#but nothing good will ever come from the sensationalization of trials. ever

[maya-matlin]

Pick your most unpopular opinion about each of these shows (only if you want to!!): Degrassi, OTH, Gilmore Girls, Friends, Riverdale, That 70s Show, and Dawson's Creek :)

Degrassi:

This is so difficult because I feel like I've stated so many opinions in the past. Okay. I think the Degrassi nudes arc was theoretically really interesting from a psychological standpoint as well as how a survivor would cope after going through a very public sexual assault trial with the details of what happened to them being well known. Because it feels like something so human and yet so misguided, I don't view Zoe's role in it as harshly as others do. To be fair, the writers lost the plot. Literally. It got really sensationalized with blackmailing and cheerleader dolls and fake hostage situations. I also really hate how it turned into a Zoe vs Frankie situation with zero nuance. Their past involving Frankie being an unsupportive friend who victim blamed Zoe multiple times was never brought up once in lieu of Frankie being turned into Zoe's victim. So while I wouldn't say I like the arc itself, I feel like it had potential. The writers just weren't committed to seeing it through and let Zoe down as a character. The aftermath was really underwhelming and made the whole story line irrelevant.

OTH:

Even though I like the shooting episode for what it is, it's a pretty mediocre depiction of characterizing a school shooter. Following Jimmy's suicide, the writing consistently expects the audience to feel sympathy for him and remember him as a good guy who did one bad thing. It's to the point where the entire school ends up signing his high school yearbook. To be fair, a lot of the Jimmy romanticism came from Mouth, who had weird morals himself considering he was the show's resident incel. But beyond that, Jimmy quickly stops being the villain of the episode to orchestrate a scenario where Dan just happens to stumble upon Keith and a gun, giving him the opportunity to murder him. Also, every other scene features monologues given by the characters that are blatantly trying WAY too hard to be deep and profound. Not to mention this episode marked the official return of romantic Lucas/Peyton, but because Peyton was bleeding and supposedly didn't know any better she can't possibly be held responsible for selfishly making a move on her best friend's boyfriend in what she believed to be her last moments. Sorry, fuck that. Your last moments shouldn't include complicating things for two people you claim to care about. Especially not when you were the one who helped ruin their relationship the first time around, and you know for a fact that your best friend still has trust issues over what happened.

Also, Brooke was the love of Lucas's life. I'll die on this hill. Blame Chad Michael Murray's inability to stop giving his ex-wife heart eyes even during scenes post-Brucas, but it is what it is.

Gilmore Girls:

It's difficult to know what is or isn't popular in the Gilmore Girls fandom. I guess I'll say that Rory dropping out of Yale was the right decision? The way I see it, nothing bad was ever going to come out of that. Rory was in a transitional place where she was questioning a lot of her life decisions. She didn't currently feel up to attending school, so she took some time off. It was completely understandable, yet the narrative insists that this was indicative of Rory going down a bad path. I can understand Lorelai wanting Rory to take some time to make sure this was what she wanted but if anything, Lorelai's overreaction probably made Rory take even more time off from school. Had Rory had her mother and best friend in her corner, maybe she would have realized by the beginning of the next semester that she was emotionally ready to return to Yale. Just.. everything with Lorelai, Richard and Emily feeling as though they could force Rory to go back to school as though she was suddenly going to lose her place and never be able to return was stupid. Out of the two of them, Lorelai was the pettiest and most in the wrong during their estrangement. Lorelai was the parent. Lorelai chose not to tell her daughter she was engaged. Rory shouldn't have ever felt as though she couldn't come home until she basically did everything her mother wanted her to do. Considering Lorelai's own history with Emily, you'd think she'd realize that. But again, the writers made sure we knew how badly Rory was ruining her life and making bad decisions for committing the crime of taking a leave of absence from school and daring to try other things in the meantime.

Friends:

My opinions on the Ross/Rachel infamous "break" are all over the place. Technically, I think Ross is right that their relationship was no longer intact when he slept with another woman. Their communication absolutely sucked during this story line. No attempts at clarification were ever made. Ross just walked out when Rachel said she wanted a break, and Rachel let him. Honestly, I don't even think Ross sleeping with someone else so soon after splitting up from Rachel, in whatever form you consider that to be, makes him an asshole. In an ideal world where everyone makes rational decisions all the time, Ross wouldn't have coped with intense heartbreak by immediately sleeping with someone else. But it was a human reaction, and I don't fault him for that. What I do fault him for is hiding it the next day, running around town trying to stop other people from telling Rachel. It's all but admitting that Ross and Rachel were still emotionally connected and in the mindset of being in a monogamous relationship. Even if they technically weren't. What I also fault him for is being so stubborn and adamant on being right that he never admits fault or owns up to causing Rachel pain for several years after that. So what if he didn't technically betray Rachel? To Rachel, it felt like one. Sometimes, when you love someone, you have to be understanding of the complexities of emotions and just take the fucking L, even if you're technically faultless by definition. And honestly, Rachel was part of the problem, too. What kind of relationship or connection do you really have if you're having the same, obnoxious argument for eight years, never able to get on the same page? Like, I know it's a comedy, but Friends wasn't playing up the comedy angle during this arc. Anyways, they definitely shouldn't have ended up together if they were going to keep getting tripped up over one argument for eight years.

Riverdale:

I don't know how unpopular this actually is, but Veronica is extremely underrated and never gets the love and appreciation she deserves. Looking across the entire series, including time jumps, different universes, and eras where the characters literally had powers, Veronica was consistently the most selfless and considerate character on the show. Half the time, she was the mean girl in name only. There were countless occasions where Veronica forgave even when she shouldn't have and/or should have held out for more remorse and effort from the person that wronged her. The attempt to compare Veronica kissing Ginger Judas in the pilot after knowing Archie and Betty for two seconds to Betty doing it three years into Varchie's relationship is.. it has some nerve. Anyways, Veronica was wonderful, ambitious, and everyone on that show was better for having known her. Sadly, she was underappreciated more often than not, rarely ever getting her due. I really wish anyone but Archie had been the love of her life, because he really didn't deserve her by the end.

That '70s Show:

Sometimes, Hyde gets way too much of a pass for his treatment of Jackie. I feel like he's overall the most popular character on the show with his relationship with Jackie being the most popular, resulting in a lot of his questionable behavior getting swept under the rug. Obviously Hyde had issues he needed to work through stemming from his childhood and struggled to let other people in. But Jackie was consistently a pretty great girlfriend for him, going out of her way to show love and affection, only for him to not 100% reciprocate. Fuck Danny Masterson (and honestly Mila at this point too), but a lot of what made that relationship what it was is the chemistry between Danny and Mila and how they chose to demonstrate the love between those two characters. Hyde was still miles ahead of Kelso and Fez and had great moments with Jackie. But it still needs to be said. Hyde put Jackie through a lot.

Dawson's Creek:

While not perfectly written, most of Andie's fall from grace during season 3 makes a lot of sense. I even think Andie cheating on Pacey was in character. It's a controversial take because no one wants to believe that season 2 Andie would have ever done such a thing. But the reality is, Andie had a literal mental breakdown. She says it herself. When Andie went to get mental health help, she was no longer the same girl Pacey fell in love with. Andie was in a dark, lonely, vulnerable place, and she met someone else. This guy understood parts of Andie's mental health struggles that Pacey couldn't, and it led to a friendship that became an emotional affair. They made their own world together, and then had one, impulsive slip up. It doesn't cheapen Andie's love for Pacey, but it's still understandable that Andie crossed a boundary of Pacey's that couldn't be uncrossed. After this, Andie's attempts to recuperate post-breakup, including her treatment of Pacey and even stealing the test were pretty consistent based on how desperately Andie wanted to appear normal and as though everything was under control. However, I also think early season 3 stacked the deck too far against Andie, resulting in her character leaving the show early. The supposed "false accusation" meant to make Andie look bad from a misogynistic, ableist showrunner took it too far. I personally think even during that episode, there are enough hints, including Rob's desperation to shut Andie's story down when she hadn't even gone to the authorities, indicates she told the truth. Seriously, his happy ass was all cocky when Pacey confronted him, but once he sobered up he practically sprinted to Joey's house to use Andie's mental health against her, even manhandling Joey multiple times to force her to listen. But whatever. The intent was obvious, and I still hated it. Anyways, Andie McPhee was great, and I wish people would still appreciate her at her worst. After all, it's what led to season 4 Andie, probably the strongest iteration of her character even though she sadly wasn't around for long.

#mayamatlinscello #Long post #I promise I never mean for these answers to be so long #I just have so much to say #Also the two OTH opinions aren't technically connected #I was just going through my Brucas tag and had a realization so my petty ass couldn't help it

[scarlet--wiccan]

open letter to Marvel's X-Men office

To whom it may concern,

I'm a longtime reader of Marvel comics and a weekly buyer with subscriptions and pull lists at my local comic store. I'm also an American of Romani descent who has spent years researching and writing about the function of pop culture in the systemic racism that my people endure. Much could be said about the record of Romani characters in superhero comics, particularly the Scarlet Witch, but I'm writing today to raise concerns about the character's throughline in the current X-Men era, which has come to a head with her apparent murder in X-Factor #10, written by Leah Williams. First, however, I would like to address the racial and sexual violence visited upon the character Prodigy, as depicted by Williams, who is a white author, and the history of racist microagressions and the objectification that many readers have observed in Williams' past work. In X-Factor #10, Prodigy, a Black bisexual, is shown to have been sexually assaulted and murdered by a predator who specifically targets Black bi and gay men. Prodigy's assault and death transpired while he was dressed in a drag-inspired look, an arbitrary decision which served only to further sensationalize the homophobic violence. This plotline was abrupt and underdeveloped, and leaped without warning into imagery that many Black and LGBT readers found traumatizing. This was not an authentic or meaningful exploration of Black and queer experiences-- rather it was an exploitation and objectification of the violence done to Black and queer bodies. Coming from a white writer, this is wholly inappropriate. Leah Williams being bisexual herself does not excuse that. I am particularly disturbed by the implementation of pro-police messaging, via white character Aurora, after we have all spent the last year protesting police violence against Black lives. At worst, this is tone deaf, but I, and many other readers of color, found it to be egregiously offensive. Readers of color, particularly East Asian readers, have long been wary of Williams and her treatment of non-white characters. The repeated and disturbing objectification of East Asian women in her series X-Tremists struck a serious nerve, particularly with Williams' original character, Nezumi, who seemed redolent of racist WWII-era propaganda conflating Japanese people with rats. Her over-sexed and racially tokenized treatment of Akihiro in X-Factor has also put readers on edge, although many bit their tongue and endeavored to support her new book on account of its numerous LGBT characters and plotlines. Unfortunately, it seems as though that tentative faith was misplaced, and we must reiterate that LGBT representation does not outweigh violent racism. The Scarlet Witch is a complex character with an ever-changing history. The most formative and consistent element of her origin, however, is that she was born to a Romani mother, and raised by a migrant, working class Romani family who faced racial discrimination and violent hate crimes. For context, the Romani people are a South Asian diaspora who are racialized in European society, and have endured systemic oppression ever since our arrival in the West, including an attempted genocide during the Nazi regime. Although Wanda is no stranger to taking a dark turn, the Decimation plot stands out as a uniquely damaging and harmful case of character asassination. You can imagine how the identity politics and acts of violence which were projected onto the character are offensive given her personal history, and the real-life history that she represents. For years, the vitriol and anger that were directed towards Wanda within this narrative, boosted by blatantly ableist tropes, shaped the way that readers and writers alike perceived her. That negative perception encouraged audiences to espouse hateful sentiments about Wanda without forming clear thoughts about their racist implications, or making any effort to better their understanding of Romani people and our needs regarding popular culture. The current era of X-Men comics has revisited the Decimation several times, but I fear that

they have done nothing to counteract the harmful messaging that was attached to Wanda during that time, and have only doubled down on her troubling political position in the mutant world. I shouldn't have to explain this, but characterizing a Romani woman as an interloper, and a bogeyman figure that Krakoans invoke to engender nationalism, directly parallels the racist propaganda that is used to subjugate real-life Romani people throughout Europe. Year after year, Roma communities face forced eviction, deportation, and property laws designed to weed out migrant travellers, while our lives are often endangered by violent hate. Earlier this month, on 19 June, 2021, a Romani man in Teplice, Czech Republic, was murdered in an act of police brutality, and the Czech state has refused to launch an investigation or deliver any sort of justice on behalf of his family. We have spent the last two weeks protesting for Roma lives. To be honest, witnessing Roma death on-page, particularly in the heartbreaking scene where Wanda's own son discovers her body, triggered a lot of the distress and emotional trauma that I've been carrying since the Teplice incident. Of course, the timing of it couldn't be helped, but I fear that Williams will continue to exploit our trauma and our pain in her upcoming series, Trial of Magneto, which promises to revolve around Wanda's death and Magneto's reaction. Given Williams' history, and her choices in this most recent issue, I simply have no faith, only grave misgivings. Leah Williams is a white woman who continues to profit from the exploitation racial trauma and stereotyping, and Marvel cannot claim to be inclusive while enabling her behavior. As readers, we feel we must demand her removal from upcoming and future Marvel projects. We cannot in good conscience support and continue to give money to the X-Men franchise with such creators at the fore. In general, Marvel needs to take a good hard look at how it employs. This won't be a solution to the company's ingrained problems, but removing Leah Williams would be a constructive place to start.

[certain cues have been taken from other readers who have posted and shared their messages to the X-Men office. Please feel free to borrow and modify any aspect of this letter, barring, of course, the passages regarding my own identity. This message has been sent to [email protected]]

#leah williams #x-factor #david alleyne #prodigy #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch

[back-and-totheleft]

"I do have the right to talk"

In many people’s opinion, Oliver Stone doesn’t just court controversy. He buys it dinner and tickets to a Broadway show. With movies like “Platoon,” “Salvador,” “JFK,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Natural Born Killers” on his resume, it’s no wonder the Oscar-winning director has a hot-button reputation of sorts. Perhaps that’s why one of the most controversial things about his new film, “World Trade Center,” which opens Wednesday, is how uncontroversial it is.

Based on the true story of two New York Port Authority cops who were pulled out of the rubble after the towers collapsed Sept. 11, 2001, the movie plays it straight – it keeps politics, one of Stone’s favorite topics, out of the picture.

During a recent conversation at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead in Atlanta, the confident, well-spoken filmmaker talked about his new film, a few of his old films and being Oliver Stone.

Q: When the word came that you were making a movie called “World Trade Center,” I think a lot of people thought, Uh-oh, he’s going to create a controversy, he’s going to sensationalize a national tragedy. Why would that be?

A: I got politicized a long time ago. My films were seen as one thing or another. I was surprised, frankly. There’s an Oliver Stone they talk about, and he’s not me. I mean, this is a ball of years. Twenty, 30 years, going back to “Midnight Express” even (the 1978 film that won him his first Oscar, for Best Adapted Screenplay). Years of confusions and repetition of lies.

A big one, for instance, was “JFK.” The lie has been, Oliver Stone makes up history. He falsifies history. Brainwashes children. He would have us believe the idiot theory that 25 government agents, along with Lyndon Baines Johnson, killed John F. Kennedy.

The true meaning of that film was a question about what reality is in politics, what surface events mean. All the language was suppositional, except for (Jim) Garrison’s feelings at the end of the trial. And even some of that was suppositional.

The rap on the politics (in my movies) is really about statements I’ve made between the films. I could be faulted for that. I did shoot myself in the foot for saying things. But I don’t believe in being censored. Because I’m a filmmaker and a celebrity, people think I have no right to talk. But I say to you, I do have the right to talk. I’ve earned the right to talk. I served my country. I did my time. Paid my taxes. Had children. All that (expletive).

Q: But you do see that you’re a hot-button personality to people, even when it’s not a politically themed movie. People seem to react very personally to you and your work.

A: I became a hot button, especially on that film (“JFK”). But “Natural Born Killers” added to it. And probably “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Platoon” (Stone won best-director Oscars for the latter two). By the time I made “The Doors,” with the drugs, I was a “raving lefty.”

Q: Where were you when you found out America had been attacked on 9/11?

A: Nothing exciting. I was in L.A. Asleep. The time zone difference. My wife woke me up and turned on the TV. It was pretty shocking stuff.

I’m not a pacifist or a bleeding-heart liberal, as some people say. I believe in measured vengeance. Two thousand al-Qaida fighters killed 3,000 people. I’m all for going after those 2,000 and, when it became necessary, the Taliban. The world was with us, and I think I show that in the movie. That was the right war, the one Dave Karnes (the Marine who discovered the trapped men) should’ve gone to. Instead, he went to Iraq, which seems to me a confusion. A confusion I don’t understand.

Q: One of the things that ran through my mind after the movie was the line from “Manhattan,” where Mariel Hemingway says to Woody Allen, “You gotta have a little faith in people.”

A: I can’t say that’s the original reason. It was just a great story, and it was true. It came to me out of the blue. I wasn’t thinking about a 9/11 movie, but Andrea Berloff wrote this script that had these five figures in it. (The police officers, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, are played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña, with Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal as their wives and Michael Shannon as Karnes.)

They were inspirational to me. I’d never thought of it that way. As a microcosm. These people dug in. They didn’t give in to fear. They found their courage. Their faith, you can call it. The metaphysical thing that exists, the evidence of things unseen. They dug in and connected in a kind of collective dream, a collective unconscious. It’s a web, a thread, between five people.

Q: You’ve said your movies are an emotional barometer for you. Where does “World Trade Center” find you?

A: It was good to come back home after being in Iran for three years (for “Alexander”). To come back to this country, which is at war, and go back to the bottom of the cellar, so to speak. This country was raped collectively, and this is like going back to the therapist and saying, I want to know about the day of the rape. That’s where you start. Realism. Then let the demons out.

I didn’t know about these guys until 2004. And this Marine. At our first screening, we handed out cards, and the audience thought we’d laid in a Hollywood B-movie on top of the reality. They were shocked. They thought it (his character) was all (expletive).

But it wasn’t. This was the guy exactly. I saw him on TV doing interviews. And he really did go to Iraq.

Q: Speaking of going to war, in 2007, it will be 40 years since you were in Vietnam. Looking back, what do you see? And looking forward?

A: (shaking his head) Forty years goes like … it’s all moments.

The irony of it is, I was very pessimistic when I was young. Who else would go to Vietnam at age 19 to commit suicide? As I’ve become more realistic in life, I’ve become more optimistic. Because you have a better sense of the negative, and, knowing the negative, the darkness, you appreciate the light more. It makes you more optimistic when you do get the light. When you’re younger, you take it a little bit more for granted.

Q: I once read an item about you in The New Yorker.

A: (interrupts) Oh, no.

Q: You were having lunch with your mother.

A: (small sigh of relief) Oh, that was another one.

Q: She said she came to this country from France after the war (to join her American husband), and she was the only woman on a huge ship with 1,500 men. And she was already pregnant with you and was so nauseated she had to be fed intravenously. And you said, “No wonder I’m the way I am.”

A: She’s an Auntie Mame type. Not the greatest mother, frankly, but you’ll never forget her if you ever meet her.

Q: So you’re saying you were shaped in the womb by a lot of testosterone and a little bit of seasickness?

A: (laughs) I was probably throwing up myself.

Q: Someone once wrote that you were part Captain Ahab, part Ken Kesey. Would you add anyone to that list?

A: Oh, yeah. I’d add a few people. Any of the people I’ve done in my films have affected me. I’m part Nixon, part Garrison, part Jim Morrison.

And Alexander (the Great). I definitely lived through Alexander. I think that was misunderstood as an act of hubris, but what he was to me was the ultimate voyager. The ultimate adventurer.

Q: Which could also, in some way, describe you.

A: Yeah, but I wasn’t saying I was Alexander.

Q: Your approach to “World Trade Center” does seem different from many of your earlier films. Not so much a hot issue as a heart issue.

A: I used to be faster. I did 10 movies in 10 years. This movie was no different in its methodology, with the exception of “U-Turn” and “Natural Born Killers,” which were fiction.

I do my homework. I interviewed, and I interviewed. I interviewed everyone. We have a gold mine here. These two guys are lucid and can talk about it. And process it. This is a gold mine for me, a gold mine for all of us.

You know, the end of “Platoon” has a similar feeling. When Charlie (Sheen) is leaving the jungle, he says something to the effect: We the survivors have an obligation to the dead to remember. And with the remainder of our lives, we must bring a goodness and meaning to this life.

And I think that’s why John and Will are here. That’s why they’re helping us.

-"I do have the right to talk," The Orange County Register, Aug 6 2006 [x]

#world trade center #oliver stone #the orange county register #memories

[arcticdementor]

In the David Fincher produced, 2017 Netflix series, Mindhunter, two FBI special agents travel the country interviewing serial killers in the 1970’s. The series, based on the non-fiction book “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas, chronicles the beginnings of advanced criminal profiling techniques developed by the FBI in response to a number of high profile, and gruesome crimes carried out during the era, beginning with the Manson Family murders of 1968. Throughout the show the fictional special agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench meet with frequent resistance from other law enforcement personnel as they attempt to unravel the minds of the serial killers they meet. Everyone from their bosses in the agency to the local police officers they encounter along the way express extreme discomfort at the thought of empathizing or attempting to understand the killers Ford and Tench interrogate. These men are just evil. There’s nothing more to it. Nothing can be learned from them. No insight can be gained. They’re simply, purely evil, and attempting to say anything more on the subject is an affront to the victims, their families, and to human decency and capital-J Justice in general.

Fictionalized though the series may be, in our own time, in the era of mass shootings, one doesn’t have to go far to find similar responses to this uniquely contemporary category of violent crime. Media coverage of the killers oozes sensationalized language that depicts them as dark, evil, twisted, vile, abhorrent, insane. The public, in internet comment forms across social media, offer up their thoughts and prayers, and inevitably, the discussion devolves into a debate on the second amendment and the merits of gun control as politicians and journalists quickly move to steer the national conversation to more politically fruitful areas in order to amass momentum in passing various pieces of long desired legislation targeting gun owners or the NRA. The killers themselves, their personalities, their motivations, their worldviews, the experiences that shape them, every time quickly slip through the cracks of the conversation and are forgotten long before their respective cases are ever brought to trial.

