people-from-colorado

"No matter how many times I go through it, I can’t help but feel its intensity which then mellows into ambivalence, leaving me in a stupor of more emotions than I can count."

"Usually, anticipation is a slow burn, but when you’re on stage in heels, under the bright lights, smiling nervously ahead waiting for the emcee to say your name, the anticipation burns hot and fast."

"I grudgingly accepted my unspoken duty to my mom to do this thing that continues to be a significant part of my life for better or worse. She unpacked and furnished my house while I concentrated on adjusting to working remotely for my job I kept from Boston. I employed what felt like grueling levels of self-discipline to prepare for the pageant. After all, I had moved here to pursue business opportunities in pageantry, and wouldn’t the title of Miss Colorado USA be a great foot in the door?"

"I poured these feelings which have been stewing slowly for years into the regimen of restraint I needed to lose ten pounds in 7 weeks. Even this I feared wouldn’t be enough for me to be a viable competitor, but it was all I could reasonably do."

"Although it was my first time at this pageant, I grew up competing in various pageants in Colorado up until I left for college at 15. I had competed twice in Miss Massachusetts USA with disappointing results."

"The discipline naturally spilled over into my work and I had a productive start to my entirely separate and equally significant remote work journey. My boyfriend was with me for it all and offered his observations and insights about all the newness in our lives."

"Basic to a free society is the belief in a golden rule. Just as you feel you have the right to your opinion, you must feel that everyone else, in turn has a right to his."

"Education is, however, an extremely interesting and complex institution provided because society has discovered that, if it is to preserve itself and advance, it must spare the time and the people necessary to provide our young people with an understanding of their heritage. But education doesn't take place within institutions. It takes place only within individuals. It is something we cannot buy. It is something that records in the registrar's office do not measure."

"We can all join that most worthwhile of all wars—the fight for tolerance, the fight for wisdom, the fight for freedom. Above all else, continue to develop your tastes—material and spiritual—so that you may learn to choose the best values from life's many alternatives."

"If any one thread runs through the UVM story, it is the continual belief that higher education should be pre-occupied with the progress of mankind."

"Since the very beginning of the history of the State, the Catholic Church has been an important factor in the upbuilding of the commonwealth and the welfare and education of the people. The difficulties encountered were not easy to overcome in the midst of an unsettled, careless, and often lawless community."

"I just don't remember. I'll tell you one thing I remember: When it got close to the end of the day, I told somebody in my company we were going back up one more time, and I found a whole four-man machine-gun crew, all of them dead. So we started lifting them up, dragging them, trying to get them off as fast as we could. Marines don't leave their dead. That was our way. We had to get them out. I don't know what the hell they were killed by. I didn't get a chance to follow up. Anyway, I was pulling a guy by his shoulders, over rocks and through brushes and stuff, and all of a sudden I look down at what I'm pulling, and he's naked. His pants were ripped from shell fire and then got torn off as I dragged him. And I thought, "Shit, even in dying up here you can't have any privacy." There was no dignity in death. You could see the enemy. They were going around, dodging behind bushes and stuff, hiding. I lost every weapon I had. I lost my .45. I lost my carbine. I had at least one M-1 that I lost. I would pick these guns up and use them on the way up and then, when you're busy getting a stretcher or moving wounded, you shitcan your weapon. I ended up the whole day not only hauling stretchers, but with a BAR, a Browning Automatic Rifle. I don't know how that happened."

"I recently found out- my son came across this book in the library- that one of my favorite baseball players was flying suppor for us that day, and he got hit by small-arms fire and crash-landed on his way back to the base. His name was Ted Williams. Back when I was in officer school in Quantico, Virginia, a friend from Pueblo and I went and saw his team, the Red Sox, play the Senators [now the Minnesota Twins] in Washington, and he didn't hit a ball out of the infield, and I remember thinking, 'Shit, I'll never see that man again.' Well then, when I got to Natrick, Williams- maybe the greatest hitter who ever lived- had come back. He got out of the military, rejoined the Red Sox, and I got an opportunity to see him play about six more times. I even saw his final game, when he left after hitting that last home run. He was the only Major Leaguer I know of that got called back for Korea. I heard after Ungok we lost a tank commander and we lost another officer who was flying close air support. I didn't know that was Ted Williams. He had to crash-land going back to base because the controls of his Corsair had been shot up. He was a big hero of mine."

