Bestselling author and acclaimed physicist Lawrence Krauss offers a paradigm-shifting view of how everything that exists came to be in the first place. “Where did the universe come from? What was there before it? What will the future bring? And finally, why is there something rather than nothing?” One of the few prominent scientists today to have crossed the chasm between science and popular culture, Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing. With a new preface about the significance of the discovery of the Higgs particle, A Universe from Nothing uses Krauss’s characteristic wry humor and wonderfully clear explanations to take us back to the beginning of the beginning, presenting the most recent evidence for how our universe evolved—and the implications for how it’s going to end. Provocative, challenging, and delightfully readable, this is a game-changing look at the most basic underpinning of existence and a powerful antidote to outmoded philosophical, religious, and scientific thinking.

In determining good and bad luck, in the Confucian Mind there is nothing greater than the divining straws and the tortoise. For lines, concentric circles, and dots represent the most abstract and philosophical conceptions of primeval cosmogony. No unprejudiced person can see any difference between a tortoise and a lamb, as candidates for sacredness: both are mere symbols, and no more. Vishnu is represented in the Kurma-avatara as a tortoise sustaining a circular pillar, on which the semblance of himself (maya) sits with all his attributes. The great Circle of Time, on the face of which fancy in India has represented the tortoise, has the Cross placed on it by nature in its division and localisation of stars, planets, and constellations. Beginning with the Azoic time, corresponding to Ilus, in which Brahm? implants the creative germ, we pass through the Palæozoic and Mesozoic times, covered by the first and second avataric incarnations as fish and tortoise. The avataric succession is a mere allegory for the dual spiritual and physical evolution of creatures and man. From the watery abyss, this dual transformation carries on the physical form through the shape of a fish, a tortoise, a boar, a man-lion, a dwarf human form, a physically perfect but spiritually undeveloped man, and, finally, the apex of physical and spiritual perfection — a god-like man on earth. Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajapati began creating offspring. The myths and endless genealogies of the Prajapatis, the Rishis or Manus, and their wives and offspring, are a veiled record of the order of evolution in this round. The sceptics of today are as incapable of rising to the sublimity of Vedantic and Buddhistic philosophy, as a tortoise to soar like the eagle. “Light Divine” in the fancy of the Hylo-Idealist, who confines the whole universe to the phantasms of his grey matter. Every sacred truth, which the ignorant are unable to comprehend under its true light, ought to be hidden within a triple casket concealing itself as the tortoise conceals his head within his shell. The magical figures of Phurbu on a square tortoise have nothing to do with Tibetan Buddhism. Seek not the seeds of Wisdom in Maya’s realm; but soar beyond illusions, search the eternal in the changeless Sat, mistrusting fancy’s false suggestions. Chelas, in their trials of initiation, see in trances the vision of the Earth supported by an elephant on the top of a tortoise standing on nothing, in order to teach them to discern the true from the false. Be of clean heart before thou startest on thy journey. Before thou takest thy first step, learn to discern the real from the false, the ever-fleeting from the everlasting. Learn above all to separate Head-learning from Soul-Wisdom, the “Eye” from the “Heart” doctrine.

The lowland girl seemed to contain fire. Her hair stirred, flickered, gushed upward, blowing flame in a wind that did now blow. A tower of light shot up the sky, beginning where the girl stood. For half a second there was only light, then it took form. The form it took was Anackire. She towered, she soared. Her flesh was a white mountain. Her snake's tail a river of fire in spate. Her golden head touched the apex of the sky, and there the serpents of her hair snapped like lightnings. Her eyes were twin suns. The eight arms, outheld as the two arms of the girl had been, rested weightlessly on the air, the long fingers subtly moving... The girl standing before the well, unblasted by the entity she had released, seemed only quiescent. At last one could see that her face, as it had always been, was the face of Anackire...