…

Over the course of hundreds of hours beginning in 1959, Ted Kaczynski, the future unabomber, participated in an intense psychological experiment conduced at Harvard by Dr. Henry A Murray. During World War II, Murray had worked for the Office of Strategic Services in developing personality assessment techniques designed to test potential recruits on how well they would endure interrogation and torture by the enemy. At Harvard, Murray went on to further develop his method, transforming it from a diagnostic assessment of mental anti-fragility, into the basis of a radical personality modifying procedure he hoped could be used to forcibly evolve human consciousness in order to prevent the nuclear annihilation he feared was inevitable in light of mankind’s petty national prejudices and self-interest during the period of the Cold War. Kaczynski was among his unwitting test subjects, and though his personal, radical Luddite beliefs would ultimately diverge from the kind of technocratic globalism Murray intended to inculcate in Kaczynski, in a strange way, Murray was also more successful than he could have possibly anticipated.

…

No case provides better evidence of this possibility than that of Adam Lanza, the 2012 Sandy Hook shooter. After years of denied requests, more than 1,000 pages of evidence relating to the Lanza case were finally released to the Hartford Courant in December of 2018. Lanza, who killed himself following the attack, left behind no manifesto. He had even taken the precaution of smashing his devices’ hard drives prior to the shooting. In the end hundreds of pages worth of Lanza’s writings were ultimately recovered by the police, and it’s only from these scattered fragments that his beliefs and opinions emerge. Like Holmes in the weeks and months leading to the Aurora massacre, Lanza was no stranger to psychiatric evaluation. Throughout Lanza’s entire life, from the age of 3, when he was first diagnosed with speech and developmental problems, he knew little else but the offices of therapists and counselors and psychiatrists. A rotating cast of mental health professionals drifted in and out of his life. They all recognized the so-called ‘warning signs’ all too well, but even with a lifetime’s worth of treatment, they completely and utterly failed to prevent his transformation into mass murderer.

…

Lanza goes even further, and characterizes the years of psychiatric treatment he received since childhood explicitly as abusive: “I was molested at least a dozen times by a few different adults when I was a child. It wasn’t my decision at all: I was coerced into it… What do each of the adults have in common? They were doctors, and each of them were sanctioned by my parents to do it. This happens to virtually every child without their input into the matter: Their parents sanction it.”

…

The United States spends more per capita on primary and secondary education than almost any other country. As of 2014 the U.S. is in the top 5, below only Switzerland, Norway and Austria. Despite this however, year after year, a majority of Americans report dissatisfaction with the quality of K-12 education in their country. Alternative education remains a persistent source of controversy within the public consciousness. Private schools, charter schools, school vouchers, homeschooling, all are topics that filter in and out of the national political conversation. Democrats, on the whole, maintain an unyielding support for the compulsory nature of public education in America, while practices like Homeschooling are largely written off as the exclusive province of religious fundamentalists and political separatists. The same goes for the diverting of public resources to charter schools by means of a tax exemption or credit. The argument that has formed over time to circumvent these controversial alternatives boils down to a single word: Socialization.

Public schools not only educate students in facts and skills, the argument goes, but also serve to socialize children by serving as a microcosm of the pluralistic, diverse society in which these students will one day have to live and contribute to. A private, all male school, for instance, will fail to prepare its students for the modern workplace, where they’ll have to cooperate and even take orders from female colleagues or superiors. Likewise, desegregation busing is required to ensure students experience a sufficiently diverse environment. When it comes to a wide variety of controversies in public education, the socialization argument continues to form the backbone of liberal resistance to conservative attacks on the public schooling monopoly.At the same time, as liberals defend the practice and theory of socialization, the scourge of bullying has, on-again off again, served as a cause célèbre among many of the same people. Since 2010, October has become National Bullying Prevention Month, a campaign by the non-profit PACER organization in coordination with companies like CNN and Facebook, among others. Television shows and documentaries have tackled the subject, and celebrities like Ellen regularly champion anti-bullying causes. But what is bullying but the core of Socialization? In a sense the two can almost be considered synonymous. Bullying is, after all, the school of hard knocks which children undergo to learn the complex, unspoken rules of social game playing. Socialization is about instilling conformity, and bullying remains the core experience for many children in learning about all the ways the deviate from the norm. When children are unresponsive to bullying, that’s when things are kicked up to the teachers and administrators and school counselors, and that same unpliability and unresponsiveness is re-conceptualized by well-meaning adults as developmental disorders.

In 1975 Autism was diagnosed in children at a rate of 1 in every 5,000. Today that number has soared to nearly 1 in 100. This has ignited a public controversy over the source or cause of what by every definition deserves to be called an public health epidemic. 75% of children diagnosed with Autism today are boys. There’s no need to go searching for a cause. Vaccines aren’t behind the explosion in Autism rates. Teachers and school psychologists are. School psychology today is a booming industry, one which the US Department of Labor identifies as having some of the best employment opportunities across the entire field of psychology. 75% of school psychologists are women, with an average age of 46. It is this same group of people most empowered to conduct psychological monitoring of children across the country, and over the last 30 years, they have come to classify a larger and larger percentage of young boys as having developmental issues, to the point where it’s not clear whether there is anything wrong with these children at all, or if school psychologists have simply written off a wider and wider range of behaviors which they find problematic or incomprehensible as constituting autism.

…

In 2013, a Texas teenager named Justin Carter was locked up for threatening a school shooting. Whether or not the threat was legitimate is another matter entirely. In a bout of online shit talking over League of Legends Carter wrote “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts…” in response to a quip by a fellow gamer calling him crazy. He quickly rejoined: “lol jk,” likely realizing the fact he could get himself in trouble saying such things. Whether or not it was a good idea for him to make such a comment is immaterial, what matters is the violent, disproportionate response that followed. A Canadian woman, thousands of miles away, reported Carter. He was arrested and locked in jail. Bond was set at half a million dollars, which his family couldn’t afford to pay. He languished in jail, was assaulted by fellow inmates, and then locked up in solitary confinement for his own safety. After 4 months in jail an anonymous donor paid to have Carter released on behalf of his family. The state dragged out the matter for years, delaying the trial as long as possible on tenuous grounds. In the interim Carter was banned from using a computer. It wasn’t until spring of 2018 that a plea agreement was finally reached and Carter was let off with time served.

This is the paranoid system which today we entrust with rescuing at-risk young boys. This is what stands between us and more school shootings. Never mind the fact that as this system has grown, it has only led to a rise in mass shootings. Maybe the real cause of such cases is not guns, or a failure to identify and treat students, maybe the cause is these same students, following a protracted process of isolation and attempted psychological modification, learning to play the part the system has assigned to them, that of the security threat. When schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on active shooter drills and security systems, isn’t it just wasted money until someone comes along and gives them an excuse to use it? The complicated apparatus of psychological surveillance and socialization that prevails among schools today is, like the TSA checkpoint at the airport, nothing more than an elaborate piece of (psychological) security theater, and theaters require drama, and more importantly, villains. People like Adam Lanza and James Holmes are certainly killers of the very worst kind, guilty of evil, but on a larger scale, their evil is a only a reflection of our own, of the perverse societal mechanisms we’ve developed to give ourselves piece of mind, regardless of the children that must be fed to the machinery for it to function.

#kantbot #autistic mercury #mass shooters #read the whole thing

[winterverses]

Walking Wounded - Chapter Sixty-Five

After those first few days, it seemed like life was a whirl of activity even though Kirk no longer had the day-to-day running of the ship to account for. Every day he found himself having to leave the apartment in the morning to speak to various higher-ups, to go over preparations for resuming the five year mission and potential courses with Ops, and most often of all, to testify in the damn trials. Anne got up with him, or sometimes even earlier, making breakfast with as little synth as she could get away with. That was the only good part of waking up that early with no Enterprise to run. Well, morning sex was pretty fantastic too, but everything else he had to do was boring as hell, or frustrating. At least the media hadn’t been tipped off again, though once or twice he noticed someone taking a holo of him.

Anne sometimes left the apartment with him, going on mysterious errands of her own. She wasn’t involved in the trials. She’d wanted nothing to do with anyone on trial but Loche, and Justice hadn't felt it necessary to summon her. He knew that she continued to see Claudia, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure. The dark mood Anne had fallen into after the call from her mother had worried him, especially because he’d seen that she was trying to chase it away or at least hide it and neither he nor she had been able to lift it much until she’d seen Claudia again, despite their excesses. The sessions definitely helped her keep it together, and whatever else she was doing seemed to help too. By the time he got home every day, she was already there, ready to hit the building’s gym before they decided what to do with the rest of their night. She did her barre exercises while he did a stepped up version of his normal routine-- to account for all those indulgent meals-- and then they continued with bar fighting and self defense. Other residents of the apartment building sometimes looked alarmed when they saw him attempting to “hit” a tiny little thing like her, but she was fast enough to keep mostly away from him and he always pulled his punches to a light tap when he landed one. Luckily, no one ever seemed to connect them with the periodic news stories cropping up. That would have been pretty crazy to try to explain.

The media was an ongoing problem, even though there were no longer crowds like the one that had greeted him at Justice. The story had taken on a bit of a life of its own by then, much the way it had happened after the Franklin had made its last fiery flight to save Yorktown and he’d made his frantic dive to stop Krall; it had been seized, examined, dissected, the motivations speculated on, the people involved both accused and acquitted by turns. It was a macrocosm of the rumor mill aboard the ship. Because he could do nothing about it, he paid as little attention as he could, and encouraged Anne to ignore it completely. It bothered her far more than it bothered him. She’d avoided it so ferociously before.

Still, it had caught public interest, and every so often when they were out they would be approached by someone who either wanted an interview or had become too personally invested in the stories they’d read. Anne swore up and down after every incident that she was going to change her hair, her face, everything, until she was no longer recognizable and people stopped bothering her. Kirk just agreed and told her to do whatever she liked, knowing she would never get around to it. She thought of her body as a physical record of her experiences, which was somewhat odd to him-- if he thought the same way he’d still be dead-- but he liked her the way she was, so he never tried to push the more practical ideas like changing her hair.

Eventually, though, the rumors started to get out of hand. He and Anne were both being torn apart in public speculation, and continued silence was only taunting the piranhas. He’d asked to consult with Commodore Paris before deciding what to do. As the highest ranking officer on Yorktown base, and someone with decades of experience in administration at her level, she merited a voice in the discussion and would have useful advice. Anne hadn’t wanted to attend the meeting, saying she wasn’t really a member of Starfleet and shouldn’t take up the Commodore’s time, but asked him to pass on assurances that she would abide by whatever Kirk thought was reasonable.

“Whatever I think is reasonable?” he’d asked as they discussed it the night before his meeting.

Anne had yanked the covers up further and buried her face in his chest. “Yes. Now shut up, you wore me out and I’m sleeping.”

He couldn’t help a snicker. “You are not. You’re too crabby that I mentioned it to fall asleep now.” She wasn’t really as irritated as she sounded. It was just that she’d avoided talking about it all day and had thought she was home free once they’d gotten into bed.

With a dramatic sigh, Anne rolled over onto her back. “Fine. Yes. You are correct. But I want nothing to do with this and if you tell me that I must give you some input, all I have to offer is that I don’t care what the public thinks. I’ll do whatever needs to be done to be left alone.”

“And if I think it’s reasonable to do something you don’t--”

“I’ll do it, of course,” Anne said, as if this should have been obvious.

“And, just to clarify, if Commodore Paris thinks something is reasonable and I don’t--”

“You are extremely aggravating. Of course I’ll do what you think is best. What do I care for her opinion either?”

The more irritated she was, the less American she sounded, though her accent didn’t change. It was kind of hilarious. “All right then. As long as you’re okay with doing what I decide even if you disagree.”

“How could I possibly disagree if I have no interest whatsoever?” she sniffed.

“As long as you don’t complain,” he’d said, pulling her close. Of course, they couldn’t just go to sleep after that, and since her irritation was more for the subject matter than it was for him, she’d softened up as soon as the subject changed to more interesting topics, with the result that he was a little tired at his meeting the next morning.

Commodore Paris hadn’t commented on it, though he knew those piercing dark eyes of hers noted everything. She’d waited until he was standing in front of her desk before speaking, her expression neutral. “Captain Kirk. I am glad to see that you wish my advice in this matter.”

“I hope to minimize the media attention as much as possible. You know I don’t enjoy the spotlight.” After the Franklin and Krall there had been a bit of attention from the press, which he’d escaped mostly by virtue of not being where they thought he would be and not giving any but the blandest, shortest comments he could get away with until they realized he wasn’t going to sit still for the holo if he could help it. And, being that he was a somewhat heroic figure in the eyes of Yorktown at large, they’d backed off out of respect and mostly stuck to file holos and recycled sound bites. The way Loche’s women had spread sensationalized bits of misinformation in order to stoke media interest, though, that wasn’t about to happen any time soon.

“I understand your frustration. You are a man of action first, and you do not wish to participate in the endless circumlocutions of those who know nothing of action. But where is your companion?” Commodore Paris looked to the door, and then back to him as if making a point.

He knew he’d told her that Anne wouldn’t be attending. This was her way of gently making him answer for Anne’s actions… something he then realized would be a very pertinent part of any media discussion. He had to give it to her, Commodore Paris was subtle. “She wishes me to speak for her at this particular meeting, and has said she’ll abide by whatever decisions I make about how to move forward.” He sure as hell wasn’t going to say that she rejected the whole idea that Starfleet ranks applied to her in any way.

“Next time we speak of this, you will require her to attend,” the Commodore said, her voice just as neutral, her gaze like a skewer, holding him in place.

She had him trapped. If he said yes, he’d have to compel Anne to come. If he said no, he’d be admitting that he couldn’t or didn’t want to apply the control Anne said he had. He had to choose his words carefully. “I’ll ask that she attend. I have confidence that she will do exactly as she says, and if she says that she will follow my lead, I believe her.”

The Commodore gave him a long, evaluating look, and then seemed to consider that sufficient. “This media attention will not die down completely as long as it is known that you are still on the base and still involved in the trials. The most troublesome elements are the human elements that were not present in your previous exploits: the suggestion of fallibility, and perhaps trickery; the intimation of emotions beyond the straightforward heroics that made up your last skirmishes with the press. It is very easy to laud a hero and then forget about him. He has no depth, no complexity to inflame the mind. You have, unfortunately, gained some complexity in the eyes of the galaxy, as has your companion. Your previous flirtations with the attention of the public subsided with silence, but this one will not.”

“You would recommend we speak to the press, then,” Kirk said. He’d known going in that this was probably how it would end up. Didn’t make it any more fun.

“I do. I would also recommend that you remove as much complexity from the narrative as possible. If presented in a straightforward way, some of the impact can be diminished. Some, not all. I am afraid there have already been too many pieces of information strewn about to entice the press. They will not wish to abandon them for a simpler, less interesting narrative.”

“It seems like the best course of action would be to offer concrete answers to most of the points the press are speculating on.” Kirk frowned. Interviews were not his idea of a good time.

Commodore Paris paused, waiting until she had his full attention before speaking. Her eyes bored into his. “It is your relationship which makes your position seem full of deceit and manipulation. If she is truly a victim, how could you interfere with her recovery? If she was not a victim, you have been taken in. You should never have become involved. It is your greatest vulnerability in this situation, as your opponents are well aware.” Commodore Paris said this as neutrally as the rest; her voice did not hold either sympathy or condemnation.

Kirk had to bite back his response anyway. He was getting really sick of being told how terrible an idea it was to have a personal relationship with Anne. If it was a bad idea, so be it; it was already done. “Seeing her only in terms of victimhood or not is demeaning to her. And I will not apologize for having a relationship with someone I admire and respect.”

Paris took it in stride, nodding her head gravely. “I also understand your position, inconvenient though it is. Nevertheless, the information put forward by the friends of the alleged smuggler and slaver has been overwhelmingly aimed toward the perceived transgression of your relationship, as that is the easiest way to paint you both in a less flattering light.”

“If you have any advice on how to counteract that, I would be glad to hear it,” Kirk said. Speculation had gotten worse, yes, but that bad? He’d have to start paying more attention to the news, distasteful as it was.

“I am doing what I can. Starfleet’s public position on your actions, personal and professional, as well as your companion’s, has been one of our utmost confidence and trust in your judgment and abilities. You may wish to publicly express your thanks for that.” The woman was nearly as unreadable as a Vulcan. Her expression and tone still maintained that pleasant neutrality.

There was a catch there. Public. “You’re saying that Starfleet isn’t happy with what I’ve done.”

Commodore Paris blinked slowly; it was as good as a nod. “You have made yourself vulnerable. How can you be trusted to captain a ship if you are either a predator or a dupe? Nothing has been decided. But there is talk.” For the first time, a sour expression flitted across her face before it regained its pleasant neutrality. “Especially after the motorcycle incident. Nevertheless, the public position holds until something is proven. Your words could do much to soothe the situation.”

It was good advice. Even if it felt as if he had to take a moment to swallow back his defensiveness so he could speak. Thanking Starfleet Command for sticking by him was basically implying that the Federation as a whole had no issues with his behavior, even though they were technically different bodies. Thanking them also re-emphasized the points that they made. And speaking publicly could take the wind out of anyone’s sails if they were trying to sink him. “I’ll do what I can.” Kirk glanced at the time displayed on one of her holographic screens. “I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to meet with me on what is essentially a personal matter, Commodore. I won’t hold you up any longer.” Not after that little bit of news. Hell no.

“I would have been, and still would be, glad to have you as one of my Vice-Admirals, you know,” she said. “It is possible that your discovery and your actions will make an end of the disappearances here. And Yorktown always welcomes the return of her heroes. We remain grateful.”

It was unaccustomed, coming from her. Commodore Paris was not given to such direct remarks. It surprised him out of his defensiveness. “Thank you, Commodore.” He stepped back, giving her a nod before turning to leave the massive open space of her office.

After that, to the Justice building, making more depositions. At least they were boring enough to snuff out the anger he’d felt. Trials were being held in every court, and his time was very carefully spread between them. By this point, he was on autopilot the entire time. Most of his depositions were exactly the same repetitions of the overarching strategy of taking the base, as he hadn’t interacted with most of the accused beyond briefly glancing at them in the holding cells. Still, he had to be there to answer any questions the judges might have. A few of them had gotten very specific with it. Kirk was careful to answer them consistently, as any previous evidence could be entered or questioned in Loche’s trial.

To his surprise, the last trial he was to attend that day brought him in just after Captain Vergne. Though they were performing the same role, he’d only seen her in passing in the halls. The sheer amount of trials going on kept them too busy to talk. When she saw him, she gave him a rakish little smile and pointedly sat herself in one of the auditorium seats on the aisle. He’d given her a minute nod, keeping his answering grin under wraps.

Same old shit. Once his part was over, he paused long enough by Ella’s seat for her to follow him, then left the auditorium. When the door had closed behind them, she laughed. “You’ve been trying to get out of buying me those drinks, haven’t you? Cheapskate.”

“Got plans for tonight?” he asked, pulling out his communicator. When she shook her head, he set the comm code for home. “I’ll see what Anne’s up to. If she’s home.”

“She doesn’t have a communicator?” Ella asked, surprised.

“I don’t think she was ever issued one,” Kirk said, thinking back as he entered the apartment’s comm code. “If she’s got a civilian model, I don’t know about it.”

“One what?” Anne’s voice asked, sounding thin. She’d answered so quickly that she could have been waiting for his call.

“A communicator, don’t you have one?” he asked.

“No. Why would I want one?” she asked, sounding genuinely puzzled.

“You’re so weird,” he said, unable to stop himself from grinning. Ella just shook her head. “Anyway we promised to take Ella out for drinks and she’s with me now. Got any plans you can’t move?”

Instead of happily agreeing, as he’d come to expect from her, she said, “Oh…” Even over the communicator, her voice sounded troubled.

“What’s up?” he asked. That wasn’t like her.

“Can she come by the apartment instead? I don’t want to go out. Someone was following me earlier today.”

Ella looked up at him, frowning her concern, and he asked, “Is this something to worry about?”

“Just another reporter. I lost him before I came home-- transported to another district, went by Ben’s place for a chat, switched aircars and all that. It just spooked me, that’s all. I’ll make us dinner and we can eat outside. The orange tree is blooming.”

After a glance at Ella, who nodded, Kirk said, “Sounds great. Anything you need me to pick up on the way home?”

“No. Just… keep an eye on your surroundings, cher.” The endearment was tossed off carelessly. He wondered if she noticed that she did it anymore.

“I will. I’ll be there soon.” He flipped the communicator shut and clipped it back at his waist.

“Getting bad, huh? I’m not surprised. Someone’s stirring the pot.” Ella didn’t look at him.

Kirk sighed. “We know who. We can’t really stop them. I talked to Commodore Paris about it today and we’re going to have to take some steps.”

“If you’re having to do things like switch aircars, I think some steps were warranted a while ago,” Ella said, her voice sarcastic.

“Nothing like that has happened until now.” Kirk paused a moment. “Unless she didn’t tell me about it. She does go off alone a fair bit.”

At that, Ella stopped walking, and he turned to see her scowling at him, those perfectly arched brows drawn together in irritation. “Jim, you need to start paying attention to what’s going on here. What the hell are you doing that you don’t know these things?” Ella demanded.

His defensiveness immediately leaped back to the surface. “Look, if she chooses not to tell me, it’s none of my business.”

“Normally I’d agree with you, but this isn’t a normal situation. With no communicator, she can’t even call you for help if she needs it,” Ella said, with the air of someone who was very aware they were explaining something very reasonably.