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as a platoon commander of Company A, in action against enemy aggressor forces. Although painfully wounded by fragments from an enemy mortar shell while leading his evacuation platoon in a support of assault units attacking a cleverly concealed and well-entrenched hostile force occupying commanding ground, 2d Lt. Murphy steadfastly refused medical aid and continued to lead his men up a hill through a withering barrage of hostile mortar and small-arms fire, skillfully maneuvering his force from one position to the next and shouting words of encouragement. Undeterred by the increasing intense enemy fire, he immediately located casualties as they fell and made several trips up and down the fire-swept hill to direct evacuation teams to the wounded, personally carrying many of the stricken marines to safety. When reinforcements were needed by the assaulting elements, 2d Lt. Murphy employed part of his unit as support and, during the ensuing battle, personally killed two of the enemy with his pistol. With all the wounded evacuated and the assaulting units beginning to disengage, he remained behind with a carbine to cover the movement of friendly forces off the hill and, though suffering intense pain from his previous wounds, seized an automatic rifle to provide more firepower when the enemy reappeared in the trenches. After reaching the base of the hill, he organized a search party and again ascended the slope for a final check on missing marines, locating and carrying the bodies of a machine-gun crew back down the hill. Wounded a second time while conducting the entire force to the line of departure through a continuing barrage of enemy small-arms, artillery, and mortar fire, he again refused medical assistance until assured that every one of his men, including all casualties, had preceded him to the main lines. His resolute and inspiring leadership, exceptional fortitude, and great personal valor reflect the highest credit upon 2d Lt. Murphy and enhance the finest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service."

"I don't know how many I saved. It's hard to be strong on details of what happened that day. I don't recall shooting two guys with a pistol, like the citation says. People ask me, but it was a confusing time. It really was. To get the Medal you have to have three nominees, witnesses. If they said that's what I did, I'm not one to argue with them. I've only known one recipient in our [Medal of Honor] Society who told me many years ago he wasn't scared and he knew what he was doing in his combat action. Well, most of the people around me at that time and after say that's a bunch of bullshit. You don't get in the infantry and not be scared."

"... I fuss around with commas, semi-colons, dictionaries, and wordings, and it drives me crazy. I am too virile. I ought to be building subways. I was thinking of going to the with the but that would take a year or two and I can spare, at most, only two months. It probably would be a bore anyhow. All life is a bore if you think at all...."

"The New Yorker had an interest in publishing any writer that could turn in a good piece. It read everything submitted. Hemingway, Faulkner, and the others were well established and well paid when The New Yorker came on the scene. The magazine would have been glad to publish them, but it didn’t have the money to pay them off, and for the most part they didn’t submit. They were selling to The Saturday Evening Post and other well-heeled publications, and in general were not inclined to contribute to the small, new, impecunious weekly. Also, some of them, I would guess, did not feel sympathetic to The New Yorker’s frivolity. Ross had no great urge to publish the big names; he was far more interested in turning up new and yet undiscovered talent, the s and the s. We did publish some things by —“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” was one. I believe we published something by Fitzgerald. But Ross didn’t waste much time trying to corral “emerged” writers. He was looking for the ones that were found by turning over a stone."

"I think DMT is a forcible reminder that there's a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves, the biosphere, whatever—there's a lot more to it than we imagine."

"What does it mean? Why is there a part of the brain that seems to be, for lack of a better word, a "God-detector", you know? What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain that seems to trigger and mediate experiences of the transcendent?"

"Terence was very … he was a good promoter. Basically, he said it's the ultimate metaphysical reality pill. Even though it's not a pill, but I thought that was a pretty good characterization after I took it. It would seem to be of a different order than LSD and mescaline and some of the other things that were around. DMT really did seem to be a whole other level of experience."

"Terence's pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened, and I don't know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe.It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning." And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence's worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming."

"Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they're suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. Historically, those in power have always sought to suppress free thought, whether bluntly or subtly, because it poses an inherent challenge to their rule. That's no less true today, in an age when corporate, political, and religious interests form a global bloc whose interests threaten all earthly life, including human life."

"One of the things besides what it does, one of the things about DMT that always fascinated me, was the fact that it's such a simple molecule. Biosynthetically, it's two steps from tryptophan, right? Two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan. Well, tryptophan is an amino acid, of course, and it's everywhere. So all organisms have tryptophan, and all organisms have the two key enzymes that lead to the synthesis of DMT. And these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, they're all over the place. They are, again, part of basic metabolism. So, theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT."

