Oath of Fëanor
"Sonra Fëanor korkunç bir yemin etti. Yedi oğlu da yanında diz çöküp hep birlikte aynı andı içti ve meşalelerin ışığı çektikleri kılıçlarda kan gibi kıpkırmızı parladı." -Silmarillion, Noldor'un Kaçışına Dair
Morgoth's Ring adlı kitapta belirtildiği gibi Fëanor ve oğullarının yemini:
“Be he foe or friend, be he foul or clean
Brood of Morgoth or bright Vala,
Elda or Maia or Aftercomer,
Man yet unborn upon Middle-earth,
Neither law, nor love, nor league of swords,
Dread nor danger, not Doom itself
Shall defend him from Fëanáro, and Fëanáro’s kin,
Whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh,
Finding keepeth or afar casteth
A Silmaril. This swear we all…
Death we will deal him ere Day’s ending,
Woe unto world’s end! Our word hear thou,
Eru Allfather! To the everlasting
Darkness doom us if our deed faileth…
On the holy mountain hear in witness
and our vow remember,
Manwë and Varda!"
The alliance with Pakistan, sealed with a handshake by George W. Bush, is hardly an outlier. Take the impossible-to-satirize situation with a major organ of American foreign policy that enjoys longstanding, bi-partisan support: foreign aid. Where do $28-odd-billion go every year? To countries where many, many people view us as an “enemy.” The Pew Global Attitudes Survey queried more than 325,000 people in 60 countries that receive U.S. aid. It asked whether they saw America as more of a “partner,” or more of an “enemy” (or neither). The countries with the highest percentage of respondents who viewed us as an “enemy” were also among those receiv-ing significant amounts of U.S.-backed aid: the Palestinian territories (76 percent of respondents saw us as an “enemy”), Pakistan (64 percent), Turkey (49 percent), Lebanon (46 percent), Venezuela (39 percent).
So, yes, we are the world’s mightiest nation, but we serve as a global ATM for people hostile to us and our interests. We spend years chasing down Osama Bin Laden and fighting his minions in Afghanistan, while at the same time we support Pakistan’s jihadist-enabling regime. Look broadly and deeply at American foreign policy, and you will find it crowded with many more instances of the same depressing theme. When considered as a whole, American foreign policy does not add up to a whole. It is a bewildering mish-mash of diverging, inconsistent goals. It lacks a unifying, guiding principle.
Sayfa 170
there is no place for fatalizm
“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.
“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
What do you hear when you hear the word feminism? It is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up. So much history in a word; so much it too has picked up.
and then there are days when the simple act of breathing
leaves you exhausted. it seems easier to give up on this life.
the thought of disappearing brings you peace. for so long i
was lost in a place where there was no sun. where there grew
no flowers. but every once in a while out of the darkness
something i loved would emerge and bring me to life again.
witnessing a starry sky. the lightness of laughing with old
friends. a reader who told me the poems had saved their life.
yet there i was struggling to save my own. my darlings.
living is difficult. it is difficult for everybody. and it is at that
moment when living feels like crawling through a pin-sized
hole. that we must resist the urge of succumbing to bad
memories. refuse to bow before bad months or bad years.
cause our eyes are starving to feast on this world. there are
so many turquoise bodies of water left for us to dive in. there
is family. blood or chosen. the possibility of falling in love.
with people and places. hills high as the moon. valleys that
roll into new worlds. and road trips. i find it deeply
important to accept that we are not the masters of this place.
we are her visitors. and like guests let’s enjoy this place like
a garden. let us treat it with a gentle hand. so the ones after
us can experience it too. let’s find our own sun. grow our
own flowers. the universe delivered us with the light and the
seeds. we might not hear it at times but the music is always
on. it just needs to be turned louder. for as long as there is
breath in our lungs—we must keep dancing.
Sayfa 240Kitabı okudu
What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.
“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.