“All right, you’ve got a point. I’ll talk to her about it-- in private.” Kirk wasn’t entirely certain that he should be prying into what Anne chose not to talk about, but at the very least he’d make sure she had a communicator. That was reasonable enough.

“Where are we headed?” Ella asked, perhaps sensing that a change of topic was due.

Kirk raised an eyebrow at her. “You really think I’m gonna tell you after all that talk about security?”

Ella just gave him a long, flat look that he knew was fake, because he could see the tiniest curve at the corners of her mouth. “I outranked you once, Captain, and I could do it again if I wanted. So you’d better keep that lip to yourself.”

At that, Kirk couldn’t help a laugh. Something about Ella always made things easier, in spite of her prickliness. He turned to walk away, and she followed him. “In your dreams, Captain,” he chuckled, suddenly very glad to have her along.

Oof, lost a week again. I don't even have a good excuse. Sorry!

#James T. Kirk/OC #Jim Kirk/OC #Star Trek #Star Trek Fanfiction #dark romance #fanfic #ST:WW #Star Trek: Walking Wounded

[forever-rogue]

Rooftop Sessions - Part II

Summary: Y/N is a therapist that works with war veterans that ends up meeting a mysterious stranger who asks for her help.

A/N: Part 2 woo! So, there will be one more part to this, I promise :) I hope you all enjoy! Let me know if you’d like to be added to my taglist!

Word Count: 2.2k

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Warnings: mental health / mentions of death

PART I | PART III

When Y/N had gotten home that night, she was mulling over the events of the afternoon. She was sure she knew him, or at least had seen him before. His voice and the little glimpses she had gotten of his face were both familiar, but for the life of her she could not place him.

She sighed and sat down on her couch and pulled her laptop towards her and started searching for him with the little information she had. After a while, she gave up and was no closer to figuring out his identity. Almost as if on cue, her phone buzzed and lit up with a text. She grabbed it and saw that the message was from the same blocked number from the previous days: you can keep looking but you won’t find anything.

Her eyes widened and she looked around, hoping to see where he was at. How was he following her and she didn’t even notice?! She quickly typed out a response: why are you following me? Where are you?

It was only a few moments before she received a response: I’m not following you...right now. I’ve just observed your habits, and I know you’ll be looking.

She rubbed her tired eyes, unsure of what to tell him or even to believe him. He didn’t make her feel worried or scared though; she knew she didn’t have to fear him. She texted him back: Guilty as charged. I’ll stop looking. You can tell me whatever you feel you need to or want to. What time works for you tomorrow?

He responded immediately: Thank you. 5 tomorrow? I know what building you live. Rooftop?

She chuckled a little bit and responded with a simple yes.  She wondered where he lived and what he was like in everyday life and to others. She hadn’t learned enough about him just yet to pass judgment on him She looked wistfully at her laptop but decided to honor her promise to him and let it go.

To get her find off of him, Y/N flicked on her TV and started channel surfing. She didn’t watch much TV anymore, so trying to find anything remotely interesting was a challenge. Eventually she grew tired of searching and left it on the news. She went into the kitchen and started making herself some dinner as she listened to the news in the background.

And in other news, the upcoming trial of James Buchanan Barnes, also known as the Winter Soldier, is fast approaching and is leaving many people divided. Is he simply a murder, or a tortured war veteran used as a pawn? Most people seem to think the latter. However, it will be up to a jury to decide if he walks free or will face punishment. Leading his defense is the renowned attorney Matthew Murdock.

Y/N paused for a second while throwing things into the pot on the stove. She narrowed her eyes as she listened to the presenter. She had heard of the Winter Soldier before, but she realized he was in that much trouble. All she knew was that he was Captain America’s best friend and they were both super soldiers from the past. She shook her head to herself and continued cooking. She had better things to do than worry about a sensationalized trial.

Y/N’s eyes opened and refused to be shut again again early the next morning. She gave a small huff; this was the one day she was hoping to sleep in and take it easy. Realizing she wasn’t going to get any more rest, she decided to get up and go on about her and get her errands done.

It didn’t take long for her to finish cleaning her small apartment, so she ran out and decided to go get some groceries. It was nearing the later part of the afternoon, and she figured she’d be back in time to meet James. She bounded out the door of her building - and straight into a tall, strong figure. It startled her more than anything, “I’m so sorry! I should have been watching where I was going!”

The man gave her a small smile and quietly said, “it’s okay, Y/N,” before rushing off. She didn’t get a good look at him, he had avoided making eye contact and he was gone before she could even respond.

She shrugged her shoulders before heading off in the direction of the grocery store. She wasn’t going to give him another thought before she realized he had known her name. Panic immediately set in as she wondered who it was. Was it a stalker? Someone she knew? A client? She took in her surroundings, but realized there was not much she could do at this point. Y/N tried as best as she could to calm down and carry on as normal.

She quickly did her shopping and returned home. She shoved the food into the cabinets and refrigerator hurriedly and rushed to the rooftop, earlier than necessary.

Y/N sat at the ledge of the rooftop, staring into the busy city as the sun slowly set, casting a pink glow over everything. She wasn’t thinking about much, trying to relax amongst the collective craziness. Her life was so hectic and busy, she liked when she got a quiet moment to herself. She was so zoned out she didn’t hear the footsteps behind her.

“Hello Y/N,” she slowly turned around and saw James standing behind her, hooded sweater and sunglasses on, identity concealed yet again. She gave him a small smile and changed her position so she was facing him.

“Hello James. It’s good to see you again,”

“Thank you for meeting me again so soon...or at all,” he gave a small laugh as he sat down next to her. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and concentrated his gaze straight ahead.

“Of course. It’s a pleasure, really. I’m glad you feel safe enough to come to me. Even if you scared me a little last night,”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, the whole texting me out of the blue and making it seem like you’re watching? A little creepy at first, but I’m not scared of you or worried,” she dared to reach out and put her hand on his shoulder. He stiffened for a moment and she worried that he would shake her off. To her surprise he didn’t, but seemed to lean into her touch.

“Why aren’t you scared?” His voice was low and had note of hesitation in it.

“Because you have already had the opportunity to hurt me if you wanted to. And I grew up with someone like you,” she almost whispered the last part, “my father was a veteran with severe PTSD. After he came back from war, when I was still so young, he was never the same. Ever. The light never reached his eyes again and no smile graced his face anymore. He struggled so much and almost everyone just abandoned him and left him to rot because he was suddenly a ‘burden’. It changed my life, helped shape me into who I am today. Now  I want to make sure no one else has to go through anything like that.”

“You understand then,” he responded with a sad smile as he met her eyes. A tear had escaped her eye, slowly running down her cheek. He reached over and wiped it away softly with his right hand, “what happened to your father?”

“He killed himself shortly before I turned 16. He couldn’t take it anymore and left he had no other options apparently. He left no note, nothing. He was just suddenly gone. In a way I never fully forgave him, but at least now I understand why,” she closed her eyes and took a deep breath as she tried to put the memory out of her mind, “but hey. We’re here for you, not me.”

“Sometimes it helps to say things out loud, even if to a stranger. I’ll be here to listen to you if you ever need,”

“Thank you, that means a lot. Now, why don’t you tell me about what happened towards the end of the war? How did you feel when you realized you were coming home?”

“Oh boy, that’s a loaded question. How much time have you got?” He rubbed his hands together as he laughed a bit, both nervous to confess his past and happy that someone was finally listening.

“However much time you need,” she was drawn to him and definitely did not mind giving him her time, “and if it gets too late or cold, my apartment is just downstairs.”

And so he launched into his tale, leaving out very few details and giving her an overall picture of the hardships he’d faced and how he seemingly made it home from the war. Y/N was enraptured; he knew how to tell a story. She also realized how much more there was to him, surely he dealt with many of his demons frequently.

They had talked late into the night, making decent progress. Y/N wasn’t sure how much help she was really providing, but she could sense he felt a huge relief by getting all his unspoken words out. He’d been silent, by force and choice, for so long, she was sure he needed to get it all out, or he’d explode.

That’s how the next several weeks went. They’d meet almost daily, sometimes not even to discuss anything important. They were both drawn to each other and relished being in the other’s company. He still hadn’t revealed himself to her, continuing to wear his large hooded jacket, baseball cap, and dark sunglasses, regardless of what time of the day they met.

Y/N was growing more and more curious as to who he was, still only knowing him by the name of James. She didn’t want to push him, but every time they met she secretly hoped he would tell her who he was.

She got little pieces of him, strengthening her belief that he was a good person, who had been forced to endure terrible things.

It was Friday night and Y/N was lying in bed, eating some ice cream, scrolling through her social media feeds, the news providing some background noise. Nothing much excited her, besides a few new makeup items she vowed to try, until the news switched once again to the Winter Soldier’s trial.

Starting in only a few days time, James Barnes will take the stand as his trial begins. Both the DA and Mr. Murdock claim they are geared up for hard fought trial, witnesses coming in from both sides. Public affection for Mr. Barnes seems to have grown, as Tony Stark’s Avengers team have publicly shown their support for him.

Y/N froze, spoon halfway between her mouth and the ice cream counter as she finally put the pieces together.

“Oh my God,” she whispered to herself. James, her James, was the Winter Soldier. She should have realized when he told her his trial dates and informed her of his attorney’s name, Matt Murdock. She kicked herself for not putting it all together before.

She thrust her ice cream carton on the bedside stand and grabbed her phone again. She quickly googled his name and saw hundreds upon hundreds of articles and pictures instantly popped up. She scrolled through a few articles as she realized how little she knew about him. She frowned, a bit hurt that he hadn’t been totally honest with her, but also understanding his reasoning. She knew she still would have taken him on knowing the truth, but undoubtedly it would have clouded her reasoning a little bit. Y/N wondered what she should do. She went back to scrolling but a pop up in the form of an incoming call grabbed her attention.

She knew who it was immediately and cautiously answered and heard, “so now you know.”

“James - I didn’t know before, I promise I didn’t seek it out,” she stammered as she tried to search for the right words.

“It’s okay, Y/N. You would have figured it out eventually anyway, “ he sighed, “I understand if this ends our sessions or whatever.”

“No, please, don’t worry about that all. I’d still like to continue. I just want you to be completely honest with me now.,” she paused for a moment, “besides I feel like you’re my friend and I want to keep it that way.”

“That means a lot to me,” he should relieved, “can we meet again before the trial begins?”

“Absolutely. It’s not too late for you now is it? Otherwise tomorrow night works,” she looked over at her alarm and saw that it was only nearing 8. She heard him move around a little bit.

“Open your door,” Y/N pulled the phone away from her head and narrowed her eyes.

She ended the call and padded her way to the door. She paused for a moment before unlocking the deadbolt and swinging it open. To her (un)surprise, there was James, standing before her in his full unmasked glory. She was taken aback by how handsome he was, bright blue eyes staring straight into hers.

“Hello, Y/N,” he gave her a dazzling smile and her heart leaped in her chest, “it’s nice to properly meet you. I’m Bucky.”

“H-hi,” she smiled back at him and reached to shake his outstretched hand, “please, come in.”

Taglist: @ruinerofcheese @supernatural508 @courtneychicken @nerissa98 @jems8241 @emmamcarthur @softwhispers

#bucky barnes #bucky x reader #sebastian stan #sebastian stan x reader #marvel #mcu #avengers #defenders #winter solider x reader #captain america #ofc #imagine #infinity war #winter solider #steve rogers #matthew murdock #au #chris evans

[itsbenedict]

so, i’ve been thinking about Bullet Proof, reworking the cast and switching up the murders and culprits so the adventure won’t spoil the game. i hit on a pretty good setup for one of the trials- and it involved lesbian characters dying. and, at first, i figured, well, it’s Danganronpa, the majority of the cast dies and everyone knows that going in, so it’s not a big deal. but in the wake of recent discourse around A/tomic B/londe, wherein the “it’s not a big deal” side is saying “seriously? love interests almost always die in this genre” and the other side is loudly proclaiming who cares, you’ve still done the thing... i am of course less confident that such an excuse would fly.

not to beat around the bush: the backlash against the “bury your gays” trope initially struck me as kinda bizarre. like, characters in media dying isn’t the same as real people dying- unlike in real life, death in fiction is a role for a character in a story, and you can hit rewind and they’re alive again.

but then of course i saw lots of posts with lists and infographics and statistics explaining that lesbians die way more than other characters, and that this revealed something or other about what writers secretly think of LGBT people. one particular statistic i saw said that- out of shows featuring lesbian/bi characters- 35% of them had one or more of those lesbian/bi characters die. that number stuck with me. it seemed like a lot!

since then, i’ve remembered an important insight: that lists and infographics and statistics that go viral on social media are sensationalized and misleading upwards of 90% of the time.

backing up, i notice that the culture of backlash against the trope would exist whether or not it was grounded in a real phenomenon. we’re living in a world where lots of people are powerless, and want to believe that they’re somehow powerful, and so reframe the act of consuming media and tweeting about it as fighting for justice. they see their favorite characters die on TV, get sad or angry about it, feel like it shouldn’t have happened, and construct elaborate systems of media analysis to explain why their feelings are objectively correct. the creators of entertainment products are the real power behind the system, responsible for every bad thing that happens by using their godlike power to shape the culture. if a screenwriter makes a decision you don’t like, it’s not just something that bugs you in a movie- it’s an act of violence that is killing people. regardless of whether too many gay characters were dying, there would be some reason why killing off gay characters would be a morally blameworthy offense.

i realize how that whole last paragraph comes off. like, pretty badly. sounds like some real craven anti-sjw shit. i’m not blind to what website this post is going up on.

but that paragraph wasn’t an argument for why the Bury Your Gays trope is not a real thing. it has nothing to do with that question. 

in fact, it’s obviously been a real thing for a while- until pretty recently, networks wouldn’t allow gays on TV at all, unless they were being killed off as some kind of moral lesson. that was the world we were living in. and it didn’t end overnight! there was no point where it was suddenly decided that gays could be on TV, and then all representation issues were fixed. it’s not some lie made up by euuuuh social justice warriors euuungh to stroke their heroic egos or whatever.

the question that paragraph is getting at is: how do we tell if we’ve won?

there’s clearly some point at which we’ve reached parity. where LGBT characters are at least as common in media as LGBT people are in reality- where they’re not dying any more often than non-LGBT characters. it’s not an endless unwinnable fight to correct for unconscious bigotry. there exists a point at which the campaigning has succeeded and that specific issue is, for the moment, solved.

but when we reach that point, there isn’t a chance in hell that anyone will notice. people are too invested in fighting the good fight! people score brownie points, social capital, by pointing out how problematic media is. it’s practically impossible to lose social capital by doing this incorrectly- when was the last time you saw someone in social justice circles make some shit up, say “this thing is bad for a new reason i just noticed” and then be roundly dismissed by other social justice people saying “no, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill”? that doesn’t happen. saying “no, things are fine, actually” is a great way to paint a target on your back- whereas if you make up some totally bullshit new outrage, the worst that happens is that after some long and bitter discourse, level heads conclude “this bullshit new outrage is definitely a serious concern we should watch for, but it shouldn’t prevent you from supporting this specific show because it does other things right.” 

the incentives line up to make it impossible to ever collectively notice that a problem has been solved. consequently, viral infographics will always claim that the injustice is still at large. when something behaves the same way no matter what’s actually true, it fails to function as evidence for discerning what the truth is.

all that junk said, it still seems intuitively pretty likely that we’re not totally past the issue in this specific case. quite probably, lesbians are still being killed off at a rate suspiciously higher than that of other types of characters. 

what i want to know- and what i actually want to know, as opposed to what i want to darkly hint at an answer to- is how we measure to what degree this is still a problem, and whether socially-conscious people need to be deliberately avoiding killing off gay characters no matter how important it is to the story, in order to balance the scales.

like, let’s take that statistic i heard earlier (or we could just make one up for the example, but that’s basically the same thing as recalling a statistic from a viral tumblr post i remember reading a while back.) let’s say 35% of lesbians on TV get killed off.

do 35% of non-lesbians on TV also get killed off?

do 35% of non-lesbians on shows featuring lesbians also get killed off?

how does this break down by genre? are some genres innocent where others are Dead Gays Georg?

are shows featuring lesbians more likely to be the kind of shows that kill characters off, since both killing characters and having lesbians are Bold Edgy Moves in today’s climate for some asinine reason? if this effect exists, how much of the difference does it account for?

how do we get these numbers? what’s our sample, how is it decided on? are we just counting TV shows? what about books? movies? video games with multiple endings where the deaths only happen in some of them? who are we paying to analyze all these works?

there are enough questions here to do a background study for a meaty thesis in Media Studies or whatever. in fact, probably someone’s already conducted such a study. probably a lot of people have conducted such studies. i’m not sure if enough people have conducted such studies to overcome the whole “most social science experimenters think the word “methodology” means that thing Walter White got his degree in” effect, though. a good chunk of those studies admit up front that they were deliberately constructed to prove their hypothesis, which is not how you science.

but maybe there is something good on the subject! if anyone knows any decent resources, i would really like to know one way or the other, so i can stop stressing over whether to scrap my really good plot.

#where ''decent resources'' here means ''not journalism'' #science journalism is a garbage fire and social science journalism is a garbage fire in my living room

[takemypulse-feelmyheart]

A lot of people have strong feelings about 13 Reasons Why. That's fair. It's an intense show. What's unfair to me, though, is declaring that your feelings are the only valid feelings related to it. That your feelings are correct, and other feelings are wrong. That your experiences give you, and you alone, the deciding vote on whether or not the show should have been made. This isn't supposed to be a rant, but if that's what it becomes...so be it.

For context: I am 22 years old. I have attempted suicide three times, once when I was 18 and twice when I was 19. I have been diagnosed with clinical depression, anxiety and PTSD. I live with all three every day, to varying extents each day. Some days are easier than others, some days are harder. But that's life. I have been sexually assaulted three times, and harassed countless more. I told my parents about one of the harassments and one of the assaults, but never reported either. It'd be my word against theirs, and I wouldn't stand a chance of winning that trial. 

So let's talk about everything about 13 Reasons Why that has everybody’s knickers in a bunch.

1. Unfiltered depiction of Hannah's suicide.

I had a really hard time watching this scene. But I was warned by the trigger warning at the beginning of the episode. I chose to ignore it. I had to look away a few times, and I lost track of how hard I was crying. It was hell. Watching Hannah end her life was hell, because I understood it all. I remembered that feeling, I remembered those moments, I remembered that pain. It hurts. Slitting your wrists physically hurts. Bleeding out while your body fights to hold on, knowing that your brain and heart are shutting down, hurts. 13 Reasons Why is the first show I've seen that has unapologetically shown viewers those final moments. As the viewer, you don't get to hide from it. You don't get to just see red water in a tub with a hand draped over the side. You don't get to just see a casket. You have to watch it all. You have to experience the hell. You have to see a parent's worst nightmare come true. You have to feel your heart break as Hannah's mother holds what you, she, and the whole world already knows is a lifeless body, while still fighting to believe things will be okay. It is a horrible truth, but it is just that: a truth. Someone has to find the body. Someone has to mop up the overflowing tub. Someone has to wash the bloodstains from the bathroom rug.

Psychologists have said that showing that scene in all its torturous detail can be triggering and unhealthy to people contemplating suicide. Of course it is triggering; we all saw the trigger warning at the beginning of the episode. But what I believe many psychologists are missing is the fact that, even if we haven't seen it with our own two eyes, we already know what exists. People have called the scene a "suicide manual." I've never before seen the step by step process of a person slitting their wrists, but I knew how it was done. I knew how to cut and where to cut. I knew about the bathtub. I know how to hang myself, how to overdose, and where to shoot to kill myself with a single bullet. I know where and how to get a gun. I didn’t have to see it on a Netflix show to know how it's done. It exists in every teenager's everyday world. I understand and acknowledge the research stating that the “risk of additional suicides increases when the story explicitly describes the suicide method, uses dramatic/graphic headlines or images and repeated/extensive coverage sensationalizes or glamorizes a death.” But I can assure you that the conversations it has started, the awareness it has raced, and the pain it has forced you to acknowledge both validates and fully rationalizes its place. If people want to kill themselves, they already know how.

2. Unfiltered depiction of Hannah and Jessica's rapes.

This has received less backlash than the suicide scene, but certainly has not gotten off scot-free. For starters, there's a critical detail I feel like a lot of people are missing in their criticisms of the show: it's rated for mature audiences. Yes, the main characters are high schoolers. But that doesn't necessarily make it a show for young teens. Project X was about a 17th birthday party. 21 Jump Street and Superbad both took place in a high school. Sausage Party was an animated cartoon. South Park features elementary school kids. The age of the characters is in no way a determination of the intended audience.

Now for the content itself. Much like the suicide scene, there is no hiding from the two rapes. Hannah's especially, you have to see it. You are forced to be uncomfortable as you see Hannah essentially give up (sidenote - how incredible was katherine langford in that scene? wow wow wow A+ acting for real). She never explicitly says the word "no," but we all knew it was anything but consensual. Why does that matter? Because in today's world, consent is somehow still a blurred line. People still are somehow fuzzy to the concept that the only true consent is a sober, fully-informed, continual "yes." Silence is not consent, as Hannah showed. She was raped, and we had to watch it knowing there was nothing we could do. We felt just a fraction of Hannah's helplessness, and it didn't feel good. I would argue seeing those two scenes and the rage it brought us against Bryce made them the most important scenes in the show. We should be enraged about rape. We should be enraged that serial rapists walk among us every day because their victims aren't supported enough to report them. We should be enraged that Jessica continued a sort of friendship with Bryce, as so many victims do in an attempt to normalize the rape. 13 Reasons Why was infuriating in that moment, and I'm glad it was.

3. Inaccurate portrayal of depression and oversimplification of bullying as the sole reason for suicide.  

Depression is a disease. Getting a common cold is a disease, though far less severe. Sometimes you get a cold that's more sore throat. Sometimes is a dry cough. Sometimes your nose won't stop running for days. Sometimes you get a fever. Sometimes you get multiple symptoms at the same time.