"It just rips that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes, and for a few minutes, you're immersed in sort of this raw data sphere of input, of sensory input, of memories, of associations. I mean, it seems like the brain builds reality out of these things: what you're experiencing, what you have experienced, and how you associate and synthesize these things together to tell yourself a story, essentially, about what's going on, where you are in space and time."

"Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the "elegance" of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it "makes sense". It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)"

"You don’t survive as a screenwriter-for-hire if you’re not willing to incorporate other people’s ideas or at least be willing to consider them. What I’ve found is that other people have really good ideas, which make you look better. It’s part of the process. At all stages of production, including pre- and post-, your film is going to change because it’s being shaped by all these people and ideas."

"The generally accepted computation is that 2½ acres of land are required to provide a minimum adequate diet for each person, by Western standards anyhow. On a vegetarian diet it has been estimated that 1½ acres per head may provide enough. The reason for this difference is that animals grazed for meat-eating purposes require about 15 times more land than is necessary to raise an equivalent amount of nutrition in the form of grains, vegetables and fruit for human consumption. This means that India, on a vegetarian diet, is living far more wisely within its own land resources than are the meat-eating peoples."

"I realized that all forms of religion are masks that the divine wears to communicate with us. Behind all religions there’s a reality, and this reality wears whatever clothes it needs to speak to a particular people."

"Eggs are generally considered kosher, but what about eggs from chickens who spend their entire lives imprisoned in a cage one cubic foot in size? Food pellets are brought to them on one conveyor belt; their droppings and eggs are taken away on another. The Bible forbids us to torment animals or cause them any unnecessary grief. Raising chickens who can go out sometimes and see the sky or eat a worm or blade of grass is one thing, but manufacturing them in the concentration camp conditions of contemporary "poultry ranches" is quite another."

"Godspeed, John Glenn."

"I volunteered for a number of reasons. One of these, quite frankly, was that I thought this was a chance for immortality. Pioneering in space was something I would willingly give my life for."

"In Foundations of the Theory of Signs (p. 6), the three terms in question were defined follows: pragmatics as the study of "the relation of signs to interpreters", semantics as the study of "the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable", syntactics as the study of "the formal relations of signs to one another.""

"A language in the full semiotical sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules."

"Charles Morris (1901-1979) was a student of George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago and later editor of the widely known collection of Mead's lectures, Mind, Self, and Society (1934). Morris helped to create "the Viennese connection" to American philosophy in the 1930s, hoping to clarify pragmatism by making use of the foundationalist, verification model of truth promised by the logical empiricism of Rudolph Carnap and others."

"The term "meaning" is not here included among the basic terms of semiotic. This term, useful enough at the level of everyday analysis, does not have the precision necessary for scientific analysis. Accounts of meaning usually throw a handful of putty at the target of sign phenomena, while a technical semiotic must provide us with words which are sharpened arrows. "Meaning" signifies any and all phases of sign-processes (the status of being a sign, the interpretant, the fact of denoting, the significatum), and frequently suggests mental and valuational processes as well; hence it is desirable for semiotic to dispense with the term and to introduce special terms for the various factors which meaning fails to discriminate."

"The Encyclopedia presents a contemporary version of the ancient encyclopedic ideal of Aristotle, the Scholastics, Leibniz, the Encyclopedists, and Comte."

"Semiotic itself neither rests on nor necessarily implies a particular philosophy. A science of signs no more decides between an 'empirical' and a 'non-empirical' philosophy than it decides between a 'naturalistic' and a 'supernaturalistic' religion. In itself it cannot force one to believe only scientifically verified statements, nor to use only scientific discourse, nor to form one's appraisals and prescriptions in the light of science. It will nevertheless have a profound influence on the course of philosophy, since it deals with topics peculiarly relevant to philosophic systematization... In this sense, the philosophy of the future will be semiotically oriented. But the nature of this influence will not always be the same, and will depend upon the role which given individuals and societies assign to scientific knowledge."

"The fundamental significance of the work of Charles William Morris is based on the fact that he was a philosopher in the widest sense of the term, a man who changed the world, leaving it a different place than it had been before. Morris left behind a large number of writings, but not all have been made available, and the breadth of his work as a whole has gone unrecognized. His contributions to sign theory have gained a firm foothold in international semiotic discourse, but his axiological studies as well as his work on the theory and history of science have largely been ignored, as have his writings on the subject of mind and his essay on the various paths of life."