“I say that even later someone will remember us.”—Sappho, Fragment 147, sixth century, BC Sappho’s prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the twenty-first century. But not without peril. Sappho’s writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women’s voices. Sappho’s hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion—across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations—in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them. Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do so in the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women’s rhetoric. Women whose voices are central to such scholarship are included here, such as Aspasia (a contemporary of Plato’s), Margery Kempe, Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells. Added are influential works on what it means to write as a woman—by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Alice Walker, and Hélène Cixous. Public “manifestos” on the rights of women by Hortensia, Mary Astell, Maria Stewart, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, and Audre Lorde also join the discourse. But Available Means searches for rhetorical tradition in less obvious places, too. Letters, journals, speeches, newspaper columns, diaries, meditations, and a fable (Rachel Carson’s introduction to Silent Spring) also find places in this room. Such unconventional documents challenge traditional notions of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery, and blur the boundaries between public and private discourse. Included, too, are writers whose voices have not been heard in any tradition. Ritchie and Ronald seek to “unsettle” as they expand the women’s rhetorical canon. Arranged chronologically, Available Means is designed as a classroom text that will allow students to hear women speaking to each other across centuries, and to see how women have added new places from which arguments can be made. Each selection is accompanied by an extensive headnote, which sets the reading in context. The breadth of material will allow students to ask such questions as “How might we define women’s rhetoric? How have women used and subverted traditional rhetoric?” A topical index at the end of the book provides teachers a guide through the rhetorical riches. Available Means will be an invaluable text for rhetoric courses of all levels, as well as for women’s studies courses.

George Kateb’s writings have been innovatory in exploring the fundamental quandary of how modern democracy—sovereignty vested in the many—might nevertheless protect, respect, promote, even celebrate the singular, albeit ordinary individual. His essays, often leading to unexpected results, have focused on many inter-related topics: rights, representation, constitutionalism, war, evil, extinction, punishment, privacy, patriotism, and more. This book focuses in particular on his thought in three key areas: Dignity These essays exhibit the breadth and complexity of Kateb’s notion of dignity and outline some implications for political theory. Rather than a solely moral approach to the theory of human rights, he elaborates a human-dignity rationale for the very worth of the human species Morality Here Kateb challenges the position that moral considerations are often too demanding to have a place in the rough-and-tumble of modern politics and political analysis. Rejecting common justifications for the propriety of punishment, he insists that state-based punishment is a perplexing moral problem that cannot be allayed by repairing to theories of state legitimacy. Individuality These essays gather some of Kateb’s rejoinders and correctives to common conceptions and customary critiques of the theory of democratic individuality. He explains that Locke’s hesitations and religious backtracking are instructive, perhaps as precursors for the ways in which vestigial beliefs can still cloud moral reasoning.

The object of these scripts is to expose and air out the unprovable stances and influences of religious belief and its exploitation with no absolute condemnation on conventional beliefs. Conventional religion tends to cancel itself with the passage of time. Detailed descriptions are enclosed. The nutshell has it that in comparing archaic beliefs to unfolding beliefs, time is revealing a picture of inevitable and irreversible changes in those beliefs. Following the process of these changes will allow one to blend with them while broadening their scope on life or whatever else. Humans have precariously searched for a form of security that lessened the burden of exposure to accepting responsibility for living a life on planet Earth. Then, someone or other discovered, invented or rationalized something they believed was bigger and more powerful than them. Over a period of mankinds time, that power of belief became a dominant source of security and eventually emanated a belief of living forever in this illusionary state of security. Humans have been trapped into misconception, misunderstanding and vulnerable susceptibility for millenniums concerning their nature of choice in believing almost anything including the need for some type of mind salvation. An evolution of belief is slowly transforming from archaic views to a spiritual, consciousness of future orientation. Insight on basic and spiritual belief is covered.

The demon Saul has broken the seal that had held his army trapped inside. The God of War has returned to lead the heroes of the past and the men of the future against the Army that threatens to sweep across the world. But before they can do anything else they must fight the dead.