When I was in the worst of my depression, my therapist and I would refer to days as either "down" days or "blah" days. The blah days were my favorites, because I felt nothing. There was no joy, no hope and no true life in me, but I also didn't have to feel anything else. I didn't wake up in tears, and it would only take me an hour or so to get out of bed. I would be able to eat. The down days weren't so great. Some down days wouldn't let me get out of bed. A string of down days in a row sometimes meant I wasn't eating a proper meal for nearly a week. At the worst of the down days, the suicidal thoughts would start creeping in. Enough down days in a row, and rock bottom would rapidly approach. In the midst of all of it, though, I was able to keep my grades up in all my classes. It was the only thing in my life I had a chance of controlling, and I couldn't let that slip away. A friend of mine at a different school was also battling depression. She dropped out of college because she couldn't control it anymore.

Every cold is different. Every case of depression is different. Hell, every day of depression is different. Criticism of an "inaccurate portrayal" of depression makes no sense to me, because there is no single accurate portrayal. Depression isn't a checklist. You won't necessarily have every symptom every day in every situation, if at all. One of the symptoms of depression is physical pain, like headaches or back pain. I never had that. But I was still depressed.

One major criticism of 13RW is that the word "depression" is never mentioned. But did it really need to be? From what I've seen, people in the midst of battling mental health issues don't tend to advertise it. They don't wear signs or t-shirts proclaiming their diseases. Maybe no one ever explicitly said Hannah was depressed, but I question if they really needed to. Her behavior, and how it changed over the course of the 13 episodes showed more than stating it ever could. Depression isn't the sole cause of suicide. It is a contributing factor, just as bullying is, and just as so many other things can be. You don't need to explicitly state it for it to be understood. Bullying wasn't the reason Hannah killed herself: as the title states, there were 13 reasons. You can take her tapes as what they are, putting responsibility on individual people, or you can consider what those people represent.

1: Justin - Humiliation, the first time Hannah has been sexually taken advantage of, and the second wave of loneliness from losing another person she cared about (the first being Kat moving away)

2: Jessica - Loss of trust, loss of control, and a third wave of loneliness from losing another person she cared about

3: Alex - Objectification of Hannah's body, being used as a pawn in someone else's game, fourth wave of loneliness

4: Tyler - Loss of privacy without consent, blackmail, fifth wave of loneliness when Courtney turns her back on Hannah

5: Courtney - Second time intimate relations have been used against Hannah, reminder of losing Justin, further humiliation.

6: Marcus - Third time Hannah has been sexually taken advantage of, and additional loss of trust

7: Zach - Another reinforcement of Hannah's loneliness (emptying Hannah's compliment basket), and the first person who hears Hannah's plea for help, which he throws away.

8: Ryan - Another loss of privacy without consent

9: Sheri - Guilt from hurting other people

10: Clay - Another unanswered cry for help and long-lasting damage from the history of the damning reputation from nonconsensual sexual exploitation

11: Justin, 2.0 - More guilt from hurting others/not being able to protect the ones she loves

12: Bryce - Being physically, sexually and emotionally taken advantage of without consent, exploited vulnerability.

13: Mr. Porter - The most blatant unanswered cry for help.

Hannah's thirteen reasons weren't just bullying, and they weren't just people in her life. The thirteen reasons were a string of humiliation and guilt, constant sexual objectification and exploitation, lack of control in her own life, desperate loneliness, and unanswered cries for help.

4. Reckless dramatization of suicide as a "way out" and overall glorification of death.

This reason has to be the one I understand least. I can't imagine a single person who watched 13 Reasons Why and didn't find at least a part of themselves begging for a different ending, one where Hannah survives. As viewers we wanted so desperately for Hannah to see that things could be okay again, that there were people who loved her, that once people knew the depth of what she was feeling they truly wanted to help. We wanted Hannah to live to see things get better, but she didn't. And she won't. Because she can't. Sure, 13 Reasons Why showed Hannah’s drastic way to stop feeling the pain that was haunting her, but what it showed even more than that was the opportunities she never got. She never got to see that Clay loved her, that her parents were truly broken without her, that Alex couldn't handle life without her, that Jessica truly needed her, or that Zach tried to do right by her. There was no happy ending to 13 Reasons Why, because there is no happy ending to suicide. So yes, they dramatized suicide in a drama show, but I can't imagine anyone seeing the world Hannah left behind as a glorified place.

5. No direct suggestion of how Hannah could have been helped.

I guess the people complaining about this missed the part at the end where the cast of the show give you resources for mental health assistance. Or they missed the entire rest of the show where the lack of simple kindness broke Hannah more and more each day. Maybe there wasn't a 20 minute PSA that gave you a step by step on how to prevent teen suicide, but there was a 13 hour show that gave you a whole lot of ideas.

6. Hannah using suicide as a means of calling for attention, and successfully getting that attention.

Yes, Hannah got a whole lot of attention from committing suicide. But the concept of "attention" is one that seems a little distorted in this argument. The attention Hannah and many other people considering suicide so desperately seek isn't the whole school talking about them. Hannah already had the whole school talking about her when she was alive, and it certainly wasn't helping. The attention many suicidal people seek is help. Support. Knowing someone cares. It's not a cry for popularity, it's a cry for help. Hannah cried for help throughout the show; many people didn't hear her, and those who did hear did nothing about it.

7. Suicide as a way of exacting revenge on those who have hurt you.

While the fundamental concept of this argument makes a little bit of sense - the thirteen tapes certainly did bring pain to those who had brought pain to Hannah - the rate of people who commit individual suicide out of spite or for revenge is notably small. Those who commit suicide for revenge or to bring pain are more often people who will physically hurt others before killing themselves (suicide bombers, school shooters, etc.), which Hannah certainly was not. Her death was not a revenge suicide, nor were the tapes. Her death was her own pain, and the tapes were her extended letter.

8. Promoting the assumption that kindness is all it takes to save lives.

I don't know why this is such a problem. I will gladly admit that it would be delusional to believe that nothing more than kindness is all it takes to end mental health issues. That said, I have never met a person who was truly hurt from too much kindness. We've all heard the stories of people who, because of a single smile or one genuine "hello" from a stranger, decided not to commit suicide that day. Could Clay's love alone have saved Hannah? No, not at all. Hannah needed help far greater than any single person could have provided. But could Zach allowing her to read compliments she was given have given her invaluable hope? Yes. Could Mr. Porter actually listening to Hannah and validating her feelings have given her a sliver of hope that she would get the support she so desperately needed? Absolutely. Could Alex or Jessica checking in with Hannah when she started to show signs of falling apart have helped her get through another day, another week, another month? Perhaps.

So no, kindness alone cannot save lives. But it certainly can help people keep fighting until they get the help they need. And I don't understand why we would ever discourage kindness among teenagers.

Like I said, these are just my thoughts, my understanding, and my response to what I see as excessive and undue criticism of 13 Reasons Why. I'm not saying my opinions are worth any more than yours. You don't have to feel what I felt watching it. You don't have to agree with me. But using your own experiences to decide how someone like me should have felt, should have reacted, should have been triggered, should have been traumatized by, or should have hated 13 Reasons Why is getting really old, really fast. You may be an expert. You may be a victim. You may be a survivor. But you are not me, and you are not everyone. Try considering that before writing off an entire show simply because it didn't sit perfectly with you.

(let me know if i missed any other arguments and i will gladly add them)

#13 reasons why #13rw #spoilers #trigger warning #rant #katherine langford #hannah baker #clay jensen #dylan minnette

[networkingdefinition]

Breakthrough Quotes

Official Website: Breakthrough Quotes

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• A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts. – Bill Gates • A breakthrough occurs when you recognize, you are more energy than matter – Caroline Myss • After a breakthrough year for America, our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999. – Barack Obama • All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn’t all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it’s reinterpreted in an unexpected way. Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation. – Scott Belsky • All I need is the breakthrough. The joint-venture for my clothing. Same as Stella McCartney has. – Kanye West • All of us have at least one great voice deep inside. People are products of their environment. A lucky few are born into situations in which positive messages abound. Others grow up hearing messages of fear and failure, which they must block out so the positive can be heard. But the positive and courageous voice will always emerge, somewhere, sometime, for all of us. Listen for it, and your breakthroughs will come. – Pat Riley • All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. – Tony Robbins • All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. You must feel deep in your gut that not only has this belief cost you pain in the past, but it’s costing you in the present and, ultimately, can only bring you pain in the future. Then you must associate tremendous pleasure to the idea of adopting a new, empowering belief. – Tony Robbins • All personal breakthroughs being with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. – Tony Robbins • All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking. – Thomas Kuhn • All technological breakthroughs start with a small “elite”. Think about cellphones, for example. Now just about everyone has one. The same will happen to innovations such as Twitter. – Helen Zille • Almost every significant breakthrough is the result of a courageous break with traditional ways of thinking. – Stephen Covey • America has the best doctors, the best nurses, the best hospitals, the best medical technology, the best medical breakthrough medicines in the world. There is absolutely no reason we should not have in this country the best health care in the world. – Bill Frist • Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are considered “useless,” will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life. – John Maeda • And [we hope to sell] the clean fuels to other airlines. I mean, the exciting thing about the breakthrough with clean fuels for the airline industry is there’s only 1,700 pumps in the world that fill up the airlines. – Richard Branson • And I’m going to work as hard as I can… for cancer research and hopefully, maybe, we’ll have some cures and some breakthroughs. I’d like to think I’m going to fight my brains out to be back here again next year for the Arthur Ashe recipient. I want to give it next year! – Jim Valvano • And yet in a funny way our lack of success led to our breakthrough; because, since we could not get a cell line off the shelf doing what we wanted, we were forced to construct it. And the original experiment … developed into a method for the production of hybridomas … [which] was of more importance than our original purpose. – Cesar Milstein • Animal research and testing has played a part in almost every medical breakthrough of the last century. It has saved hundreds of millions of lives worldwide. – Joan Ryan • Any breakdown is a breakthrough. – Marshall McLuhan • Any time there is a cultural breakthrough in which this culture transcends what it’s supposed to be, there’s a violent reaction. So we had a black president, and it’s followed by an incredibly violent reaction. It happens over and over. – George C. Wolfe • As a Christian, when your trial is getting hotter, you are getting closer to your breakthrough! Keep pressing! – T. B. Joshua • As God’s representative on the earth, He has given us the authority to speak for Him. When we speak under the leading of the Holy Spirit, we speak as His voice on the earth. During strategic times, the Lord will prompt us to pray prayers that will bring breakthrough. – Barbara Wentroble • As I’m sure anyone who’s born after the ’70s’ access point is – is ’70s films and ’70s culture and there is a kind of a paranoiac atmosphere in that time in America. Yes, it’s the golden age of journalism, Watergate, and all the rest of these people making these great breakthroughs – but it’s also the moment that “if it bleeds, it leads” becomes mainstream and sensationalizing the news becomes more and more the given. Checking how many numbers you’re getting, whatever you can do to get more numbers. – Rebecca Hall • Asking “Why?” can lead to understanding. Asking “Why not?” can lead to breakthroughs. – Daniel H. Pink

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Break+through', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '32', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_break-through').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_break-through img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality. – Thomas Cech • Because we are God’s children…we can bring our needs to him with certainty in prayer…. Prayer is not some kind of heavenly lottery. Nor does the Bible counsel us to pray with an “I hope this will work”…attitude. Instead…prayer brings us before the throne of grace as children seeking the help of their heavenly Father. That’s the heart of breakthrough, successful prayer-the bold confidence that we are talking to the Father who delights to supply our needs. – Jim Cymbala • Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them. – Marc Andreessen • Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed – Thomas Friedman • Both instruments are processors of information. Both appeared when nothing quite like them had existed before, and both began to make their effects felt immediately (a situation that isn’t invariable with new technology). Both devices were less the result of a single breakthrough than of an evolving set of technologies. Like the computer, the printing press had no one certain inventor; it was a technology whose time had come. – Pamela McCorduck • Breakthrough Advertising is not about building better mousetraps. It is, however, about building larger mice – and then building a terrifying fear of them in your customers. – Eugene Schwartz • Breakthrough happened around me when breakup happened within me. – Jack W. Hayford • Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts. It’s hard to think this way — I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change. O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders? – Marc Andreessen • Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating – Ben Horowitz • Breakthrough is how to distinguish a leader and who followed – Steve Jobs • Breakthroughs, in art, in culture, in personality, come when tackling the unexpected. – Lynda Obst • Brokenness is often the road to breakthrough. Be encouraged. – Tony Evans • But so long as we can keep this crew of fantastic people together and can continue to make real breakthrough films in this category, as well as characters that stay true to what we’ve done in this first film, I’d be more than happy to be a part of it. – Brandon Routh • But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that’s the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch) – Tim Dorsey • By creating a self-policing, self-reporting, sort of self-monitoring culture through law, through statute, and imposing that on the academic world, I think not only are we losing a significant measure of freedom in academic traditions and in our civil society, but we’re actually making ourselves less competitive with every other country around the world that does not do that. Because that’s where researchers are going to go and that’s where academics are going to go. And ultimately, that’s where breakthroughs are going to occur. – Edward Snowden

