#villains who are sympathetic and have understandable convictions rooted in their past

[insinirate]

Yeah no tbatf only gets worse and none of it is fun and it’s one of those things that’s like. This isn’t even fun to make fun of it’s just…. Sad

just finished reading it and boy was it something

[darkpoisonouslove]

“The 6th Extinction” Book Review

Title: The 6th Extinction

Author: James Rollins

Summary: A remote military research station broadcasts a frantic distress call that ends with a chilling message: Kill us all. When soldiers arrive to investigate, they discover everyone in the lab is dead—not just the scientists, but every living thing for fifty square miles is annihilated: every animal, plant, and insect, even bacteria. The land is completely sterile—and the blight is spreading.

To prevent the inevitable, Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma must decipher a threat that rises out of the distant past, a time when Antarctica was green and Earth’s life balanced on a knife edge. Following clues from an ancient map rescued from the lost Library of Alexandria, Sigma will make a shocking discovery involving a prehistoric continent, and a new form of death buried under miles of ice.

From millennia-old secrets out of the frozen past to mysteries buried deep in the darkest jungles of today, Sigma will face its greatest challenge yet: stopping the coming extinction of mankind.

But is it already too late?

I read this a while back and I’ve wanted to write a review ever since. Here are my thoughts:

The book is obviously plot-driven and that’s working splendidly for it because the plot is intricate, intriguing and rich in action. It takes place on three different continents and begins as a few different threads that come together to form a solid story. It’s fast-paced and action-packed, barely leaving you room to breathe and certainly making it difficult to put the book down. The plot revolves around topics that are extremely relevant in our rapidly developing society and poses important questions about our future as a species.

While the characters are secondary to the plot, I found all of the main ones to be extremely likable. They make it easy and enjoyable to follow their journey and root for them as all of them exhibit strength of character and conviction in their beliefs. They are all intelligent, compassionate and competent specialists who are devoted to their mission and give it their all. The only complaint I have here is that there are a bunch of characters introduced all at once in the beginning of the book and that made them hard to distinguish at first but that’s probably due to the fact that that I’m unfamiliar with the characters from the Sigma series.

The main antagonist is well built. His actions are driven by his philosophy and he’s sympathetic and understandable although very frightening with his knowledge, competence and most importantly the scheme he’s concocted. In my opinion he’s a villain you love to hate but can still empathize with and understand where he’s coming from.

The book is well-written and it’s obvious how much effort and research was put into it. It was a thrilling, breath-stealing ride that gave me a lot to think about and engaged my mind in a way that no book had recently. I’d give it 12/10 if I had to rate it.

[gibsongirlselections]

How John Dos Passos Left the Left

The reputations of the writers who transformed literature during the Jazz Age, the so-called “Lost Generation,” have undergone some interesting up and downs. Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis have largely disappeared from the canon. Dreiser’s sludge-like prose doomed him among readers over the last half century, while Lewis, who achieved fame in the ‘20s, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, has seen his reputation sag. None of his indictments of middle-class America have found an audience today. Good luck trying to get a class of college sophomores to read Main Street. His last real success, It Can’t Happen Here (1937), had a brief revival with the election of Donald Trump. But no one reads Babbitt or Elmer Gantry anymore.

Hemingway’s name remains popular, though it is doubtful whether any of his novels are read today, other than The Old Man and the Sea, which is popular, I understand, in seventh- and eighth-grade language arts courses (precisely where it belongs with its faux-biblical prose). During the virus, I picked up The Sun Also Rises, which I’d first read in college and thought a fresh and wonderful book. Now it seemed shallow. Even the dialogue, which I thought so smart, sounded old hat. Lady Brett came off as an adolescent’s dream of what sex could be like with an ever-willing woman. If Hemingway is read today, it’s not for his novels but his short stories, which, at their best in “Hills Like White Elephants” and “Big Two Hearted River,” remain sharp, hard-edged gems.