That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
Tamamen şaşırmış bir şekilde, "Dünyanın en büyük yalanı nedir? " diye sordu Çocuk.
Şu: hayatımızın belli bir noktasında, başımıza gelenlerin kontrolünü kaybediyoruz ve yaşamlarımız kader tarafından kontrol ediliyor. Bu dünyanın en büyük yalanıdır."
The Quality World
The more others in our quality worlds let us do things for ourselves, the more we learn to take control of ourselves.
Sayfa 50 - Harper CollinsKitabı okudu
What do you hear when you hear the word feminism? It is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up. So much history in a word; so much it too has picked up.
The Seductive Process
Phase One: Separation—Stirring Interest and Desire
1-Choose the Right Victim:
Everything depends on the target of your seduction. Study your prey thoroughly, and choose only those who will prove susceptible to your charms. The right victims are those for whom you can fill a void, who see in you something exotic.
xiiiKitabı okudu
The moon is the friendliest of the celestial bodies, after all, glowing warm and white and welcoming, like a friend who wants only to know that all of us are safe in our narrow worlds, our narrow yards, our narrow, well-considered lives. The moon worries. We may not know how we know that, but we know it all the same: that the moon watches, and the moon worries, and the moon will always love us, no matter what.
The two circuits begin in the same place, but the desire circuit ends in a part of the brain that triggers excitement and enthusiasm, while the control circuit goes to the frontal lobes, a part of the brain that specializes in logical thinking.
In this way, both circuits give us the capacity to consider “phantoms”—things that don’t physically exist. For desire dopamine, those phantoms are things we wish to have but don’t have right now—things we want in the future. For control dopamine, the phantoms are the building blocks of imagination and creative thought: ideas, plans, theories, abstract concepts such as mathematics and beauty, and worlds yet to be.
Bruh!
There are deontologists such as Kant, who tell us that lying is always wrong (Always wrong? Even if the Nazis are at the door, asking if there are Jews in the attic? Yes!) and utilitarians such as Bentham, who say that it’s perfectly fine to torture and kill a baby if this action increases the sum total of the world’s happiness by even a smidgen (A baby? An innocent little baby? Yes!).
Architecture does not make us inhabit worlds of mere fabrication and fantasy; it articulates the experience of our being-in the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self.
Sayfa 12 - The sense of self, strengthened by art and architecture, also permits us to engage fully in the mental dimensions of dream, imagination and desire.
That's The Point
What veterinarians know—and physicians might not—is that flu viruses prowl many animal populations besides pigs and birds. Specific strains of dog, whale, mink, and seal flu have all been identified. Given the opportunity, they could blend with the human strain. Although these volatile viruses haven’t, as of this writing, crossed over into human populations, they are being closely tracked by veterinary epidemiologists.
The 2009 swine flu outbreak was but the latest wave in an ocean of diseases emerging from the jungle, the factory farm, the beach, the backyard bird feeder … perhaps even the doghouse and the litter box. The avian flu scare of 2005, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) panic of 2003, the monkeypox eruption the same year, the Ebola worry of 1996, the mad cow terror in Great Britain in the late 1980s—exotic zoonoses are nothing new. Think of a big, infectious killer and it’s probably zoonotic, spread or harbored by other animals. Malaria. Yellow fever. HIV. Rabies. Lyme disease. Toxoplasmosis. Salmonella. E. coli. These all started in animals and then jumped into our species. Some spread to us via insects like fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes. Others move around in feces and meat. In some cases, the pathogens leave their animal reservoir, mutate, and evolve into bespoke superbugs especially tailored for human-to-human spread.
The E. coli–tainted fresh baby spinach that killed three North Americans and sickened more than two hundred in 2006 was traced to the feces of wild pigs in the fields. One of the world’s worst outbreaks of the eerily named Q fever struck the Netherlands in the late 2000s.‡ Thirteen people died and thousands fell ill from the bacterial infection that spread to humans from infected goats on nearby farms.
But they see us as we see the animals in the forest.