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• Cancer can be attacked directly by metabolic enzymes and then be assisted by the enzyme diet programme. The second greatest cancer breakthrough of the 20th century is the metabolic organic effect on malignant tumours of correcting the body fluid pH to a non-acidic pH 7.1 to 7.5. A neutral pH 7.0 resists cancer formation. An acid body fluid pH of 6.44 and below permits tumours to biochemically become malignant. At pH 7.5 cancer may become inactive; at 8.5 tumours may disintegrate. – Benjamin Carson • Chaos often fosters the greatest creativity. Breakdowns often precede the greatest breakthroughs. And when the pain is greatest is often when we’re on the brink of the greatest realization…..When the pain is burned through rather than numbed, when our darkness is brought to light and then forgiven, then and only then can we move on. And move on we do. – Marianne Williamson • Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that’s ahad a profound impact on my life. He said, “The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything.” Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba. – Brennan Manning • Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn’t mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease. – Evgeny Morozov • Doctors…from the Office of Info. Tech. at Harvard U.(:)…Their appraisal of 46 surgical or anesthesia breakthroughs…suggested…only 13% were highly preferred (and)…in nearly half the cases the new therapy was no better than the therapy it replaced. …About 12% of the innovations increased complications. – Jeffrey Bland • Don’t they know science doesn’t work like that? You can’t just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you’ve been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you’re looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don’t they know you can’t get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one? – Connie Willis • Ending torture and tyranny in Iraq was not a mistake. Supporting democracy in Iraq is not a mistake. Helping the long-suffering Muslims of Iraq who now seek to live democratically is not a mistake. In the long, long history of the Middle East, this breakthrough may one day be ranked as a dramatic turning point in regional history. – Michael Novak • Energy is very primal stuff and there are a lot of leads that are promising, still at a fairly risky stage, but over the next decade some of these breakthrough approaches are going to pay out, and U.S. research and U.S. leadership on this should be part of how it gets solved. – Bill Gates • Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. – Terence McKenna • Even in the dark times between experimental breakthroughs, there always continues a steady evolution of theoretical ideas, leading almost imperceptibly to changes in previous beliefs. – Steven Weinberg • Ever so often in the history of human endeavour, there comes a breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier into a new era. … today’s announcement is such a breakthrough, a breakthrough that opens the way for massive advancement in the treatment of cancer and hereditary diseases. And that is only the beginning. – Tony Blair • Every major difficulty you face in life is a fork in the road. You choose which track you will head down, toward breakdown or breakthrough. – John C. Maxwell • Every time I have had a breakthrough in my life, it has been because of Prayer – John C. Maxwell • Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree. – Thomas Keating • Except in very narrow cases, where there’s breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway. – Eric Ries • For anyone that’s ever had a musical breakthrough in their career, it’s always followed by the departure period right after. – Questlove • For many years I wrote nothing but “I will not sleep with Steve Almond” over and over again, page after page à la Jack Torrance in The Shining. Finally, hundreds of psychotherapy sessions and an intense shaman-guided DMT sweat lodge experience led to a breakthrough, and I was able to write about other people I would not sleep with, and also about people I would. – Alissa Nutting • For me the breakthrough was the realization that I wasn’t the center of the universe or even the centre of my own world. That you and your work, your living, are not the only reason you’re here. Your role is to shepherd your children through to adulthood. That’s the point of life. Your own little sessions and needs and passions are just there to flavour you and help you do that job for your children. – Shaun Micallef • Functional goods sold en masse earn a good return but breakthrough profits come from satisfying emotional needs. – Michael J. Silverstein • Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes. – Rosalia de Castro • Great teamwork is the only way we create the breakthroughs that define our careers. – Pat Riley • Hemingway is a baby when he turns up in Paris, but he’s an ambitious baby. And he has the talent. And he’s there to stage his breakthrough. So many of the expats who were there at that time were there to do precisely that. It was an ambition-fueled town. – Lesley M. M. Blume • Highly successful leaders ignore conventional wisdom and take chances. Their stories inevitably include a defining moment or key decision when they took a significant risk and thereby experienced a breakthrough. – Larry Osborne • Historic changes and challenges. Breakthroughs in human knowledge and opportunity. And yet, for vast numbers across the globe, the daily realities have not altered. – Abdallah II • History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that’s penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational. – Scott D. Anthony • How do you discover a need that nobody yet knows about? This is where the product breakthroughs come through. – Donald A. Norman • I am also praying for you, my beloved partner. God has a miracle breakthrough for your life. – Mike Evans • I am highly favored by God, I experience great victories, supernatural turnarounds, and miraculous breakthroughs in the midst of great impossibilities. – DMX • I asked, “What do you think the most important advancement was for women in recent years?” And the majority, the item that polled the most, was Hillary Clinton’s run for President. Can you believe that? Women saw that as a breakthrough in something very, very important. She didn’t win. And I think another thing that her race did was it showed sexism in our society. – Carolyn Maloney • I believe it is possible that we can turn today’s breakdown into a planetary breakthrough on one condition. We can do it if we can break free of a set of dominant but misleading ideas that are taking us down. – Frances Moore Lappé • I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India. – Siddhartha Mukherjee • I do enjoy manga but would not consider myself a ‘super-fan,’ only really connecting with certain works such as ‘Lone Wolf and Cub,’ or ‘Tekkon Kinkreet,’ the more breakthrough works, and ‘Akira,’ to me, is the daddy of them all. – Gerard Way • I don’t see anything beneficial about the US spending 100 billion dollars to go back to the moon unless we learn something new that will help us go to the moons of Saturn okay and so we ought to use that to breed new breakthroughs and to test new breakthroughs and to fund it. – Burt Rutan • I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt. – Thomas Friedman • I had a breakthrough, I think my life just became calmer, I gave up drinking. My priorities changed as I had a young daughter. The group didn’t want me to record for the Think Tank album… so I took it as a sign to leave. – Graham Coxon • I had a total revelation with the feminist moment, with Carolee Scheeman and Marina Abromovic and of course Joan Jonas; that was a big breakthrough with me. And through them, I was introduced to Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. You can almost call it a gang, because the works are always talking together. That stuff had a huge impact on me, but other than that, my interest had always been old paintings. – Ragnar Kjartansson • I had my breakthrough at 6 years old and received the Lord, Jesus Christ. I was so swept up in the spirit, I told my parents I had future plans to enter the priesthood. – Jonathan Cain • I have an older sister and my mom would dress us up identically, so in all of our pictures, we’re in these giant pink, poufy outfits. I remember when I was four or five, we all went to a theme park and I had to go to the bathroom but couldn’t hold it in anymore. Let’s just say, I had to buy a brand new outfit! But that moment was the first time I remember ever wearing something different from my sister at an event. It was my breakthrough moment when I decided I was never going to match my sister again! – Analeigh Tipton • I have spent forty-five years teasing out the universal principles of success that are necessary to create massive breakthroughs. I am committed to teaching and disseminating those around the world. I also believe that most transformational leaders are focusing too much on outer techniques and overlooking the important inner qualities of beingness and presence that are required to create real and lasting transformation in the world. – Jack Canfield • I just went into my studio and started to compile stuff. I was so happy with what was coming out that good momentum just carried over and when I would listen back to some of the riffs and some of the ideas, I was completely happy because I felt like, “wow, this was a breakthrough!” The ideas and the songs were really strong and I couldn’t wait to show everybody the stuff. – Charlie Benante • I love reading about all of the breakthroughs and all of the new tech, even just the little household things that are coming on the market. I’ve always been nerdy about that. – Zachary Levi • I never thought in terms of a “breakthrough” film. I wasn’t looking for fame or a career path into Hollywood. I was doing it for myself. I just wanted to make a film that I really loved. If other people liked it, great. But you can never guess what other people are going to like. – Terry Zwigoff • I think as far as straight actors playing gay roles, “Brokeback Mountain” was a big breakthrough. I’m pretty sure when they were casting that movie that – I think the story is, like you know, 10 to 15 other actors turned it down. – James Franco • I think if someone else other than Reagan, someone less of a hardliner, had been in power then the breakthrough in ending the Cold War would not have happened. – Eduard Shevardnadze • I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society. – Michael Sandel • I think President Barack Obama came to office with quite fundamental understandings in his mind about what’s possible and what’s not possible in the Middle East. The first, I would say, revolutionary breakthrough that he introduced is that the Middle East doesn’t matter to American geostrategy as much as we think. – Vali Nasr • I think we’re going to have to do better. Mr. Nixon talks about our being the strongest country in the world. I think we are today, but we were far stronger relative to the Communists 5 years ago. And what is of great concern is that the balance of power is in danger of moving with them. They made a breakthrough in missiles and by 1961, ‘2, and ‘3, they will be outnumbering us in missiles. – John F. Kennedy • I thought ��Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers. – Steve Martin • I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it – well, it is dangerous – but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work – Harold Brodkey • I was reminded of the Sydney Harris cartoon that said ‘adding two numbers that have not been added before does not constitute a mathematical breakthrough’. – Ronald Graham • I watch mainly fiction. The films I like watching are films where you see people change, like with Boyhood. You see a moment in someone’s life where it’s a breakthrough. For me, the breakthrough in Boyhood is that amazing moment right at the end when he finds somebody he can feel relaxed with, and who will maybe be a friend for the rest of his life. I like that it doesn’t end in a love affair or marriage. It just ends in, “Wow, I found people I can relate to for the first people in my life. These people accept me, I like them.” – Kim Longinotto • I wonder how many times people give up just before a breakthrough – when they are on the very brink of success. – Joyce Meyer • I work from the body – I try to develop a language of the body. I’ve invented a term I call “corporeal writing” around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there. – Lidia Yuknavitch • I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I’m writing long sentences now, something I didn’t use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating. – Paul Auster • I’m faster than the rest of you, if .. Because I’m a vampire,” Michael said, and it was some kind of breakthrough for him to say that. “If you get in trouble, I’ll be there.” “Nice,” Shane said. “I’m warming up to this bloodsucking thing, Mikey.” “No, you’re not.” “Okay, no, I’m not, but right now let’s pretend I am. – Rachel Caine • If it’s not broken, break it. That’s how new discoveries are made. That’s why everything that changes life is called a breakthrough. – Sylvester Stallone • If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can’t be breakthroughs. – Peter Diamandis • If you are predisposed to be patient, disciplined and psychologically appreciate the idea of buying bargains, then you’re likely to be good at it. If you have a need for action, if you want to be involved in the new and exciting technological breakthroughs of our time, that’s great, but you’re not a value investor, and you shouldn’t be one. – Seth Klarman • If you look at how the US economy has suffered over the last 15 or 20 years, it’s in significant part because we haven’t done the investments in research and development and infrastructure and other public goods that are necessary for our growth. And, unfortunately, we’re going to be feeling that overhang for a long time to come, because it’s the investments we made in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s that result in some of the greatest technological breakthroughs that we enjoy today. – Jacob Hacker • In a world where routine production is footloose…competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away. – Robert Reich • In recent years, we have seen technology advance at lightning speed, allowing us to accomplish lifesaving feats never imagined before. It is our responsibility to ensure that these advances are used for positive medical breakthroughs, and not allowed to restrict rights or limit access to health insurance or job opportunities. – Evan Bayh • In the inner city, there’s a mentality that the government owes you something. My breakthrough came when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and took responsibility for every part of my life. No more pity parties. I’ve gotta love me more than anybody else loves me. – Mary J. Blige • In the long struggle against sex trafficking, we finally have a breakthrough! – Nicholas D. Kristof • In thinking about nanotechnology today, what’s most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough. – K. Eric Drexler • Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation. – George Brown, Jr. • Innovation is not a big breakthrough invention every time. Innovation is a constant thing. But if you don’t have an innovative company [team], coming to work everyday to find a better way, you don’t have a company[team]. You’re getting ready to die on the vine. You’re always looking for the next innovation, the next niche, the next product improvement, the next service improvement. But always trying to get better. – Jack Welch • It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. – R. Buckminster Fuller • It is a high bar to say that it’s more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda [Gates] and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people. – Bill Gates • It is false to suggest that medical breakthroughs come only through government research. – Roger Wicker • It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do? – Hanif Kureishi • It’s funny, everywhere I go some people ask me whether it’s going to be a Latino breakthrough, some people ask me whether it’s going to be a female breakthrough, and then I’m reminded that five years ago we didn’t even know Barack Obama’s name. – Gwen Ifill • It’s irrational to assume you can ever truly evaluate yourself as a good or bad human being. You will never have enough information.That “bad person” at work who torments you might be an excellent father to his kids. That other “bad person” at work who screwed up royally today? That error might later lead to a huge breakthrough. We will never have enough info to holistically evaluate a person and score them in totality as “bad” or “good.” – David D. Burns • It’s not that we need to form new organizations. It’s simply that we have to awaken to new ways of thinking. I believe it makes no sense to spend a lot of time attacking the current realities. It is time to create the new models that have in them the complexity that makes the older systems obsolete. And to the extent that we can do that, and do that quickly, I think we can provide what will be necessary for a major breakthrough for the future. – Don Edward Beck • It’s your time for a breakthrough! Make up your mind to leave the past and the old you behind. Focus on giving birth to a new you….the real you. It is your time to create a turning point for the better in your life. It is your destiny to be healthy, happy and successful.Your future is open, full of possibility and promise! Buckle down and do whatever is required to create a life that you are proud of and a life that you deserve! Don’t look back!! Look ahead, move forward and make this your best year ever! You have the something special. You have GREATNESS within you! – Les Brown • I’ve done a number of projects where people go, ‘This is your breakthrough role,’ so I’ve stopped thinking that. – Matthew Rhys • I’ve found that often, just when you think you’ve hit a wall, you experience a breakthrough that takes you to new heights in accomplishment – Stedman Graham • I’ve had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I’ve seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way. – Jonathan Lethem • Just like the breakthroughs, the bad stuff always takes you by surprise. – Gail Giles • Launching a breakthrough idea is like shooting skeet. People’s needs change, so you must aim well ahead of the target to hit it. – Ray Kurzweil • Learning is the beginning of wealth. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins. The great breakthrough in your life comes when you realize it that you can learn anything you need to learn to accomplish any goal that you set for yourself. This means there are no limits on what you can be, have or do. – Albert Einstein • Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness. – Tom Robbins • Look at South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. They still have many problems, setbacks as well as breakthroughs, but basically changes have happened that were considered unthinkable a decade ago. – Dalai Lama • MAD FREE is a conversation project, not an organization, but I’ve literally have seen women have breakthroughs in real time. They learn and connect. I’ve had more women I could count say one of our conversations inspired them to be bold and wonderful things like getting PHD’s or traveling to the continent. I am certainly far more inspired by the community of women than they are inspired. – Michaela Angela Davis • Manufacture, don’t just trade. There is money in manufacturing even though it is capital intensive. To achieve a big breakthrough, I had to start manufacturing the same product I was trading on; which is commodities. – Aliko Dangote • Many so-called pragmatists want nothing to do with space exploration or other kinds of ambitious endeavours that don’t have a clear payoff. This mentality is hugely damaging to our success as a civilization. Our desire to understand the universe is kindled by curiosity and wonder, and this has fuelled countless scientific breakthroughs. – Garry Kasparov • Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either. – Peter Høeg • Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters.. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I think it’s too weird, I think it’s too unusual.’ – Marc Andreessen • My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers – Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few. – Terry Brooks • My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50…I had the strength for new deeds and ideas. – Edvard Munch • My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan’s Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did. – Peter Straub • My innovation message, specifically including energy, happened to be the same week that on Monday and Tuesday I announced the Breakthrough Energy Venture Group. Then on that Tuesday afternoon, in December, was when I sat down with him. I explained the US has great science here, this is where the market for these things is going to be. It connects to less pollution, it connects to U.S. jobs, it connects to security, not needing the energy coming from far away. – Bill Gates • My position hasn’t changed over the years. Which is that online voting is a very unsafe idea and a very bad idea and something I think no technological breakthrough I can foresee can ever change. – Avi Rubin • Nearly every major breakthrough innovation has been preceded by a string of failed or misguided executions. – Frans Johansson • New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works…images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models – surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works – promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations. – Peter Senge • Not even God can make something fair out of what is intrinsically unfair. Only one thing can be done. Something must break through the crust of unfairness and create a chance for a new fairness. Only forgiveness can make the breakthrough. – Lewis B. Smedes • Obama is hardly the first president to seek rapprochement with our adversaries and reconciliation with our enemies, of course. But his determination to make nice – even in the face of clear and repeated rejection from the other side – is unparalleled. For Obama and his team, diplomacy with rogue regimes is an end in itself, and any deal, however one-sided, is a win, especially one that the White House communications mavens think that friendly media will call a ‘breakthrough’ or ‘historic.’- Stephen F. Hayes • Of all the early breakthrough rock and roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers. – Cub Koda • One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein’s four rules of writing, one of which was, ‘You must finish what you write.’ I never had any problem with the first one, ‘You must write’ – I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing. – George R. R. Martin • One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity. – Brian Eno • One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they’ve failed more often than everyone else. – Seth Godin • One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know… Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough… So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. – William S. Burroughs • Part of battle has been getting Hollywood to recognize that comic books and superheroes are not synonymous. That’s been a huge breakthrough, just in recent years really, and as a result of that recent breakthrough, we’ve had movies like 300, Road to Perdition, and A History of Violence, that very few people realize were based on comic books and graphic novels. It’s very important to make that differentiation. – Michael Uslan • People tend to think of breakthroughs in medicine as a new drug, a laser, or a high-tech surgical procedure. They often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lifestyle. What we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke cigarettes, how much exercise we get, and the quality of our relationships and support can be as powerful as drugs and surgery. And they often are. – Dean Ornish • Practically every day, there is a story in the newspapers about a new breakthrough drug on Parkinson’s. – Mort Kondracke • Praise works best at the start, before the miracle, before the breakthrough, before the restoration. – Brian Houston • Prayer is the burden of revival; repentance is the breakthrough of revival; evangelism is the blessing of revival; holiness is the bounty of revival. – Steve Camp • Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment. – R. D. Laing • Qatar is giving 2.8% of our GDP to research. This is something again that is a breakthrough, as nobody was even thinking of research as a tool or component for advancement in this part of the world. – Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned • Real breakthroughs are not found because you want to develop some new technology, but because you are curious and want to find out how the world is. – Anton Zeilinger • Rockets have remained fundamentally unchanged, except for a few exceptions for the last almost 50 years. So, for there to be a fundamental shift in rocketry and getting into space, there almost has to be a breakthrough in propulsion. Either in how to bring the price down, or how to more efficiently get people up into space and the key barrier is the expense of a rocket. – Leroy Chiao • Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days. – Tim O’Reilly • Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting. – James D. Watson • Since the moment of self-consciousness comes to a permanent end – and a new journey begins- is such a decisive stroke or milestone in the contemplative life, I can only speculate why so little has been said of this breakthrough; in fact , I may never get over the silence on the part of writers who say nothing about this second movement. – Bernadette Roberts • Skepticism about the potential to achieve the kinds of breakthroughs we need has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. – Ted Nordhaus • So as long as I’m a human being and I’m not perfect, I’m able to say I’m having some growing pains. Because in order to sustain where you are once you made such a breakthrough that everyone is looking at you, now everyone is like, ‘Ooh, is she gonna make a mistake?’ Yes, I’m going to make a mistake. Yes, I’m still gonna do things. – Mary J. Blige • So not only are we saving lives now, we’re creating the incentive for the breakthroughs that over the next generation will mean we can take AIDS, malaria and TB and bring those numbers dramatically down. – Bill Gates • Someone once told me that the finer points of devotion are about the size of a pinhole, and there are millions of them. And if you could connect each dot, then you’ve got a diagram of what you think you thought you knew, and if you’re willing to admit that you know nothing…you have the blueprint for a breakthrough. – Shane Koyczan • Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation. – Cherrie Moraga • Sometimes our breakthrough begins when we refuse to be impressed with the size of our problem. – Bill Johnson • Sometimes when you are the closest to your breakthrough the pressure is the greatest. You have come too far to give up now! – Joyce Meyer • Success doesn’t necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won’t win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling. – Naveen Jain • Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough. It is not a sprint. It is not an event for the solo runner. Successful innovation is a team sport, it’s a relay race. – Nguyen Quyen • Technology has a great deal to do with it. The Panaflex camera was a big breakthrough when it came along; it changed everything, because now you could shoot from the perspective of a person riding in the backseat of a car. – Vilmos Zsigmond • Temptations which accompany the working day will be conquered on the basis of the morning breakthrough to God. Decisions, demanded by work, become easier and simpler where they are made not in the fear of men, but only in the sight of God. He wants to give us today the power which we need for our work. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer • That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. – Rem Koolhaas • That’s the best part of the game, to see the smiles on their faces and the breakthroughs they have as individuals. – Russell Westbrook • The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas. – Nicholas Negroponte • The activities you are most afraid of are the activities that can cause a breakthrough in your success. Step into them. – Darren Hardy • The art of concentrating strength at one point, forcing a breakthrough, rolling up and securing the flanks on either side, and then penetrating like lightning deep into his rear, before the enemy has time to react. – Erwin Rommel • The best way to honor past accomplishments is by building on top of their breakthroughs. – Bill Johnson • The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward. – Freeman Dyson • The business of the endgame is maneuvring to control critical squares, advancing or blockading passed pawns, preparing a breakthrough by the king, or exploiting the subtle superiority of one piece over another. – Pal Benko • The expense of getting into space is the rocket launch, the rocket itself. Rocket’s right now, commercial rockets cost probably somewhere between $50, or $120, or $150 million per launch. And those are all expendable. That is, you’ve got to buy a new rocket for each launch. So, that really is the critical part. If there was some kind of really, a revolutionary breakthrough and the price of rockets fell by an order of magnitude, I mean, just imagine what that would do as far as getting access to more ordinary people. – Leroy Chiao • The FDA, NCI and ACS, and the large treatment centres work to eliminate choice of cancer therapies, particulary better ones. They openly attack breakthroughs made by “mavericks”, which they define as anyone outside their ranks. Folks, any serious study of how these entities work together to destroy hopeful approaches to cancer reveals a trail of corruption, conspiracy, dishonesty, and inhumanity that warrants desigantion of evil……..We continue to use them not because they work, but because those who perform them have so vigorously eliminated any other choice. – Julian Whitaker • The founder of any branch must be more ingenious than the common man. However, if his achievement is not carried on by disciples of the same ingenuity, then things will only become formalized and get stuck in a cul-de-sac; whereby breakthrough and progress will be almost impossible. – Bruce Lee • The great breakthrough in your life comes when you realize that you can learn anything you need to learn to accomplish any goal that you set for yourself. This means there are no limits on what you can be, have or do. – Brian Tracy • The greatest existential risks over the coming decades or century arise from certain, anticipated technological breakthroughs that we might make in particular, machine super intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Each of these has an enormous potential for improving the human condition by helping cure disease, poverty, etc. But one could imagine them being misused, used to create powerful weapon systems, or even some kind of accidental destructive scenario, where we suddenly are in possession of some technology that’s far more powerful than we are able to control or use wisely. – Nick Bostrom • The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world. – Peter Singer • The man in the street has unfortunately been sold the idea that the breakthrough cure for cancer is just around the corner… The very prospect of effective treatment seems so remote that it doesn’t even enter into the speculative day-to-day conversation of people engaged in cancer research… New treatments have not produced any detectable decline in the total annual cancer mortality, even for children. – John Cairns • The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, the more it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation. – Vijay Govindarajan • The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone. – Steve Jobs • The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. – John Naisbitt • The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. – Bill Gates • The prosperity of the second half of the twentieth century was both a cause and an effect of social and scientific breakthroughs that have redefined human life. The biggest change is simply that people live longer and have far more freedom to think about things other than staying alive. – David Bornstein • The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative – things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection? – Robert Pozen • The Refugee Convention of 1951 was a major breakthrough, outlining the rights of those displaced across borders as well as the legal obligations of states to protect them. – Kofi Annan • The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable. – Elon Musk • The song This Kiss was definitely my breakthrough song. After that, Breathe was my breakthrough album. – Faith Hill • The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality. – Jean Cocteau • The stainless-steel frets were a major breakthrough, because of the amount of playing and bending that I do. I have to get my guitars refretted every couple of months. – Eddie Van Halen • The technological breakthrough of the World Wide Web has been enormously beneficial to society. – Mike Fitzpatrick • The transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate. – Marc Andreessen • The urge to quit is strongest just before breakthroughs occur. Those are the times when it’s most important to stay focused and committed. You will encounter the urge to quit many times. Get over it. Quitting is not an option; always be prepared to give it one more day. – Matthew Barnett • The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology. The bottleneck is really in art. – Penn Jillette • The work of cultivating experiences called “peak experiences” or “mystic moments” or “breakthroughs” until they become more accessible is part of the essential nature of genuine spiritual discipline. These are moments, at the very least, of approaching the experiential verification that there does exist something Higher within and perhaps also outside of ourselves. Moments at the very least of approaching what the religions call God. – Jacob Needleman • There are no drive-thru breakthroughs. Breakthroughs take time. – Joyce Meyer • There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about. – Helen Frankenthaler • There are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others’ disruptive breakthroughs. – Jay Samit • There is no breakthrough without a breakdown. – Tony Robbins • There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul. – Stephen Nachmanovitch • There was a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer. – Bill Gates • There’s so many things that life is, and no matter how many breakthroughs, trials will exist and we’re going to get through it. Just be strong. – Mary J. Blige • These were in the days before anybody thought to criticize Congressmen, let alone first ladies, for making money on speeches. So Eleanor raked in quite a bit of cash that she may have put, for all I know, to good uses, or maybe not. I just don’t know. But I don’t think she was any great literary breakthrough. – William A. Rusher • This amazing breakthrough full-length revolutionary audio uses a powerful new combination of a subliminal hypnotic induction AND beautiful original music (created with a really cool ancient musical instrument) AND brand-new subliminal clearing commands ALL designed to begin to clear your unconscious blocks of anything and everything in the way of your attracting what you really want – and this incredible one-hour audio does it without any effort at all on your part! – Joe Vitale • This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age. – Steven Johnson • This will be a week that I change your sheets! Don’t try to rest the same way you’ve rested in the past, for I AM remaking your bed to rest in. Know that I AM causing your house to be reordered and redirecting your steps. And because your bed is being made, stay focused and up with Me, until the breakthrough is seen in your life. – Chuck Pierce • To have a breakthrough, you must consciously connect with the invisible forces that are everywhere around you, urging you to go beyond your old conditioning. – Deepak Chopra • To have a major breakthrough in policy, you have to be able to stop and think. – Newt Gingrich • To me the biggest breakthrough was when we did Terminator 2 that just opened the door for Jurassic and all of the others and that was as big as when we did motion control on Star Wars. But I don’t see another big thing coming. – Dennis Muren • To save the planet, we do not need miraculous technical breakthroughs, or vast amounts of capital. Essentially we need a radical change in our thinking and behaviour. – Ted Trainer • To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now ‘heros du cinema.’ This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. – A. J. Liebling • To transform breakdowns into breakthroughs is the whole function of a master. – Rajneesh • Today, nearly every competitive advantage of the past has been commoditized. Creativity is the one thing that can’t be outsourced. The one thing that can separate a company, team, or individual from the competitive set. Today, precision execution is merely the ante to play. Sustained differentiation can only come from breakthrough creativity. – Josh Linkner • True disruption means threatening your existing product line and your past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of businesses. – Peter Diamandis • Understand that the enemy always fights the hardest when he knows you are closest to your breakthrough. He’d leave you alone if he thought you were going to live in mediocrity. If you keep pressing on toward your promise, through faith and patience, you will get there. – Joel Osteen • Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont. – Burt Rutan • We all hope for breakthrough rebirth moments. – Dane Cook • We all hope for breakthrough rebirth moments. When you’re headed for a breakthrough moment, it’s kind of scary because you say, ‘If I break through then I have to make great change in my life.’ – Dane Cook • We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough. – Harold S. Kushner • We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad – amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash. – Steven Johnson • We don’t have time to wait for President Bush to change his mind. How many breakthroughs have been missed as a result of this policy? – Robert Lanza • We have a strong military deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. In countries like Syria, we need a diplomatic breakthrough to end the war. In Libya, the country must first of all be stabilized to stop IS. This means supporting the Libyan government, including in terms of security. We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past in that country. The situation is extremely dangerous and the next days could be decisive. – Paolo Gentiloni • We live at the threshold of a universal recognition that the human being is not mere matter, but a potent, energetic field of consciousness. Modalities of the past millennium are quickly giving way to breakthrough technologies wherein we heal ourselves at the level of all true healing, which is spirit. – Michael Beckwith • We live in an age that is driven by information. Technological breakthroughs… are changing the face of war and how we prepare for war. – William Perry • We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, “Hey, we’ll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they’re ready to spin out probably into startup companies.” – Bill Gates • Well technologically and so forth, it’s a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it’s very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content. – Cornel West • What appears to be a breakdown can often be a breakthrough…. IF you understand God’s grace – Carl Lentz • What drives me? Surrounding myself with amazing talent to craft a breakthrough product which can be used by millions of people to change the world. – Mike McCue • What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined. – Archibald MacLeish • What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions. – Camille Paglia • What makes it difficult for people trying to follow a dream is that the whole time you feel like you’re slamming your head against the wall. So it’s nice to make a breakthrough and not kind of lying there with your head bleeding. – Lewis Black • What we are now doing with the victory, and I agree with you if you condemn that and I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women — organized women — do is to fret about his shirt? – Ayaan Hirsi Ali • What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don’t just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. – Steven Johnson • When I made a breakthrough as an actor, people started to say, ‘Who’s that bloke with the funny name?’ They advised me to change it, saying it would never be put up in lights outside theaters because they couldn’t afford the electricity. But I would never contemplate changing it. It’s who I am. – Pete Postlethwaite • When I was 18, I went to a Baptist church with my girlfriend, and had a breakthrough when a pastor laid hands on me on an altar call. I wept that evening and realized how numb I had become with God and how He was calling to me for restoration. I received that blessing and went on to raising my three children in a Lutheran Church in the Bay Area as a member of Journey. – Jonathan Cain • When things get rough, a breakthrough is just on the other side of the pain. – Shirley MacLaine • When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology? – Theodore Zeldin • When you are tempted to give up, your breakthrough is probably just around the corner. – Joyce Meyer • When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it. But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along. – Francis Collins • When you realize that the real breakthroughs come from levels of higher consciousness, then you also realize that the achievement of maturity and wisdom is the most powerful generator of new beginnings possible. – Marianne Williamson • While that amendment failed, human cloning continues to advance and the breakthrough in this unethical and morally questionable science is around the corner. – Mike Pence • Within the soil of a discouraging season can often be the seeds of incredible blessing, miracles and breakthrough! – Brian Houston • Without risks, there can’t be breakthroughs. – Peter Diamandis • YOU are on the verge of complete breakthrough in every area of your life. Spiritually, Financially, and Relationally God has shown me that this is a season of victory for His people. As I went deeper in the Spirit the Lord revealed that before the breakthrough comes, certain things must be dealt with. Specifically, there must be a complete defeat of your enemies! – Paula White • You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three. – Sam Altman • You have to go through the darkness to truly know the light. This may sound like a cliche, but it’s true nonetheless. Often the greatest doubts occur just before a breakthrough. – Surya Das • You never do arrive at a destination. You have to work at it and take ownership of the process. What resonates at age 25 is likely to change by age 35 and 45. The process never ends. Realizing this has been a big breakthrough for me. – Robert S. Kaplan • You never know how close you are to a breakthrough. It may be right around the corner. Don’t quit! – Joyce Meyer • Your doubts are not the product of accurate thinking, but habitual thinking. Years ago you excepted flawed conclusions as correct, begin to live your life as if those warped ideas about your potential were true, and ceased the bold experiment in living that brought you many breakthrough behaviors as a child. – Price Pritchett