Scott Fitzgerald faired best of the ‘20s generation. The Great Gatsby, the most popular of his novels, may be The Great American Novel of the 20th century. It captures young readers of every generation.

But what of my personal favorite as a young man, John Dos Passos? Rereading him amid this terrible virus, I believe he holds up best.

During the 1930s, Dos Passos was as popular as any writer of serious fiction in America. He had made his breakthrough after World War I during which he served in the ambulance corps. Two of his novels, Three Solders (1921) and Manhattan Transfer (1925), “changed the whole tone of opinion about the war,” as H.L. Mencken put it. They reflected the attitude, also popular in England at the time, that the war was a worthless conflict imposed by heartless leaders that had wiped out a generation of young men. But unlike Hemingway, Fitzgerald did not romanticize Europe and flee to Paris. In his view, America was all about the rejection of Europe.

Like Lewis and Hemingway, Fitzgerald was disgusted by the materialism and money grubbing of the America of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He supported various left-wing and radical causes and became particularly incensed over the treatment of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two anarchists accused of murdering a guard during a Braintree, Massachusetts, payroll robbery. His epitaph on the case summed up what it meant to radicals and revolutionaries of his generation: “All right we are two nations.”

Following Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos moved deeper into radicalism. He denounced Franklin Roosevelt and voted for the Communist candidate, William Foster, in the 1932 presidential election. He dismissed the New Deal for trying to save a corrupt capitalist system. The depression pushed him further to the left. For a time in the 1930s, he was associated with the communist journal New Masses, though he never joined the Communist Party and wasn’t even much of a fellow traveler. In truth, Dos Passos was an idiosyncratic man of the left.

Out of his anger, Dos Passos produced his greatest and most original work, the trilogy U.S.A., which appeared between 1930 and 1936. U.S.A. is a big sprawling book of around 1,200 pages and his most original and influential work. Building on some of the anti-capitalist themes he first outlined in Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos set out to paint a broad picture of America in turmoil. He used techniques borrowed from European modernists like James Joyce in a way no American author ever had before to create a new reality. He sprinkled his text with brief biographies of famous and not so famous people: Rudolph Valentino, Thorstein Veblen, Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (a bête noire of his), and Henry Ford, among others. In the “Camera Eye” sections, he created news items from a pastiche of newspaper headlines and stories. The effect was to give the novel an immediacy and sense of dealing with the real world. The technique has been copied since, but no one has done it as well.

U.S.A. was a huge success and appeared just as Dos Passos’ career took a dramatic turn. In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Dos Passos, like many of his fellow leftist contemporaries, most notably Ernest Hemingway, was drawn into the conflict. He went to Spain to work on a documentary film, “Spanish Earth,” designed to promote the cause of the Republican forces. Disillusion soon set in. One of his friends, José Robles Pazos, was caught up in the fighting among the various leftist factions and murdered by the communist secret police.

Like his contemporary George Orwell, Spain inaugurated Dos Passos’s distrust of communism and its fellow travelers and apologists. His consequent drift to the right was rooted in one of the abiding themes of his career—a deep distrust of power, especially power in the hands of an elite. Fear of unregulated capitalism and fascism now gave way to a conviction that the greatest threat to democracy was communist power. World War II furthered these concerns, with Dos Passos increasingly troubled by the power exercised by FDR during the war.

Dos Passos continued writing fiction and in 1962 published Mid-Century, a follow-up to U.S.A., only now the villains were on the left—especially labor leaders like John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther. Mid-Century lacked the creativity of his trilogy. Instead of the “Camera Eye” and other unusual techniques that seemed fresh in the 1930s, Mid-Century featured long documentary sections interspersed among the text. The book was a success, but the critics accused him of turning his back on his past. Dwight Macdonald, a former admirer and firm man of the left, wrote that Dos Passos had become “a simple Republican, scared to death of Russia and Communism.”

