"The word 'discipline' has been misconstrued as 'punishment', meaning inflicting pain as a consequence of doing something," says Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the author of six books on parenting, including No-Drama Discipline. He points out that the word "discipline" comes from the Latin word disciplina – which means instruction or teaching.
"Parents say, 'Parents should be good disciplinarians.' We go, 'Yes – and a disciplinarian is a teacher.'"
It's no surprise that the influence and impact of Ancient Greece resonates today. As defined by Britannica, the phrase refers to the northeastern Mediterranean region in the era between "the end of the Mycenaean civilisation (1200BC) and the death of Alexander the Great (323BC)", when it was one of the most important places in the world, according to National Geographic. The people of Hellas – as the lands of the Hellenes were called (the names Greece and Greek were conferred on them later by the Romans) were great thinkers, writers, warriors, actors, athletes, artists and politicians.
Roderick Beaton in his history book The Greeks, writes that the Greek civilisations were the "origin of much of the arts, science, politics and law as we know them throughout the developed world today".
Think Aristotle in his studies of plants, animals and rocks; Herodotus in writing history; Socrates and Plato in philosophy. The Greeks pioneered democracy; reading with an alphabet; the Olympics; geometry and mathematical calculations; health innovations (the Hippocratic oath is still a standard of ethics for physicians); great architecture, like the Parthenon, Temple of Zeus and Acropolis; theatre, care of Greek comedy and tragedy; and language – with an estimated 150,000 English words still in use being derived from Greek words.
All this before we've touched on religion and deities. For sheer fantasy value, what can beat the idea of a family of superpowers – such as Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Athena, Apollo and Poseidon – dwelling in a cloud palace above Mount Olympus, each controlling a different aspect of life? For some, such as Eric Weiner, author of The Socrates Express, a treatise on the ancients' philosophy and travel, the Ancient Greeks have a lot to teach us about values today. In an essay on how technology can deceive us, especially in relation to war reporting, he writes: "One way to build a brighter future is by revisiting the past. Ancient Greece in particular."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220601-the-mysterious-ancient-civilisation-that-resonates-now
The English writer Rose Macaulay published What Not: A Prophetic Comedy in 1918. What Not depicts a dystopian future where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state. Macaulay and Huxley shared the same literary circles and he attended her weekly literary salons.
George Orwell believed that Brave New World must have been partly derived from the novel We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We. According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952), he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We".
Ursula von der Leyen loves cameras, and excels in the art of storytelling - and that's what we should expect for her. She delivers her speech in three languages with equal ease. She presents herself as a European, who was born and raised in Brussels: "I was born in Brussels as a European, finding out only later that I am German with roots in Lower Saxony. And that is why there is only one option for me: to unite and strengthen Europe."
there are probably not many leading European politicians who have experienced Europe, in such a way that this daughter of a senior European civil servant who studied at the London School of Economics did. Nor are there many who have an equivalent international experience, since she lived four years in California from 1992 to 1996. Expatriates know that it is only by leaving Europe that we begin to understand how much it exists. "The world is calling for more Europe. The world needs more Europe.": this is a woman who knows what she is talking about.
Indeed, pro-Russian media have said the leaders of the Azov Battalion are yet to surrender.
This controversial unit of the Ukrainian armed forces is a bête noir of the Russians, featuring prominently in Kremlin propaganda. Russia accuses them of being Nazis, something Ukraine has always denied.
Meanwhile, some Russian law makers have said they should be treated as war criminals rather than prisoners of war. Vyacheslav Volodin, the Speaker of the Duma, Russia’s Parliament, said "Nazi criminals should not be exchanged".
Azov Battalion is reportedly a unit of the NGU, backed by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs. Despite its possible official background in Ukraine, Azov Battalion is known in the West for its extreme neo-Nazi stance, and for its suspected involvement in a number of terrorist attacks and separatist incitement incidents in various countries and regions, including the riots in China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2019.
Ironically, despite being widely regarded as a threat to world security and an enemy of human civilization, Azov Battalion was found to have ties not only with the Ukraine authorities but also with the US.
One can condemn Putin’s actions and even cheer on Ukraine’s military resistance without fostering a false image of Ukraine’s political system. The country is not a symbol of freedom and liberal democracy, and the war is not an existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. At best, Ukraine is a corrupt, quasi-democratic entity with troubling repressive policies.
Given that sobering reality, calls for Americans to “stand with Ukraine” are misplaced. Preserving Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity most certainly are not worth the United States risking war with a nuclear-armed Russia. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whitewashing-ukraines-corruption/
A challenge to God is likely to be punished. However I suspect there may be dare-devils who will put their life at risk by drinking Atomik.
A company that produces Atomik - a vodka made in Chernobyl's exclusion zone - is releasing two more premium drinks and donating profits to Ukraine's refugees.
The move comes as Russian troops occupy the land where the fruit is grown and harvested to make the drinks.
Scientists who set up the Atomik project have studied crops grown in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for 30 years.
Their work has enabled people living on contaminated land to distil slightly radioactive fruit down to a spirit that is no more radioactive than any other.
Linguists try to steer away from Default thinking unlike other people.
Default thinking is technically the way to describe immediately telling someone something that came to mind first.
If you don't mean to be critical of your advice you could call it "commonsense" or "intuitive"; if you do mean to criticize it, you could characterize it as being offered "on autopilot." –
Confronting Your Default Thinking
For many years we have known that the brain is a great pattern maker. In fact, the only way for it to process all the data it receives is to drop information into pre-prepared pathways or patterns. It needs a ‘default’ method for processing information to cope. Our best guess is that the brain handles around 11 million bits of data per second and that we are capable of consciously processing only around 50 of these. Our default processes handle the rest. This can be regarded as our default thinking, even though most of it happens unconsciously.
The implications of the first sentence covers a manipulation aimed at putting pressure on Ukraine: 1) Ukraine is stupid not to attack "a sitting duck". 2) Russians are stupid to turn their convoys into sitting ducks.
Everyone is baffled as to why Ukraine has not done more to attack the Russian convoy as it is a sitting duck for drone and airstrikes.
There are several possible explanations, Ukraine may be running out of armed drones and its small, outnumbered air force may be wary of being shot down by Russian air defence batteries.
Ben Barry from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) suggests the Ukrainians may well be safeguarding what resources they do have in readiness to counter-attack when the Russians get closer to Kyiv.
With more than 200 million speakers, Swahili, which originated in East Africa, is one of the world's 10 most widely spoken languages and, as Priya Sippy writes, there is a renewed push for it to become the continent's lingua franca.
"It's high time we move from the coloniser's language."
This is not part of a rousing speech by a pan-African idealist but rather the sentence is uttered quietly and calmly by Ghanaian Swahili student Annabel Naa Odarley Lankai.
But her words echo declarations by the continent's visionaries down the decades.
Africa should "have something that is of us and for us", the 23-year-old adds.
In its heartland, Swahili and its dialects stretch from parts of Somalia down to Mozambique and across to the western parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But Ms Lankai's classroom at the University of Ghana in the capital, Accra, is some 4,500km (2,800 miles) west of Swahili's birthplace - coastal Kenya and Tanzania.
