife who has not yet aroused masculine desires. Al-Bakri, the Arab geographer, speaking of the Slavic peoples, notes that "if a man gets married and finds that his wife is a virgin, he says: 'If you were worth something, men would have loved you and one of them would have taken your virginity.'" He then chases her out and repudiates her. It is also claimed that some primitives refuse to marry a woman unless she has already given birth, thus proving her fertility. But the real reasons for the very widespread deflowering customs are mystical. Certain peoples imagine the presence of a serpent in the vagina that would bite the spouse during the breaking of the hymen; terrifying virtues are given to virginal blood, linked to menstrual blood, and capable of ruining the male's vigor. These images express the idea that the feminine principle is so powerful and threatening because it is intact. Sometimes the deflowering issue is not raised; for example, Malinowski describes an indigenous population in which, because sexual games are allowed from childhood on, girls are never virgins. Sometimes, the mother, older sister, or some other matron systematically deflowers the girl and throughout her childhood widens the vaginal opening. Deflowering can also be carried out by women during puberty using a stick, bone, or a stone, and this is not considered a surgical operation. In other tribes, the girl at puberty is subjected to savage initiation rites: men drag her out of the village and deflower her with instruments or by raping her. Giving over virgins to passerby is one of the most common rites; either these strangers are not thought to be sensitive to this mana dangerous only for the tribes' males, or it does not matter what evils befall them. Even more often, the priest, medicine man, boss, or head of the tribe deflowers the fiancee the night before the wedding; on the Malabar Coast, the Brahmans have to carry out this act, apparently without joy, for which they demand high wages. All holy objects are known to be dangerous for the outsider, but consecrated individuals can handle them without risk; that explains why priests and chiefs are able to tame the malefic forces against which the spouse has to protect himself. In Rome all that was left of these customs was a symbolic ceremony: the fiancee was seated on a stone Priapus phallus, with the double aim of increasing her fertility and absorbing the overpowerful and therefore harmful fluids within her. The husband defends himself in yet another way: he himself deflowers the virgin but during ceremonies that render him invulnerable at this critical juncture; for example, he does it in front of the whole village with a stick or bone. In Samoa, he uses his finger covered in a white cloth and distributes bloodstained shreds to the spectators. There is also the case of the man allowed to deflower his wife normally but he has to wait three days to ejaculate in her so that the generating seed is not soiled by hymen blood.

  40. #80
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    Starfall and the asshole Chad argued hatefully up in the cosmos, each fiery word spat down a glob of fire that was the essence of creation of everything in this universe. Including, Suedehead- Starfall's spirit son. Suedehead looked upward towards his cosmic mama, longing to be something more to her than just a son. He wanted to be her lover, but that would be inappropriate. Starfall continued to argue narcisisstically with the dark, evil - twisted Chad, as she could not help but be attracted to him. He was just so wrong, so murderous - so sexy.

    Starfall looked down at Suedehead, with compassion. Yet it angered and saddened him that this was compassion and not desire. Starfall continued to look at her son with understanding. "Forgive me, dear child of the Stars- but you know that everything in existence exists because of the conflict and hatred of heterosexuality, because we are doing this now." The Chad and Starfall begun having some hot politically incorrect heterosexual sex.

    Suedehead tried to be the type of man that Starfall was attracted to, but he could only groan and wimper in the night- and then he took a moment to appreciate in silence the natural beauty of the world, the gay natural nature beauty that was created by the cosmic hateful rants of heterosexuality. All this chaos so peace is possible.


    Hitta smirks from his cloudy cosmic vantage point.

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