The man who once had written for the New Masses now became a contributor to Bill Buckley’s National Review. He came to view the American experiment through different eyes, even writing a highly sympathetic history of the Founding Fathers. In 1964, Dos Passos supported Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president. That shocked many of his admirers but was a natural outcome of his drift to the right that had begun in Spain. Both men feared communism and unrestrained power. In the 1920s, that power was in the hands of big business; now it was found in big government and what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex.”

Maybe Dos Passos’ journey wasn’t that strange after all.

John P. Rossi is professor emeritus of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

The post How John Dos Passos Left the Left appeared first on The American Conservative.

[yogaadvise]

How to Truly Be Happy for Others When They Get What You Want

There is a long custom of Western intellectuals telling us we should not be envious. Socrates, as an example, claimed, 'Envy is the ulcer of the heart.' Theodore Roosevelt is often connected with the assertion that 'comparison is the thief of delight.' Also The Holy bible cautions against wanting our next-door neighbors' ownerships. If approach is proof, there is a deeply-rooted conviction that envy and also envy irrevocably change us, and those of us that experience it are joyless sinners afflicted with invisible sores.

Everywhere we look, jealousy is a villain, yet our very own envious sensations persist. Socrates, it ends up, can't save us from ourselves. For every one of our collective knowledge, we have not removed jealousy. Instead, we have actually covered it in layer of embarassment. Therapists Merle Fossum, A.C.S.W., as well as Marilyn Manson, Ph.D., who study the characteristics of shame in their book Facing Shame: Families in Recovery, outlined the concept that shame is 'an inner feeling of being completely lessened or inadequate as a person. It is the self evaluating the self ... A pervasive sense of embarassment is the continuous facility that a person is fundamentally bad, insufficient, faulty, unworthy, or not fully valid as a human.' Jealousy and envy typically aren't the offenders that decrease our self-respect, instead, it's the follow-up belief that we are inherently flawed that does the damage. This is what we require to scrutinize.

In Buddhist philosophy, we stumble upon The Brahma Viharas, a training that Iays out the 4 virtues-loving-kindness (' metta'), compassion (' karuna'), considerate pleasure (' mudita'), and also equanimity (' upekkha')- to be cultivated by a practitioner. Much of us that have basic expertise of Buddhist mentors could have come across empathy as well as loving-kindness, but we may not have heard of the virtue called mudita, or supportive pleasure. It is, basically, the antidote to envy.

Many Buddhists concur that understanding delight, the state of sharing in the joy and also joy of one more, is one of the most hard virtues to cultivate. Just as compassion is a state of vulnerability (sharing in the discomfort of one more without pity or judgment), supportive joy promotes the softening of the heart-it is a require us to cooperate the happiness as well as joy of an additional without judgment. It is a call for us to stand in the joy of others without qualifiers.

In a collection of essays published by the San Francisco Zen facility called Teachings from Meditation in Recuperation: The Four Brahma Viharas, the writer sets out why supportive happiness is such a challenge. 'It appears instead challenging to in fact feel non-attached joy for the purpose of others. This is not so unusual really. If you stand in one location and transform 350 levels, it will certainly come to be promptly apparent that you are the facility of the globe. Thinking otherwise as well as, much more hard, experiencing the globe otherwise really takes a great deal of work and creative imagination, and also certainly, the intention to do so to begin with.' The idea that mudita is a state that does not come normally to us shows that those people who fall victim to envy typically aren't covered in heart lesions as Socrates theorizes. No, we're merely people making every effort in every moment.

Buddhist reflection educator, Sharon Salzberg, provides us methods to plant thoughtful pleasure. In an O Magazine post she informs the story of a pal who, was really feeling envious towards a woman who she felt 'had all of it.' Salzberg creates, 'Her envy harmed so a lot that she chose to have a go at a technique of concern to get to thoughtful happiness. She remembered the difficulties in this various other woman's life: Her brother was an alcoholic, her daddy had Alzheimer's, and she was worried about money. Seeing the larger picture not only enabled my good friend to view the other woman in a new means, it enabled her to value the joy in her own life. As her viewpoint opened, she released old assumptions regarding exactly how denied she was. Now this female no more appeared so unusual, and my friend could really feel a burgeoning and genuine link to her. The bindings of envy loosened, and she really felt happiness for herself and happiness that the various other lady had good ideas in her life. As opposed to seeing somebody else's happiness as a threat to her own, it actually became her very own.' When we could take a go back and realize that one individual's happiness doesn't need to diminish our very own, we can organically move beyond our sensations of envy.'