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Breakthrough Quotes

Official Website: Breakthrough Quotes

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• A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts. – Bill Gates • A breakthrough occurs when you recognize, you are more energy than matter – Caroline Myss • After a breakthrough year for America, our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999. – Barack Obama • All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn’t all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it’s reinterpreted in an unexpected way. Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation. ��� Scott Belsky • All I need is the breakthrough. The joint-venture for my clothing. Same as Stella McCartney has. – Kanye West • All of us have at least one great voice deep inside. People are products of their environment. A lucky few are born into situations in which positive messages abound. Others grow up hearing messages of fear and failure, which they must block out so the positive can be heard. But the positive and courageous voice will always emerge, somewhere, sometime, for all of us. Listen for it, and your breakthroughs will come. – Pat Riley • All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. – Tony Robbins • All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. You must feel deep in your gut that not only has this belief cost you pain in the past, but it’s costing you in the present and, ultimately, can only bring you pain in the future. Then you must associate tremendous pleasure to the idea of adopting a new, empowering belief. – Tony Robbins • All personal breakthroughs being with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. – Tony Robbins • All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking. – Thomas Kuhn • All technological breakthroughs start with a small “elite”. Think about cellphones, for example. Now just about everyone has one. The same will happen to innovations such as Twitter. – Helen Zille • Almost every significant breakthrough is the result of a courageous break with traditional ways of thinking. – Stephen Covey • America has the best doctors, the best nurses, the best hospitals, the best medical technology, the best medical breakthrough medicines in the world. There is absolutely no reason we should not have in this country the best health care in the world. – Bill Frist • Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are considered “useless,” will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life. – John Maeda • And [we hope to sell] the clean fuels to other airlines. I mean, the exciting thing about the breakthrough with clean fuels for the airline industry is there’s only 1,700 pumps in the world that fill up the airlines. – Richard Branson • And I’m going to work as hard as I can… for cancer research and hopefully, maybe, we’ll have some cures and some breakthroughs. I’d like to think I’m going to fight my brains out to be back here again next year for the Arthur Ashe recipient. I want to give it next year! – Jim Valvano • And yet in a funny way our lack of success led to our breakthrough; because, since we could not get a cell line off the shelf doing what we wanted, we were forced to construct it. And the original experiment … developed into a method for the production of hybridomas … [which] was of more importance than our original purpose. – Cesar Milstein • Animal research and testing has played a part in almost every medical breakthrough of the last century. It has saved hundreds of millions of lives worldwide. – Joan Ryan • Any breakdown is a breakthrough. – Marshall McLuhan • Any time there is a cultural breakthrough in which this culture transcends what it’s supposed to be, there’s a violent reaction. So we had a black president, and it’s followed by an incredibly violent reaction. It happens over and over. – George C. Wolfe • As a Christian, when your trial is getting hotter, you are getting closer to your breakthrough! Keep pressing! – T. B. Joshua • As God’s representative on the earth, He has given us the authority to speak for Him. When we speak under the leading of the Holy Spirit, we speak as His voice on the earth. During strategic times, the Lord will prompt us to pray prayers that will bring breakthrough. – Barbara Wentroble • As I’m sure anyone who’s born after the ’70s’ access point is – is ’70s films and ’70s culture and there is a kind of a paranoiac atmosphere in that time in America. Yes, it’s the golden age of journalism, Watergate, and all the rest of these people making these great breakthroughs – but it’s also the moment that “if it bleeds, it leads” becomes mainstream and sensationalizing the news becomes more and more the given. Checking how many numbers you’re getting, whatever you can do to get more numbers. – Rebecca Hall • Asking “Why?” can lead to understanding. Asking “Why not?” can lead to breakthroughs. – Daniel H. Pink

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Break+through', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '32', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_break-through').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_break-through img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality. – Thomas Cech • Because we are God’s children…we can bring our needs to him with certainty in prayer…. Prayer is not some kind of heavenly lottery. Nor does the Bible counsel us to pray with an “I hope this will work”…attitude. Instead…prayer brings us before the throne of grace as children seeking the help of their heavenly Father. That’s the heart of breakthrough, successful prayer-the bold confidence that we are talking to the Father who delights to supply our needs. – Jim Cymbala • Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them. – Marc Andreessen • Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed – Thomas Friedman • Both instruments are processors of information. Both appeared when nothing quite like them had existed before, and both began to make their effects felt immediately (a situation that isn’t invariable with new technology). Both devices were less the result of a single breakthrough than of an evolving set of technologies. Like the computer, the printing press had no one certain inventor; it was a technology whose time had come. – Pamela McCorduck • Breakthrough Advertising is not about building better mousetraps. It is, however, about building larger mice – and then building a terrifying fear of them in your customers. – Eugene Schwartz • Breakthrough happened around me when breakup happened within me. – Jack W. Hayford • Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts. It’s hard to think this way — I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change. O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders? – Marc Andreessen • Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating – Ben Horowitz • Breakthrough is how to distinguish a leader and who followed – Steve Jobs • Breakthroughs, in art, in culture, in personality, come when tackling the unexpected. – Lynda Obst • Brokenness is often the road to breakthrough. Be encouraged. – Tony Evans • But so long as we can keep this crew of fantastic people together and can continue to make real breakthrough films in this category, as well as characters that stay true to what we’ve done in this first film, I’d be more than happy to be a part of it. – Brandon Routh • But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that’s the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch) – Tim Dorsey • By creating a self-policing, self-reporting, sort of self-monitoring culture through law, through statute, and imposing that on the academic world, I think not only are we losing a significant measure of freedom in academic traditions and in our civil society, but we’re actually making ourselves less competitive with every other country around the world that does not do that. Because that’s where researchers are going to go and that’s where academics are going to go. And ultimately, that’s where breakthroughs are going to occur. – Edward Snowden