"What of the term 'meaning'? In the preceding discussion the term 'meaning' has been deliberately avoided. In general it is well to avoid this term in discussions of signs; theoretically, it can be dispensed with entirely and should not be incorporated into the language of semiotic. But since the term has had such a notorious history, and since in its consideration certain important implications of the present account can be made clear, the present section is devoted to its discussion."

"According to mead, the primary phenomenon out of which language in the full human sense emerges is the gesture, especially the vocal gesture. The gesture sign (such as a dog's snarl) differs from such a nongestural sign as thunder in the fact that the sign vehicle is an early phase of a social act and the designatum a later phase of this act (in this case the attack by the dog). Here one organism prepares itself for what another organism - the dog - is to do by responding to certain acts of the latter organism as signs; in the case in question the snarl is the sign, the attack is the designatum, the animal being attacked is the interpreter, and the preparatory response of the interpreter is the interpretant."

"Empirical problems of a nonlinguistic sort are not solved by linguistic considerations, but it is important that the two kinds of problems not be confused and that nonlinguistic problems be expressed in such a form as aids their empirical solution."

"The full characterization of a language may now be given: A language in the full semiotic sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules."

"Semiotic provides a basis for understanding the main forms of human activity and their interrelationship, since all these activities and relations are reflected in the signs which mediate the activities ... In giving such understanding, semiotic promises to fulfil one of the tasks which traditionally has been called philosophical. Philosophy has often sinned in confusing in its own language the various functions which signs perform. But it is an old tradition that philosophy should aim to give insight into the characteristic forms of human activity and to strive for the most general and the most systematic knowledge possible. This tradition appears in a modern form in the identification of philosophy with the theory of signs and the unification of science, that is, with the more general and systematic aspects of pure and descriptive semiotic."

"According to Morris, syntactics is the relation between a given sign-vehicle and other sign-vehicles. There is a critical distinction here (that many cartographers have missed) between Morris's "syntactics" and the linguistic subcategory of "syntax". While syntax puts emphasis on word order and parsing (i.e., on a linear sequence), syntactics is much broader in scope. Syntactics allows for any kind of among-sign relationships. Morris (1938, p. 16) makes this point explicitly in his statement that there are "syntactical problems in the fields of perceptual signs, aesthetic signs, the practical use of signs, and general linguistics."... At least three kinds of sign relationships seem to fall under Morris's umbrella of syntactics (Posner, 1985, in French; cited in Nöth, 1990, p. 51). These include:"

"I share the conviction held by many others that the movement of thought called "symbolism" is of great significance. Not only does this movement cut across the traditional lines of division among philosophers, but it coordinates in a remarkable way the work of linguists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists, in so far as their work connects with the topic of mind. In the degree that the symbolic movement is significant, a work which develops systematically the basis of the movement, and at the same time applies this analysis to the topic of mind and to certain basic philosophical problems, can at least claim to be an important contribution to critical thought. Whether the claim is substantiated depends, of course, on the quality of the work itself."

"Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results is systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs - if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning."

"The process in which something functions as a sign may be called '. This process, in a tradition which goes back to the Greeks, has commonly been regarded as involving three (or four) factors: that which acts as a sign, that which the sign refers to, and the effect on some interpreter in virtue of which the thing in question is a sign to that interpreter. These three components in semiosis may be called, respectively, the sign vehicle, the designatum, and the interpretant; the interpreter may be included as a fourth factor. These terms make explicit the factors left undesignated in the common statement that a sign refers to something for someone."

"Semiotics... is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis."

"There are, then, syntactical problems in the fields of perceptual signs, aesthetic signs, the practical use of signs, and general linguistics which have not been treated within the framework of what today is regarded as logical syntax and yet which form part of syntactics as this is here conceived."

"I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. . . . Purpose (which should last at least 100 years) should not be confused with specific goals or business strategies (which should change many times in 100 years). Whereas you might achieve a goal or complete a strategy, you cannot fulfill a purpose; it’s like a guiding star on the horizon—forever pursued but never reached. Yet although purpose itself does not change, it does inspire change. The very fact that purpose can never be fully realized means that an organization can never stop stimulating change and progress."