Wisdom practices and spiritual teachers aren't the only individuals who could assist us find brand-new methods to engage with our very own hoping. As a matter of fact, previous Saturday Night Live star, Amy Poehler discuss this idea when she authors candidly regarding why honor programs do not actually mater (and how, undoubtedly, they arrange of do). In her memoir, Yes Please, she remembers the issue of being nominated for an award, and afterwards slowly beginning to want it. This kind of desire, intending to finest the various other women in her group, was an excellent opportunity for jealousy to crop up. Nevertheless, Poehler would solidify the feeling of wanting exactly what she calls, 'the dessert,' by presenting bits with various other nominees at honors shows. At the 2011 Emmy's she called all of the other nominees for Impressive Lead Actress in a Funny Collection and also intended to stage a charm pageant when their category was provided. As each actresses name was called, they would come up on stage, as well as hold hands as if they were being all competing for the title of Miss The U.S.A.. In the end, Amy Poehler really did not win, but the energy she could've spent hoping and longing for exactly what she wanted, was toughened up by the excitement of preparing and also arranging. When discussing that minute, Poehler states, 'When Melissa won, all of us genuinely howled with pleasure. Basing on stage being amusing with those women was a lot better than winning. I can only presume. I didn't win. Melissa did. No matter.' Certainly, when we transform our power towards cooperation, it begins to matter much less that really 'victories.' When we work together, jealousy comes to be much less relevant. Envy becomes rooting versus yourself.

Poehler blogs about yearning for the dessert, however really-she is instructing us concerning thoughtful joy.

In my life, when I locate myself growing envious of my good friends (or really feeling guilty over the idea that they could be jealous of me) I do 2 points. The very first, I try to keep in mind that I take a trip in the hearts of my liked ones, and they take a trip in my heart. When they stroll down the aisle or to some various other major milestone, I walk with them as a living testimony to the tough work they have actually done. Broken hearts are best absorbed among close friends, simply as victories are most ideal celebrated with our liked ones. What a benefit to witness bones and also bruises they've healed to exist in this minute. Certain, I'm jealous, but there's so a lot more past that feeling. I can cooperate their happiness. I could reach beyond my own yearning, to see the happiness they want to show me.

The second thing that I do is I claim it aloud (either to the individual or a non-judgmental friend). I am honored to have close adequate buddies and also family members that, when I really feel envious, I can inform them without concern. A lot of frequently, we laugh concerning it, and the pity I felt at being envious become satisfaction that our relationship is strong enough to hold all feelings (also the much less favorable ones). Jealousy as well as envy are wall surfaces that block much deeper emotions. When we could translucent the cracks because wall surface we permit for deeper more profound connections to come forth.

In the end, when we separation ourselves from our Western narratives and also base on our very own, we come to find that jealousy happens as well as the world doesn't finish. You could work to move right into a state of sympathetic happiness or you could ruminate. You can try to work together with those who have exactly what you want or you could hang their images on a wall and throw darts. Life moves regardless of our individual successes or failings. What's more, every one of our feelings bare knowledge, and also frequently our rush to alter our sensations undermines our chance to expand. Will you be endure sufficient to bypass the distractions of guilt and pity, and also look your yearning in the face? Will certainly you be thoughtful sufficient with on your own to rest next to your sensations and just enable them to be?

Only then could you reach the much more productive sensations of sympathetic happiness and also personal contentment. May your hopings guide you back to the fact: that we have is this moment, and in this moment, as you read these words, you are to life, supported, as well as thriving.