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• Cancer can be attacked directly by metabolic enzymes and then be assisted by the enzyme diet programme. The second greatest cancer breakthrough of the 20th century is the metabolic organic effect on malignant tumours of correcting the body fluid pH to a non-acidic pH 7.1 to 7.5. A neutral pH 7.0 resists cancer formation. An acid body fluid pH of 6.44 and below permits tumours to biochemically become malignant. At pH 7.5 cancer may become inactive; at 8.5 tumours may disintegrate. – Benjamin Carson • Chaos often fosters the greatest creativity. Breakdowns often precede the greatest breakthroughs. And when the pain is greatest is often when we’re on the brink of the greatest realization…..When the pain is burned through rather than numbed, when our darkness is brought to light and then forgiven, then and only then can we move on. And move on we do. – Marianne Williamson • Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that’s ahad a profound impact on my life. He said, “The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything.” Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba. – Brennan Manning • Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn’t mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease. – Evgeny Morozov • Doctors…from the Office of Info. Tech. at Harvard U.(:)…Their appraisal of 46 surgical or anesthesia breakthroughs…suggested…only 13% were highly preferred (and)…in nearly half the cases the new therapy was no better than the therapy it replaced. …About 12% of the innovations increased complications. – Jeffrey Bland • Don’t they know science doesn’t work like that? You can’t just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you’ve been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you’re looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don’t they know you can’t get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one? – Connie Willis • Ending torture and tyranny in Iraq was not a mistake. Supporting democracy in Iraq is not a mistake. Helping the long-suffering Muslims of Iraq who now seek to live democratically is not a mistake. In the long, long history of the Middle East, this breakthrough may one day be ranked as a dramatic turning point in regional history. – Michael Novak • Energy is very primal stuff and there are a lot of leads that are promising, still at a fairly risky stage, but over the next decade some of these breakthrough approaches are going to pay out, and U.S. research and U.S. leadership on this should be part of how it gets solved. – Bill Gates • Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. – Terence McKenna • Even in the dark times between experimental breakthroughs, there always continues a steady evolution of theoretical ideas, leading almost imperceptibly to changes in previous beliefs. – Steven Weinberg • Ever so often in the history of human endeavour, there comes a breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier into a new era. … today’s announcement is such a breakthrough, a breakthrough that opens the way for massive advancement in the treatment of cancer and hereditary diseases. And that is only the beginning. – Tony Blair • Every major difficulty you face in life is a fork in the road. You choose which track you will head down, toward breakdown or breakthrough. – John C. Maxwell • Every time I have had a breakthrough in my life, it has been because of Prayer – John C. Maxwell • Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree. – Thomas Keating • Except in very narrow cases, where there’s breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway. – Eric Ries • For anyone that’s ever had a musical breakthrough in their career, it’s always followed by the departure period right after. – Questlove • For many years I wrote nothing but “I will not sleep with Steve Almond” over and over again, page after page à la Jack Torrance in The Shining. Finally, hundreds of psychotherapy sessions and an intense shaman-guided DMT sweat lodge experience led to a breakthrough, and I was able to write about other people I would not sleep with, and also about people I would. – Alissa Nutting • For me the breakthrough was the realization that I wasn’t the center of the universe or even the centre of my own world. That you and your work, your living, are not the only reason you’re here. Your role is to shepherd your children through to adulthood. That’s the point of life. Your own little sessions and needs and passions are just there to flavour you and help you do that job for your children. – Shaun Micallef • Functional goods sold en masse earn a good return but breakthrough profits come from satisfying emotional needs. – Michael J. Silverstein • Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes. – Rosalia de Castro • Great teamwork is the only way we create the breakthroughs that define our careers. – Pat Riley • Hemingway is a baby when he turns up in Paris, but he’s an ambitious baby. And he has the talent. And he’s there to stage his breakthrough. So many of the expats who were there at that time were there to do precisely that. It was an ambition-fueled town. – Lesley M. M. Blume • Highly successful leaders ignore conventional wisdom and take chances. Their stories inevitably include a defining moment or key decision when they took a significant risk and thereby experienced a breakthrough. – Larry Osborne • Historic changes and challenges. Breakthroughs in human knowledge and opportunity. And yet, for vast numbers across the globe, the daily realities have not altered. – Abdallah II • History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that’s penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational. – Scott D. Anthony • How do you discover a need that nobody yet knows about? This is where the product breakthroughs come through. – Donald A. Norman • I am also praying for you, my beloved partner. God has a miracle breakthrough for your life. – Mike Evans • I am highly favored by God, I experience great victories, supernatural turnarounds, and miraculous breakthroughs in the midst of great impossibilities. – DMX • I asked, “What do you think the most important advancement was for women in recent years?” And the majority, the item that polled the most, was Hillary Clinton’s run for President. Can you believe that? Women saw that as a breakthrough in something very, very important. She didn’t win. And I think another thing that her race did was it showed sexism in our society. – Carolyn Maloney • I believe it is possible that we can turn today’s breakdown into a planetary breakthrough on one condition. We can do it if we can break free of a set of dominant but misleading ideas that are taking us down. – Frances Moore Lappé • I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India. – Siddhartha Mukherjee • I do enjoy manga but would not consider myself a ‘super-fan,’ only really connecting with certain works such as ‘Lone Wolf and Cub,’ or ‘Tekkon Kinkreet,’ the more breakthrough works, and ‘Akira,’ to me, is the daddy of them all. – Gerard Way • I don’t see anything beneficial about the US spending 100 billion dollars to go back to the moon unless we learn something new that will help us go to the moons of Saturn okay and so we ought to use that to breed new breakthroughs and to test new breakthroughs and to fund it. – Burt Rutan • I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt. – Thomas Friedman • I had a breakthrough, I think my life just became calmer, I gave up drinking. My priorities changed as I had a young daughter. The group didn’t want me to record for the Think Tank album… so I took it as a sign to leave. – Graham Coxon • I had a total revelation with the feminist moment, with Carolee Scheeman and Marina Abromovic and of course Joan Jonas; that was a big breakthrough with me. And through them, I was introduced to Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. You can almost call it a gang, because the works are always talking together. That stuff had a huge impact on me, but other than that, my interest had always been old paintings. – Ragnar Kjartansson • I had my breakthrough at 6 years old and received the Lord, Jesus Christ. I was so swept up in the spirit, I told my parents I had future plans to enter the priesthood. – Jonathan Cain • I have an older sister and my mom would dress us up identically, so in all of our pictures, we’re in these giant pink, poufy outfits. I remember when I was four or five, we all went to a theme park and I had to go to the bathroom but couldn’t hold it in anymore. Let’s just say, I had to buy a brand new outfit! But that moment was the first time I remember ever wearing something different from my sister at an event. It was my breakthrough moment when I decided I was never going to match my sister again! – Analeigh Tipton • I have spent forty-five years teasing out the universal principles of success that are necessary to create massive breakthroughs. I am committed to teaching and disseminating those around the world. I also believe that most transformational leaders are focusing too much on outer techniques and overlooking the important inner qualities of beingness and presence that are required to create real and lasting transformation in the world. – Jack Canfield • I just went into my studio and started to compile stuff. I was so happy with what was coming out that good momentum just carried over and when I would listen back to some of the riffs and some of the ideas, I was completely happy because I felt like, “wow, this was a breakthrough!” The ideas and the songs were really strong and I couldn’t wait to show everybody the stuff. – Charlie Benante • I love reading about all of the breakthroughs and all of the new tech, even just the little household things that are coming on the market. I’ve always been nerdy about that. – Zachary Levi • I never thought in terms of a “breakthrough” film. I wasn’t looking for fame or a career path into Hollywood. I was doing it for myself. I just wanted to make a film that I really loved. If other people liked it, great. But you can never guess what other people are going to like. – Terry Zwigoff • I think as far as straight actors playing gay roles, “Brokeback Mountain” was a big breakthrough. I’m pretty sure when they were casting that movie that – I think the story is, like you know, 10 to 15 other actors turned it down. – James Franco • I think if someone else other than Reagan, someone less of a hardliner, had been in power then the breakthrough in ending the Cold War would not have happened. – Eduard Shevardnadze • I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society. – Michael Sandel • I think President Barack Obama came to office with quite fundamental understandings in his mind about what’s possible and what’s not possible in the Middle East. The first, I would say, revolutionary breakthrough that he introduced is that the Middle East doesn’t matter to American geostrategy as much as we think. – Vali Nasr • I think we’re going to have to do better. Mr. Nixon talks about our being the strongest country in the world. I think we are today, but we were far stronger relative to the Communists 5 years ago. And what is of great concern is that the balance of power is in danger of moving with them. They made a breakthrough in missiles and by 1961, ‘2, and ‘3, they will be outnumbering us in missiles. – John F. Kennedy • I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers. – Steve Martin • I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it – well, it is dangerous – but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work – Harold Brodkey • I was reminded of the Sydney Harris cartoon that said ‘adding two numbers that have not been added before does not constitute a mathematical breakthrough’. – Ronald Graham • I watch mainly fiction. The films I like watching are films where you see people change, like with Boyhood. You see a moment in someone’s life where it’s a breakthrough. For me, the breakthrough in Boyhood is that amazing moment right at the end when he finds somebody he can feel relaxed with, and who will maybe be a friend for the rest of his life. I like that it doesn’t end in a love affair or marriage. It just ends in, “Wow, I found people I can relate to for the first people in my life. These people accept me, I like them.” – Kim Longinotto • I wonder how many times people give up just before a breakthrough – when they are on the very brink of success. – Joyce Meyer • I work from the body – I try to develop a language of the body. I’ve invented a term I call “corporeal writing” around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there. – Lidia Yuknavitch • I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I’m writing long sentences now, something I didn’t use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating. – Paul Auster • I’m faster than the rest of you, if .. Because I’m a vampire,” Michael said, and it was some kind of breakthrough for him to say that. “If you get in trouble, I’ll be there.” “Nice,” Shane said. “I’m warming up to this bloodsucking thing, Mikey.” “No, you’re not.” “Okay, no, I’m not, but right now let’s pretend I am. – Rachel Caine • If it’s not broken, break it. That’s how new discoveries are made. That’s why everything that changes life is called a breakthrough. – Sylvester Stallone • If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can’t be breakthroughs. – Peter Diamandis • If you are predisposed to be patient, disciplined and psychologically appreciate the idea of buying bargains, then you’re likely to be good at it. If you have a need for action, if you want to be involved in the new and exciting technological breakthroughs of our time, that’s great, but you’re not a value investor, and you shouldn’t be one. – Seth Klarman • If you look at how the US economy has suffered over the last 15 or 20 years, it’s in significant part because we haven’t done the investments in research and development and infrastructure and other public goods that are necessary for our growth. And, unfortunately, we’re going to be feeling that overhang for a long time to come, because it’s the investments we made in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s that result in some of the greatest technological breakthroughs that we enjoy today. – Jacob Hacker • In a world where routine production is footloose…competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away. – Robert Reich • In recent years, we have seen technology advance at lightning speed, allowing us to accomplish lifesaving feats never imagined before. It is our responsibility to ensure that these advances are used for positive medical breakthroughs, and not allowed to restrict rights or limit access to health insurance or job opportunities. – Evan Bayh • In the inner city, there’s a mentality that the government owes you something. My breakthrough came when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and took responsibility for every part of my life. No more pity parties. I’ve gotta love me more than anybody else loves me. – Mary J. Blige • In the long struggle against sex trafficking, we finally have a breakthrough! – Nicholas D. Kristof • In thinking about nanotechnology today, what’s most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough. – K. Eric Drexler • Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation. – George Brown, Jr. • Innovation is not a big breakthrough invention every time. Innovation is a constant thing. But if you don’t have an innovative company [team], coming to work everyday to find a better way, you don’t have a company[team]. You’re getting ready to die on the vine. You’re always looking for the next innovation, the next niche, the next product improvement, the next service improvement. But always trying to get better. – Jack Welch • It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. – R. Buckminster Fuller • It is a high bar to say that it’s more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda [Gates] and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people. – Bill Gates • It is false to suggest that medical breakthroughs come only through government research. – Roger Wicker • It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do? – Hanif Kureishi • It’s funny, everywhere I go some people ask me whether it’s going to be a Latino breakthrough, some people ask me whether it’s going to be a female breakthrough, and then I’m reminded that five years ago we didn’t even know Barack Obama’s name. – Gwen Ifill • It’s irrational to assume you can ever truly evaluate yourself as a good or bad human being. You will never have enough information.That “bad person” at work who torments you might be an excellent father to his kids. That other “bad person” at work who screwed up royally today? That error might later lead to a huge breakthrough. We will never have enough info to holistically evaluate a person and score them in totality as “bad” or “good.” – David D. Burns • It’s not that we need to form new organizations. It’s simply that we have to awaken to new ways of thinking. I believe it makes no sense to spend a lot of time attacking the current realities. It is time to create the new models that have in them the complexity that makes the older systems obsolete. And to the extent that we can do that, and do that quickly, I think we can provide what will be necessary for a major breakthrough for the future. – Don Edward Beck • It’s your time for a breakthrough! Make up your mind to leave the past and the old you behind. Focus on giving birth to a new you….the real you. It is your time to create a turning point for the better in your life. It is your destiny to be healthy, happy and successful.Your future is open, full of possibility and promise! Buckle down and do whatever is required to create a life that you are proud of and a life that you deserve! Don’t look back!! Look ahead, move forward and make this your best year ever! You have the something special. You have GREATNESS within you! – Les Brown • I’ve done a number of projects where people go, ‘This is your breakthrough role,’ so I’ve stopped thinking that. – Matthew Rhys • I’ve found that often, just when you think you’ve hit a wall, you experience a breakthrough that takes you to new heights in accomplishment – Stedman Graham • I’ve had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I’ve seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way. – Jonathan Lethem • Just like the breakthroughs, the bad stuff always takes you by surprise. – Gail Giles • Launching a breakthrough idea is like shooting skeet. People’s needs change, so you must aim well ahead of the target to hit it. – Ray Kurzweil • Learning is the beginning of wealth. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins. The great breakthrough in your life comes when you realize it that you can learn anything you need to learn to accomplish any goal that you set for yourself. This means there are no limits on what you can be, have or do. – Albert Einstein • Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness. – Tom Robbins • Look at South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. They still have many problems, setbacks as well as breakthroughs, but basically changes have happened that were considered unthinkable a decade ago. – Dalai Lama • MAD FREE is a conversation project, not an organization, but I’ve literally have seen women have breakthroughs in real time. They learn and connect. I’ve had more women I could count say one of our conversations inspired them to be bold and wonderful things like getting PHD’s or traveling to the continent. I am certainly far more inspired by the community of women than they are inspired. – Michaela Angela Davis • Manufacture, don’t just trade. There is money in manufacturing even though it is capital intensive. To achieve a big breakthrough, I had to start manufacturing the same product I was trading on; which is commodities. – Aliko Dangote • Many so-called pragmatists want nothing to do with space exploration or other kinds of ambitious endeavours that don’t have a clear payoff. This mentality is hugely damaging to our success as a civilization. Our desire to understand the universe is kindled by curiosity and wonder, and this has fuelled countless scientific breakthroughs. – Garry Kasparov • Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either. – Peter Høeg • Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters.. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I think it’s too weird, I think it’s too unusual.’ – Marc Andreessen • My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers – Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few. – Terry Brooks • My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50…I had the strength for new deeds and ideas. – Edvard Munch • My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan’s Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did. – Peter Straub • My innovation message, specifically including energy, happened to be the same week that on Monday and Tuesday I announced the Breakthrough Energy Venture Group. Then on that Tuesday afternoon, in December, was when I sat down with him. I explained the US has great science here, this is where the market for these things is going to be. It connects to less pollution, it connects to U.S. jobs, it connects to security, not needing the energy coming from far away. – Bill Gates • My position hasn’t changed over the years. Which is that online voting is a very unsafe idea and a very bad idea and something I think no technological breakthrough I can foresee can ever change. – Avi Rubin • Nearly every major breakthrough innovation has been preceded by a string of failed or misguided executions. – Frans Johansson • New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works…images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models – surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works – promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations. – Peter Senge • Not even God can make something fair out of what is intrinsically unfair. Only one thing can be done. Something must break through the crust of unfairness and create a chance for a new fairness. Only forgiveness can make the breakthrough. – Lewis B. Smedes • Obama is hardly the first president to seek rapprochement with our adversaries and reconciliation with our enemies, of course. But his determination to make nice – even in the face of clear and repeated rejection from the other side – is unparalleled. For Obama and his team, diplomacy with rogue regimes is an end in itself, and any deal, however one-sided, is a win, especially one that the White House communications mavens think that friendly media will call a ‘breakthrough’ or ‘historic.’- Stephen F. Hayes • Of all the early breakthrough rock and roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers. – Cub Koda • One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein’s four rules of writing, one of which was, ‘You must finish what you write.’ I never had any problem with the first one, ‘You must write’ – I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing. – George R. R. Martin • One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity. – Brian Eno • One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they’ve failed more often than everyone else. – Seth Godin • One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know… Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough… So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. – William S. Burroughs • Part of battle has been getting Hollywood to recognize that comic books and superheroes are not synonymous. That’s been a huge breakthrough, just in recent years really, and as a result of that recent breakthrough, we’ve had movies like 300, Road to Perdition, and A History of Violence, that very few people realize were based on comic books and graphic novels. It’s very important to make that differentiation. – Michael Uslan • People tend to think of breakthroughs in medicine as a new drug, a laser, or a high-tech surgical procedure. They often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lifestyle. What we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke cigarettes, how much exercise we get, and the quality of our relationships and support can be as powerful as drugs and surgery. And they often are. – Dean Ornish • Practically every day, there is a story in the newspapers about a new breakthrough drug on Parkinson’s. – Mort Kondracke • Praise works best at the start, before the miracle, before the breakthrough, before the restoration. – Brian Houston • Prayer is the burden of revival; repentance is the breakthrough of revival; evangelism is the blessing of revival; holiness is the bounty of revival. – Steve Camp • Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment. – R. D. Laing • Qatar is giving 2.8% of our GDP to research. This is something again that is a breakthrough, as nobody was even thinking of research as a tool or component for advancement in this part of the world. – Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned • Real breakthroughs are not found because you want to develop some new technology, but because you are curious and want to find out how the world is. – Anton Zeilinger • Rockets have remained fundamentally unchanged, except for a few exceptions for the last almost 50 years. So, for there to be a fundamental shift in rocketry and getting into space, there almost has to be a breakthrough in propulsion. Either in how to bring the price down, or how to more efficiently get people up into space and the key barrier is the expense of a rocket. – Leroy Chiao • Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days. – Tim O’Reilly • Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting. – James D. Watson • Since the moment of self-consciousness comes to a permanent end – and a new journey begins- is such a decisive stroke or milestone in the contemplative life, I can only speculate why so little has been said of this breakthrough; in fact , I may never get over the silence on the part of writers who say nothing about this second movement. – Bernadette Roberts • Skepticism about the potential to achieve the kinds of breakthroughs we need has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. – Ted Nordhaus • So as long as I’m a human being and I’m not perfect, I’m able to say I’m having some growing pains. Because in order to sustain where you are once you made such a breakthrough that everyone is looking at you, now everyone is like, ‘Ooh, is she gonna make a mistake?’ Yes, I’m going to make a mistake. Yes, I’m still gonna do things. – Mary J. Blige • So not only are we saving lives now, we’re creating the incentive for the breakthroughs that over the next generation will mean we can take AIDS, malaria and TB and bring those numbers dramatically down. – Bill Gates • Someone once told me that the finer points of devotion are about the size of a pinhole, and there are millions of them. And if you could connect each dot, then you’ve got a diagram of what you think you thought you knew, and if you’re willing to admit that you know nothing…you have the blueprint for a breakthrough. – Shane Koyczan • Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation. – Cherrie Moraga • Sometimes our breakthrough begins when we refuse to be impressed with the size of our problem. – Bill Johnson • Sometimes when you are the closest to your breakthrough the pressure is the greatest. You have come too far to give up now! – Joyce Meyer • Success doesn’t necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won’t win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling. – Naveen Jain • Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough. It is not a sprint. It is not an event for the solo runner. Successful innovation is a team sport, it’s a relay race. – Nguyen Quyen • Technology has a great deal to do with it. The Panaflex camera was a big breakthrough when it came along; it changed everything, because now you could shoot from the perspective of a person riding in the backseat of a car. – Vilmos Zsigmond • Temptations which accompany the working day will be conquered on the basis of the morning breakthrough to God. Decisions, demanded by work, become easier and simpler where they are made not in the fear of men, but only in the sight of God. He wants to give us today the power which we need for our work. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer • That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. – Rem Koolhaas • That’s the best part of the game, to see the smiles on their faces and the breakthroughs they have as individuals. – Russell Westbrook • The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas. – Nicholas Negroponte • The activities you are most afraid of are the activities that can cause a breakthrough in your success. Step into them. – Darren Hardy • The art of concentrating strength at one point, forcing a breakthrough, rolling up and securing the flanks on either side, and then penetrating like lightning deep into his rear, before the enemy has time to react. – Erwin Rommel • The best way to honor past accomplishments is by building on top of their breakthroughs. – Bill Johnson • The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward. – Freeman Dyson • The business of the endgame is maneuvring to control critical squares, advancing or blockading passed pawns, preparing a breakthrough by the king, or exploiting the subtle superiority of one piece over another. – Pal Benko • The expense of getting into space is the rocket launch, the rocket itself. Rocket’s right now, commercial rockets cost probably somewhere between $50, or $120, or $150 million per launch. And those are all expendable. That is, you’ve got to buy a new rocket for each launch. So, that really is the critical part. If there was some kind of really, a revolutionary breakthrough and the price of rockets fell by an order of magnitude, I mean, just imagine what that would do as far as getting access to more ordinary people. – Leroy Chiao • The FDA, NCI and ACS, and the large treatment centres work to eliminate choice of cancer therapies, particulary better ones. They openly attack breakthroughs made by “mavericks”, which they define as anyone outside their ranks. Folks, any serious study of how these entities work together to destroy hopeful approaches to cancer reveals a trail of corruption, conspiracy, dishonesty, and inhumanity that warrants desigantion of evil……..We continue to use them not because they work, but because those who perform them have so vigorously eliminated any other choice. – Julian Whitaker • The founder of any branch must be more ingenious than the common man. However, if his achievement is not carried on by disciples of the same ingenuity, then things will only become formalized and get stuck in a cul-de-sac; whereby breakthrough and progress will be almost impossible. – Bruce Lee • The great breakthrough in your life comes when you realize that you can learn anything you need to learn to accomplish any goal that you set for yourself. This means there are no limits on what you can be, have or do. – Brian Tracy • The greatest existential risks over the coming decades or century arise from certain, anticipated technological breakthroughs that we might make in particular, machine super intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Each of these has an enormous potential for improving the human condition by helping cure disease, poverty, etc. But one could imagine them being misused, used to create powerful weapon systems, or even some kind of accidental destructive scenario, where we suddenly are in possession of some technology that’s far more powerful than we are able to control or use wisely. – Nick Bostrom • The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world. – Peter Singer • The man in the street has unfortunately been sold the idea that the breakthrough cure for cancer is just around the corner… The very prospect of effective treatment seems so remote that it doesn’t even enter into the speculative day-to-day conversation of people engaged in cancer research… New treatments have not produced any detectable decline in the total annual cancer mortality, even for children. – John Cairns • The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, the more it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation. – Vijay Govindarajan • The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone. – Steve Jobs • The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. – John Naisbitt • The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. – Bill Gates • The prosperity of the second half of the twentieth century was both a cause and an effect of social and scientific breakthroughs that have redefined human life. The biggest change is simply that people live longer and have far more freedom to think about things other than staying alive. – David Bornstein • The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative – things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection? – Robert Pozen • The Refugee Convention of 1951 was a major breakthrough, outlining the rights of those displaced across borders as well as the legal obligations of states to protect them. – Kofi Annan • The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable. – Elon Musk • The song This Kiss was definitely my breakthrough song. After that, Breathe was my breakthrough album. – Faith Hill • The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality. – Jean Cocteau • The stainless-steel frets were a major breakthrough, because of the amount of playing and bending that I do. I have to get my guitars refretted every couple of months. – Eddie Van Halen • The technological breakthrough of the World Wide Web has been enormously beneficial to society. – Mike Fitzpatrick • The transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate. – Marc Andreessen • The urge to quit is strongest just before breakthroughs occur. Those are the times when it’s most important to stay focused and committed. You will encounter the urge to quit many times. Get over it. Quitting is not an option; always be prepared to give it one more day. – Matthew Barnett • The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology. The bottleneck is really in art. – Penn Jillette • The work of cultivating experiences called “peak experiences” or “mystic moments” or “breakthroughs” until they become more accessible is part of the essential nature of genuine spiritual discipline. These are moments, at the very least, of approaching the experiential verification that there does exist something Higher within and perhaps also outside of ourselves. Moments at the very least of approaching what the religions call God. – Jacob Needleman • There are no drive-thru breakthroughs. Breakthroughs take time. – Joyce Meyer • There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about. – Helen Frankenthaler • There are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others’ disruptive breakthroughs. – Jay Samit • There is no breakthrough without a breakdown. – Tony Robbins • There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul. – Stephen Nachmanovitch • There was a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer. – Bill Gates • There’s so many things that life is, and no matter how many breakthroughs, trials will exist and we’re going to get through it. Just be strong. – Mary J. Blige • These were in the days before anybody thought to criticize Congressmen, let alone first ladies, for making money on speeches. So Eleanor raked in quite a bit of cash that she may have put, for all I know, to good uses, or maybe not. I just don’t know. But I don’t think she was any great literary breakthrough. – William A. Rusher • This amazing breakthrough full-length revolutionary audio uses a powerful new combination of a subliminal hypnotic induction AND beautiful original music (created with a really cool ancient musical instrument) AND brand-new subliminal clearing commands ALL designed to begin to clear your unconscious blocks of anything and everything in the way of your attracting what you really want – and this incredible one-hour audio does it without any effort at all on your part! – Joe Vitale • This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age. – Steven Johnson • This will be a week that I change your sheets! Don’t try to rest the same way you’ve rested in the past, for I AM remaking your bed to rest in. Know that I AM causing your house to be reordered and redirecting your steps. And because your bed is being made, stay focused and up with Me, until the breakthrough is seen in your life. – Chuck Pierce • To have a breakthrough, you must consciously connect with the invisible forces that are everywhere around you, urging you to go beyond your old conditioning. – Deepak Chopra • To have a major breakthrough in policy, you have to be able to stop and think. – Newt Gingrich • To me the biggest breakthrough was when we did Terminator 2 that just opened the door for Jurassic and all of the others and that was as big as when we did motion control on Star Wars. But I don’t see another big thing coming. – Dennis Muren • To save the planet, we do not need miraculous technical breakthroughs, or vast amounts of capital. Essentially we need a radical change in our thinking and behaviour. – Ted Trainer • To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now ‘heros du cinema.’ This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. – A. J. Liebling • To transform breakdowns into breakthroughs is the whole function of a master. – Rajneesh • Today, nearly every competitive advantage of the past has been commoditized. Creativity is the one thing that can’t be outsourced. The one thing that can separate a company, team, or individual from the competitive set. Today, precision execution is merely the ante to play. Sustained differentiation can only come from breakthrough creativity. – Josh Linkner • True disruption means threatening your existing product line and your past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of businesses. – Peter Diamandis • Understand that the enemy always fights the hardest when he knows you are closest to your breakthrough. He’d leave you alone if he thought you were going to live in mediocrity. If you keep pressing on toward your promise, through faith and patience, you will get there. – Joel Osteen • Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont. – Burt Rutan • We all hope for breakthrough rebirth moments. – Dane Cook • We all hope for breakthrough rebirth moments. When you’re headed for a breakthrough moment, it’s kind of scary because you say, ‘If I break through then I have to make great change in my life.’ – Dane Cook • We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough. – Harold S. Kushner • We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad – amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash. – Steven Johnson • We don’t have time to wait for President Bush to change his mind. How many breakthroughs have been missed as a result of this policy? – Robert Lanza • We have a strong military deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. In countries like Syria, we need a diplomatic breakthrough to end the war. In Libya, the country must first of all be stabilized to stop IS. This means supporting the Libyan government, including in terms of security. We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past in that country. The situation is extremely dangerous and the next days could be decisive. – Paolo Gentiloni • We live at the threshold of a universal recognition that the human being is not mere matter, but a potent, energetic field of consciousness. Modalities of the past millennium are quickly giving way to breakthrough technologies wherein we heal ourselves at the level of all true healing, which is spirit. – Michael Beckwith • We live in an age that is driven by information. Technological breakthroughs… are changing the face of war and how we prepare for war. – William Perry • We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, “Hey, we’ll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they’re ready to spin out probably into startup companies.” – Bill Gates • Well technologically and so forth, it’s a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it’s very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content. – Cornel West • What appears to be a breakdown can often be a breakthrough…. IF you understand God’s grace – Carl Lentz • What drives me? Surrounding myself with amazing talent to craft a breakthrough product which can be used by millions of people to change the world. – Mike McCue • What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined. – Archibald MacLeish • What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions. – Camille Paglia • What makes it difficult for people trying to follow a dream is that the whole time you feel like you’re slamming your head against the wall. So it’s nice to make a breakthrough and not kind of lying there with your head bleeding. – Lewis Black • What we are now doing with the victory, and I agree with you if you condemn that and I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women — organized women — do is to fret about his shirt? – Ayaan Hirsi Ali • What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don’t just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. – Steven Johnson • When I made a breakthrough as an actor, people started to say, ‘Who’s that bloke with the funny name?’ They advised me to change it, saying it would never be put up in lights outside theaters because they couldn’t afford the electricity. But I would never contemplate changing it. It’s who I am. – Pete Postlethwaite • When I was 18, I went to a Baptist church with my girlfriend, and had a breakthrough when a pastor laid hands on me on an altar call. I wept that evening and realized how numb I had become with God and how He was calling to me for restoration. I received that blessing and went on to raising my three children in a Lutheran Church in the Bay Area as a member of Journey. – Jonathan Cain • When things get rough, a breakthrough is just on the other side of the pain. – Shirley MacLaine • When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology? – Theodore Zeldin • When you are tempted to give up, your breakthrough is probably just around the corner. – Joyce Meyer • When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it. But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along. – Francis Collins • When you realize that the real breakthroughs come from levels of higher consciousness, then you also realize that the achievement of maturity and wisdom is the most powerful generator of new beginnings possible. – Marianne Williamson • While that amendment failed, human cloning continues to advance and the breakthrough in this unethical and morally questionable science is around the corner. – Mike Pence • Within the soil of a discouraging season can often be the seeds of incredible blessing, miracles and breakthrough! – Brian Houston • Without risks, there can’t be breakthroughs. – Peter Diamandis • YOU are on the verge of complete breakthrough in every area of your life. Spiritually, Financially, and Relationally God has shown me that this is a season of victory for His people. As I went deeper in the Spirit the Lord revealed that before the breakthrough comes, certain things must be dealt with. Specifically, there must be a complete defeat of your enemies! – Paula White • You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three. – Sam Altman • You have to go through the darkness to truly know the light. This may sound like a cliche, but it’s true nonetheless. Often the greatest doubts occur just before a breakthrough. – Surya Das • You never do arrive at a destination. You have to work at it and take ownership of the process. What resonates at age 25 is likely to change by age 35 and 45. The process never ends. Realizing this has been a big breakthrough for me. – Robert S. Kaplan • You never know how close you are to a breakthrough. It may be right around the corner. Don’t quit! – Joyce Meyer • Your doubts are not the product of accurate thinking, but habitual thinking. Years ago you excepted flawed conclusions as correct, begin to live your life as if those warped ideas about your potential were true, and ceased the bold experiment in living that brought you many breakthrough behaviors as a child. – Price Pritchett

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[avva-rm]

Jean Seberg Talks Breathless–Back in 1968

Harry Clein May 28, 2010 8:30 am

Back in 1968, veteran Hollywood publicist Harry Clein recalls, he visited the set of big-budget musical Paint Your Wagon to interview young actress Jean Seberg (star of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which is being reissued). A transcript follows, including a visit from her co-stars, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood (with whom Seberg denied having an affair).

As the Summer of Protest rocked the Chicago Democratic Convention and feminists stormed the Miss America Pageant, I was in Baker, Oregon reporting on the big-budget musical Paint Your Wagon as a leg man for Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber. Like Jane Fonda, Seberg was on J. Edgar Hoover’s subversives list, due to her involvement with the Black Panthers. After I left Haber in the spring of 1969, Haber ran a destructive blind item that ruined Seberg’s life: The blond and beautiful “Miss A,” she wrote, was pregnant by “a prominent Black Panther.” At the funeral for her stillborn daughter, Seberg displayed the white baby in a glass coffin; her husband Romain Gary claimed the baby as his. After that, the fragile actress repeatedly tried to commit suicide, often on the anniversary of the baby’s birth. In 1979, at age 40, she was found dead of a prescription overdose in the back seat of her car in Paris, holding a suicide note.

But that dusty August day back in 1968, I was just a callow young man infatuated with the beautiful, sexy and worldly star of Breathless, who although she was my age, had already played opposite Belmondo, Beatty and Connery. Munching two green apples for lunch, Jean, in blue jeans and a red shirt, sat on the stairs to her trailer and harmonized on “My Funny Valentine” with a couple of hippie extras strumming a guitar and rubbing a washboard.

Jean Seberg: They come over for an occasional shower.  I’d never deny that to any hippie.  I do see a healthy movement among the scruffy young in the sense it is the first generation whose values aren’t material. But the whole drug scene is a drag.  It’s a cop out.  I’d rather see a friend run down by a car than on drugs like heroin or speed.”

Harry Clein: Breathless put you at the center of the French New Wave.  Were you surprised?

JS: I was out of work and needed the money.  The producer asked Columbia, which then owned my old Preminger contract, if I was available.  He gave Columbia a choice of $12,000 or 50% of the world profits.  With great foresight, Columbia took the $12,000. It was shot for $76,000 in five weeks.  Most of the time we worked half days.  We’d break and sit around in cafes.  One day the producer saw us, it was his last card, and he got into a fistfight with Godard because we weren’t working.

HC: Why did the French fall in love with you?  

JS: I know they loved the short hair.  It was very daring then because of the concentration camp memories.  Maybe they were happy because I married a French man [Romain Gary]. I’m just happy people think of me at all.  I’m just happy to get jobs.

HC: What was it like making Saint Joan after winning the big talent contest?

JS: I didn’t do it.  Some pimply-faced kid from Iowa did it.

HC: Are you still in touch with Otto Preminger, who discovered you?

JS: We nod across crowded commissaries.

HC: You also made Bonjour Tristesse with him. Was that a better experience?

JS: I was in it, but I was all tied up with that dashing young playboy [Francois Moreuil] who dashed away. I would have broken your heart. I was a pathetic soul.  Everyone disapproved.  Which naturally pushed me on. He was a good friend when I didn’t have good friends.  He’s a very nice man, and when we were married, he was a very nice boy.  I was a crazy girl. It was really a baby marriage, not even a childhood marriage. He did a foolish thing.  He wanted to meet Romain Gary, the French Consul General in Los Angeles.  We made a call on him with the beautiful eyes, who became the father of my son (Diego).

Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood came over as junket reporters from Oakland and Charlotte trailed after them. Eastwood’s vocabulary to the press in those days consisted of pleasant hellos, yeahs and nos, and there was absolutely no indication he would become a two-time Oscar-winning director. Marvin and Eastwood had flown down the night before to Los Angeles for a party honoring Toshiro Mifune who had made Hell in the Pacific with Marvin.

Lee Marvin: You and Claudia Cardinale are Mifune’s favorite actresses!

JS: Toshiro Mifune likes me!  If he comes up, I’ll bake him a Japanese pie. What was I doing here in Baker?  I wish I had gone with you.

LM (playfully):  “No.  You couldn’t have.  I paid for the plane.

JS (haughtily):  That proves you’re not a star.

LM: I don’t have to take that from a runway starlet.

My Baker interview ended when the six actresses who played French whores made a sensational helicopter landing on the set.  The hormone-stoked male crew and cast cheered as the voluptuous women stepped out onto the Oregon dust in their high boots and their lavender, orange and yellow micro-dresses.  

JS: It looks like Raquel Welch hitting Viet Nam!

My interview continued on Election Day, November 5, 1968 at Jean’s rented pink California colonial house on Coldwater Canyon. By the backyard pool, Jean was barefoot, wearing a floppy gray hat, jeans and a red gingham shirt tied at the waist. But she was not as fancy-free as she had been on set.  A darker more reflective mood had set in.

JS: Bobby Kennedy is the guy I’ll be thinking about most today. I found him very candid and, surprisingly, he didn’t think he had a hope in hell of getting the nomination in Chicago because of the Johnson-Humphrey machine. Politically, as they say on television, there’s a breakdown in communications between the electorate and the candidates. But this is still the country where people live the best, despite the gaping flaws.  I’ve friends who live all over.  But after they leave America, they realize it.  They come back.

HC: Didn’t you go to a White House dinner when John Kennedy was president?

JS: Kennedy was a pragmatist.  We can only speculate, but I think he would have seen earlier that there would be no military conclusion to the war.  That would have saved the maimed and killed on both sides.  My God, on television each night the body counts are like racking up scores for either side.

HC: Despite the problems on Paint Your Wagon, how do you feel about it?

JS: I’ve finished all my work.  Lee and Clint took me out to lunch the other day. I was sobbing.  It was kind of like leaving summer camp. I was a basket case.  I had freedom by the end of the picture.  Lee is hard to work with.  He plays broad, but it doesn’t look that way on the screen.  Working with Lee is like being in the Army for four years.  He enriches your vocabulary so much. It’s turned into such a big picture.  When the weather was bad in Oregon, there was the rumor Paramount was negotiating to buy God.

HC: Any other films on the horizon?

JS: I’ve a second commitment to Paramount.  Jim Brown has asked me to do Lions Three, Christians Nothing (a love story about a black NFL quarterback and a white actress).   But I’ve got to have a big powwow with him about it.  It could say good things, but it’s a firecracker. There are strong truths in it that I’d hate to see sensationalized. I had a talk with Sammy Davis.  We agreed it would be ten years before the right story of an interracial romance could be told as it is.  The point being that when people are in love they are color-blind.  But we’re so hung up on the black-white sexual obsession.

HC: Is Romain coming to Los Angeles while you’re here?

JS: Romain’s film Birds in Peru opens soon in New York.  It’s breaking records in Paris.  I hope it does well here. It’s about non-compassionate love. It’s a ritualistic dance of fate of a frigid woman who seeks a man who will be the key to awakening her.  She has periodic crises of nymphomania.  She has a pact with her husband that if her nymphomania happens again, to kill her.  It may be shocking to some people. Romain’s work is very impressive. I was terrified working with him. I wanted him to do it with someone else. But he turned out to be more visual than I expected. He is a very sensitive director. I hope to work with him again.  

HC: What is the state of your marriage?

JS: We reached an ideal with what marriage should be.  But the pressures of our careers kept us from it.  We remain the closest of friends.  Loving friends. The three month period he was in Majorca and I was in Baker was a trial separation. He’s basically a loner. We can accept our relationship on every level but the marriage level. The marriage was over when I spoke to you in Baker…The French have a nice way of putting things.  Whenever a man presents his woman, he refers to her as ma femme.  It’s the same word for both mistress and wife. The French also say ‘never apologize, never explain.’ The French say an awful lot of dumb things…The superb thing about Romain was that he created this Frankenstein.  He pushed me to develop my own tastes. This inevitably created conflict. I have this character flaw.  I’m a ship without a rudder if there’s not a man there.  It’s my nature to mold myself around a man.  

HC: Have you ever thought of moving to Los Angeles?

JS: Only when I am very tired like right now, I say ‘why go, why not stay?’  This town… Los Angeles, Hollywood… I find beautiful.  I’m overawed by the variety of plants and flowers.  But I find the total preoccupation with the industry to be a drag. Since my son is raised as a European, I’ll spend time there.  I made a oath to Romain that Diego would be raised in Europe. I feel as if I’m a cork in the middle of the Atlantic.  When I come back here, I realize I’m so American.  To the French, I am a French actress.  But my roots are here in America.  Even if I wanted to think they aren’t, they are very much so. Do you know the old story about the chameleon?  Put the chameleon on green, he turns green; put him on black, he turns black; put him on red and he turns red.  Place the chameleon on plaid, and he explodes.

HC: What’s next?

JS: This is a paid advertisement.  Any man who sends me flowers every day can have me.  No diamonds, no jets, no Bentleys.  Also I am hooked on good manners.  I don’t mean opening car door good manners, I mean opening of hearts good manners. But I’ve learned a little on the way. I’m a lot less selfish, more giving. And if he’s someone who wants children, I’m now prepared to have piles of them. Maybe it’s a biological thing.  Maybe the career just means less at a time when it should mean more. That, too, is a paid advertisement.

The next time – and unfortunately last time – I saw Jean Seberg I took her a single white rose.

#Jean Seberg #Breathless #Paint Your Wagon #Harry Clein #Actress #Interview #1968 #IndieWire

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If we’re truly honest with ourselves, we would recognize news ultimately as a form of gossip. Who’s having business trouble? Which actress embarrassed herself? What do the elite think about fashion? Some of it is valuable, but most of it is merely entertainment for us.

As such, salacious accusations of misdeeds get “clicks”. Beyond generating revenue and wreaking havoc in the lives of the accused, though, accusations can also provide a propaganda service to political, personal, or ideological goals, which is something we should keep in mind.

In The Rape of the Mind, Joost Meerloo, a psychologist and survivor of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, warns us of the dangers of accusations and trials primarily done for propaganda purposes.

Indeed, any trial can be used as a weapon of intimidation; it can, in a subtle way, intimidate jurors, the witnesses, the entire public. In [totalitarian countries], some higher courts exist only to carry out this function of intimidation; their purpose is to prove to their own citizens and to the world at large that there is a punishing and threatening force controlling the government and that this force can use the judiciary for its own purpose.

An apparently objective official investigation may become a weapon of political control simply through the suggestions that inevitably accompany it. The man who is under investigation is almost automatically stigmatized and blamed because our suspicions are thrust on him.

He continues:

Any trial can be either an act of power or an act of truth. An apparently objective examination may become a weapon of control simply by the action of the suggestions that inevitably accompany it…

…The power to investigate may become the power to destroy…

One of the great traditions of America and Western Civilization is the idea that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, with mass media, an accusation, investigation, or trial can quickly become a very public act. That is why many people will note the danger of “trying someone in the court of public opinion”. The public is not privy to all of the details of the accusation or investigation, but through mass media it can become intimately involved in the case, coming to see itself as a jury of the masses.

Radio and television have enhanced the hypnotizing power of sounds, images, and words … Our technical means of communication make of the people one huge participating mass. Even when I am alone with my radio, I am technically united with the huge mass of other listeners. I see them in my mind, I unconsciously identify with them, and while I am listening I am one with them … It is partly for this reason that radio and television tend to take away active affectionate relationships between men and to destroy the capacity for personal thought, evaluation, and reflection.

Such a mass jury is obviously not a healthy thing, nor would it be possible without the tools of mass communication. Such is Meerloo’s warning.

We may call mental blackmail the growing tendency to overstep human reserve and dignity. It is the tendency to misuse the intimate knowledge of what is going on in the crevices of the soul, to injure and embarrass one’s fellow man. Mental blackmail starts wherever the presumption of guilt takes the place of the presumption of innocence. The hunting up of dirt and sensation in order to embarrass a victim we see very often carried on by the yellow press. It is not only playing up indecency, but at the same time it undermines human judgment and opinion. And by its sensationalism it precludes and prejudices justice in the courts.

And there, again, is the great danger. Whether we care to admit it or not, mass media (especially social media) is a powerful tool for propagandists and various political or ideological forces. The news is aimed not at our intellect, but at our emotions. And because the news media have limited resources, what they do report upon and how they report is a reflection of their values and beliefs.

All of these insights are really nothing new, but they are a good reminder. When men are accused of misdeeds, be careful to join the mass jury too quickly. Sit back, watch, listen to both sides, and reflect before coming to an opinion about a person or group. You may even want to refrain from ever casting judgment when the details and evidence are wanting.

Ultimately, if we want to maintain our traditions, in this case the tradition of innocence until guilt is proven, then we as individuals must be in the habit of practicing those traditions.

This post Propaganda: The Accusation is More Important than the Verdict was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Devin Foley.

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The post Propaganda: The Accusation is More Important than the Verdict appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

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Hyperallergic: Updating Ukiyo-Prints and Medieval Art with Allusions to Fast Food and US Politics

Masami Teraoka, “Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven” (2001) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

HONOLULU — Masami Teraoka was just seven years old growing up in Japan when he saw a strange sight on the horizon: two suns, one from the east and the other from the west. It was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.

Now 81, Teraoka has become a contemporary artist known for creating strange, absurd sights of his own — merging traditional fine art styles and techniques with modern themes. His works can be found in over 50 public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC.

Masami Teraoka, “McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan/Chochin-me” (1982)

Teraoka’s first major series after coming to the US from Japan in 1961, McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan and 31 Flavors Invading Japan, examined the expansion of American consumerism culture worldwide with Ukiyo-e woodblock print images of Japanese geisha tripping over hamburgers and devouring ice cream. In the 1980s, he broached the AIDS crisis in a series of paintings featuring frustrated samurai and geisha wrestling with condom wrappers, literally blue in the face. It was Teraoka’s goal to shed light on AIDS at a time when doctors and politicians were covering up or avoiding conversations about the disease in the public.

Recently, Teraoka shifted his art style to create The Cloisters, triptych altarpieces in the style of religious Renaissance and medieval art, confronting topics such as Monica Lewinsky and the Clinton impeachment, clergy sex abuse scandals, artistic freedom in Russia, and the threat of nuclear war. While his past works may have evoked the likes of Utamaro and Hokusai, Teraoka’s new art draws from Brueghel and Bosch: giant, graphic murals featuring contorted figures including Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, and the geisha Momotaro, in passionate, disturbing scenes.

At times, Teraoka seems like he’s hitting you over the head with the obvious associations in his work. But his subjects are so rampant in the collective public eye —from news headlines sensationalizing political sex scandals to giant billboards advertising fast food — that a loud approach seems fitting.

In March, Teraoka teamed up with Pussy Riot choreographer Viktoria Naraxsa and costume designer Masha Kechaeva for an experimental performance of Shakespeare’s Tempest at the Honolulu Museum of Art School. Currently, Koa Gallery in Honolulu is presenting a retrospective of Teraoka’s career as well as new work by the artist.

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Installation view of Masami Teraoka at Koa Gallery, Honolulu

James Charisma: Where were you in Japan when you saw the atomic bombs being dropped?

Masami Teraoka: I grew up in Onomichi City, which is in Hiroshima Prefecture. But my sister and I were evacuated to the next town because Onomichi was a middle-sized city and thought to be targeted by air raids. It wasn’t because I think it was too close to an American POW camp. We would see them while going to school and we would say, these people are so tall! And blue eyes.

All the kids liked the MPs because they were friendly, they gave us chewing gum and chocolate. My dad used to say that we are all humans. Wars are only between governments; we don’t really have to be fighting each other. That was his philosophy, so I think he made it comfortable for the Americans to visit. My mom used to cook potato chips. When she gave some to the Americans and they ate them, we couldn’t believe it. When I came here, I learned everybody eats potato chips.

JC: You seem fascinated by junk food. You have an entire series dedicated to ice cream and cheeseburgers. What inspired that?

Masami Teraoka, “The Two Suns Series/Cherry Blossoms and Koko Head” (2017)

MT: After I came to America in 1961, I met this girl who asked if I heard of hamburgers and I said no, so she cooked some for me. It was delicious. So when everyone was talking about McDonald’s, I tried their burgers but was disappointed because they were tasteless. Later, I had gone to Vancouver and saw so many [Golden] Arches. I thought, oh no, they’re invading Canada too? And Japan. Eventually I knew they were going to invade all over the globe but I didn’t want America to bring such a lousy hamburger worldwide.

This was during the flower child generation where everyone was recognizing their own background. So I thought if I was going to paint, why not paint in the format of my cultural identity? So that’s what I chose: ukiyo-e woodblock print style. My series, McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan and 31 Flavors Invading Japan, was because I knew that American capitalism is so invasive all over the world, I didn’t want hamburgers to wipe out ethnic cuisine or Disneyland to be all different levels of culture. Another series is New Views of Mount Fuji Series/La Brea Tar Pits, which is about what a businessman might bring back from America to sell in Japan: La Brea Tar Pit as Disneyland.

Masami Teraoka, installation view of the artist’s Ukiyo-e print collection (2017)

JC: Your work has always tackled issues of the various eras, from AIDS in the 1980s to the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Is response to your work usually positive or is there ever backlash?

MT: I would say that 95 percent is positive, only a few people have actually complained to me. It’s all based on fact, so not even the Catholic Church can accuse the work of being incorrect. And the attitude I have is that I’m not interested in making something easy just to please my vision. I’m interested in what’s going on regarding individual liberties and freedom of creative expression. I’m trying to express anything related to human rights.

One of my triptychs featured Monica Lewinsky and the Bill Clinton impeachment trial. I depicted one of the lead investigators in the mural — Kenneth Starr — and I actually had a chance to meet him at an ACLU event. I told him I painted him in the piece and he said he was interested in seeing it. So I showed him a folded, four-page brochure of the composition while he was standing there with his wife. He was amused. He used the word “extraordinary” and I had to ask my friends what that meant because my English wasn’t that good. I was so happy to hear that because if he didn’t like my painting, he could’ve told the security guard to arrest me and I could still be in prison.

Masami Teraoka, “Angels and Transgressors” (2017), installation View

JC: How did you connect with Pussy Riot?

MT: My primary gallery director in San Francisco, Catherine Clark, gave my Ascending Chaos book to the manager of Pussy Riot at a performance. I was interested in their group and where they were coming from because I think we share thoughts about human rights, gay rights, same sex marriage… I later contacted Viktoria [Naraxsa] and asked if she’d be interested in coming to Hawaii because I was working on a Pussy Riot-themed exhibition. She said yes, when? This was maybe three years ago when that dialogue started. It took a long time to get to the March performance.

JC: Sexuality plays a huge role in your art. How does it influence you?

MT: Human sexuality inspires me. When you start going out with a new partner, you let go of preconceived ideas and attitudes to get to know that person. If you don’t fall in love and get to know someone on a sexual level, you miss this opportunity to open your mind to different individuals and cultures and ethnicities. It’s a window for learning.

JC: What are you learning about and focusing on now, in your latest works?

MT: One is North Korea. The way I see, their leader is a crazy, spoiled boy. But he can still actually wipe out the Earth. And that means all our education about humanity and everything won’t have any relevant meaning. Two suns … it’s nonsense. With an imminent nuclear threat, nothing makes any sense. Everything becomes nonsense.

Masami Teraoka continues at Koa Gallery (4303 Diamond Head Road Honolulu) through November 9. 

The post Updating Ukiyo-Prints and Medieval Art with Allusions to Fast Food and US Politics appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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30 Lessons I've Learned About Life (So Far):

WARNING: IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED OR OVERLY SENSITIVE FOR NO REASON,

DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.

I pretty much defied every odd against me and every stereotype

that exists about young men like me. Even though I am still

young and have much more to experience, here's what I've

learned and come to the conclusion about life (so far):

1) The older you get, the more you realize that being happy is more important than being right all the time. All those petty arguments and debates really don't mean anything, especially when you're married. Love is more important.

2) No one ever gets away with anything in life. You do reap what you sew. I learned that the hard way, and I've witnessed it happen to others.

3) Having children definitely calms your wild streak, especially if you have a little girl (God help me).

4) Best friends really do become strangers. Many of you I haven't seen in years & it does feel like its the first time meeting again, now that some of us found each other on facebook (and some of us made peace with each other). I wish you all nothing but success.

5) All the crap that use to matter in high school and college, doesn't even matter anymore. All that stuff about air jordans, dating the girls with the biggest booty, going to the "party of the year", hearing the latest rap songs, having the newest "thing" that's out, proving how "gangsta" or tough you are, etc., all of that was just a complete waste and it means nothing. Now, my main concern is taking care of my wife & kids, make sure my bills are paid, make sure there's enough groceries in the house, clock in on time at work, make sure I have gas money for the car, stay out of trouble, and staring at my stomach as it expands from too much beer and bbq. Life really changes, doesn't it?

6) No one owes you anything. You owe yourself. If you take anything handed to you, be careful who its from. At some point, if you want to be successful and not be mediocre your whole life, your gonna have to compromise on the way you speak, the way you dress, change your attitude, grow the hell up, and give nothing but 100% blood, sweat and tears.......to the one that appreciates your work because not everyone will appreciate you. Some take advantage. Others, really do mean well, but they either don't have the resources to get you to the next level or they are holding you back. Work hard, but, WORK SMART.

7) Turning away great things doesn't make you an honorable rebel or a social martyr. It makes you nieve and stupid.

8) Hip Hop/Rap music will never be the same again. Many blame the Southern Untied States. Many blame corporations. Many blame the media. Many blame white people. Many blame black people. Many blame it on violence, sex & drugs. The reality is: it has been dying a slow and hemorrhaging death since the early 2000's. Like many of you who grew up with the culture, I didn't wanna believe it myself, but the fact of the matter is, it will never be the same again. This next generation will never understand the meaning of the 5 elements or what it was like hearing songs like "it ain't hard to tell" or "planet rock" or "nuthin' but a g thang" or "the bridge is over" for the first time or how sad we all felt when Biggie Smalls & Tupac died. These memories I keep with me & reflect on the good times in my childhood. The positive of all this is at least our generation can say we were here when real hip hop meant something.

9) Technology has destroyed the human experience. As great and as convenient it is, it is draining us of our humanity. Many of us have become just as hardened and lifeless as a uncharged iPad. As great as advancements are, I am not looking forward to how it will consume our very beings within the next 15-30 years.

10) Being educated is fine, but if you have no intelligence behind it, then it means nothing. Yea, I graduated, but my thinking and my creativity were severely stifled since all the teachers and administrators at Hempstead High School only cared about passing a state exam just to graduate. That is the wrong kind of pressure to even put on a young person. The entire american education system is a nightmare. There is no "real education" that goes on there. It has become a breeding ground for psychological and social disorder.

11) Marijuana didn't (almost) ruin me. Popping pills and drinking hard liquor did. Doesn't mean I'll smoke again. Just means, now that I'm sober and have more clarity, I do see what the problem was and what wasn't the problem. I hurt me. The only thing I'm guilty of is allowing those chemicals and the wrong crowd to be a part of it. Regardless, I'm getting my mind back. I'm better than I was 10 years ago.

12) Having a positive attitude really does make a difference, even when everything around you tries to pull you down in a pit of negativity. Another lesson I learned the hard way.

13) After many relationships, an exhausting amount of research and trial & error life experiences, I have realized that every so-called "-ism" and social rule in life, is all complete bullsh-t!

14) Racism is still alive and well throughout the world. It is to the point now, that its not even a lifestyle here in the United States. Now, its a sickness. There is a cure for that: GET OVER IT! You don't like different races for whatever retarded reason, go swallow a can of paint thinner & light your mouth on fire!

15) Be careful who you allow into your circle. Not everyone in the world is your friend. You're murderers come with smiles. Another lesson I learned the hard way.

16) I use to think Superman was invincible. Then, he got Lois Lane pregnant. 'Nuff said.

17) Be careful how you treat others. One hand really does wash the other.

18) I have no problem with spirituality. I believe in God. I go to church, not because "my pastor" tells me I'm obligated to go. I go for me. I understand why a Christian is a Christian. I understand why a Muslim is a Muslim. I understand why a Jew is a Jew. I understand why an Atheist is an Atheist. I understand why a Buddhist is a Buddhist. I understand why you believe or don't believe. I respect. However, one thing I cannot get or understand is why is a satanist a satanist. So, you mean to tell me you want to worship a demonic god that wants to kill you? Ummm, yea. Can't co-sign that. You may not agree, but it is what it is.

19) With every generation, hoodrats keep getting worse and worse. God help us all.

20) Now that I'm older, I am sorry for the wild and bad things that I did as a kid...but, I regret nothing. I learned from it.

21) Getting your driver's license is one of the most overrated life experiences ever. Yay me! I got a freakin' ID and can drive anything that moves. Yeah, well no one warned me about how expensive car insurance is or about road rage or how to properly buy a car with out getting ripped of. THANKS FOR THE FAIR WARNING, JERKS!

22) I really wish I could go back and do 21 all over again. I really messed that age up. Oh well, you live and you learn. Moving on.

23) The internet use to be the greatest form of information. Now, its just another form of entertainment that makes stupid people famous.

24) Anything is possible. Whether its sensationalized, rumor, or fact, in between the lines you will find a slim margin of truth. Never rule out anything. If there's one thing this world & this country has taught me is that, given enough power, money, passion or the right circumstance, anyone is capable of anything.

25) The U.S. government really is full of crap! I can't understand some of you who still insist on going thru life either as a conservative republican or a liberal democrat. They both have the same agenda & both of them DO NOT care about you, no matter who you vote for. WAKE UP!

26) This is for the single men: Being a simp is not how you get females to like you. If you go around, putting the wrong type of female on a pedestal, get your feelings and manhood destroyed then wonder why you're so stressed and gotta pay thousands of dollars in child support, then far as I'm concerned, you deserve what you allow. Another lesson in life I've witnessed happen to young men who didn't know any better.

27) Bacon is the greatest comfort food ever!

28) Wearing a suit and a smile goes a lot further that sagging jeans, over-sized shirt, gold fronts, and a mean mug. Another lesson I learned the hard way.

29) Ghettos are the same no matter where you go. Doesn't matter if its the projects, the barrio, the trailer park, we all share the same struggle.

30) Life is too short to be bitter, unforgiving and angry all the time. Enjoy your time here on Earth, because no one gets out alive.

                            -Mikey Valdez

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