Ferris Mx > Recent Status Updates

The conclusion of Kasin's research directly opposed Ekman's: "Special training in deception detection may lead investigators to make pre-judgments of guilt, with high confidence, that are biased and frequently ine rror." By now you will be familiar with the lethal combination that confidence and inaccuracy represent. You should know that this knowledge has had very little impact on modern policing.

Regarding the Reid Technique:
The threshold for being dragged to this "lower moral plane" is being considered a suspect, and whether or not you are a suspect is at the police's discretion. You should know that they can tell - they can see it on your face

I thought her version sounded much worse and less coherent, but she presented me with it and told me this was exactly how I should write all future press releases. I said "okay", although I knew the only way to achieve this would be to reach her level of intellect, which seemed an unlikely course of events unless I took up running into walls as a hobby.

At one point she asked me where my grandparents were from, which is the precursor to a certain type of middle-aged European engaging in amateur eugenics, and I briefly wonder if grandparents should become a protected characteristic.

The last question was Desdemona's attempt to confirm my class status and although I knew it would benefit me to lie, there really was no way to - rich people knew how to identify these markers faster and better than anyone else and I knew that my answer wouldn't actually reveal anything, it would just confirm her suspicions.

but then I realised that although the contents of the email weren't technically unusual, it was sent by the company's CEO and not some assistant running recruitment, and the final sentence of the email was "it will be lovely meeting you..." before the CEO's signature. This obviously set off some alarm bells, the ellipsis above all, but then I felt that any place that would consider hiring me would seem like a scam.

My favourite was when we'd start with "you should know this about me" followed by something either innocuous, absurd or universal. "You should know this about me, I have to sleep a certain number of hours to survive", "You should know this about me, there was a brief period when I was a baby where I couldn't walk or talk", "You should know this about me, I was the guy who shot JFK and I'm worried I will kill again."

I felt reinvigorated, like a vibrator fresh off the charger.

"Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine." - Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
"We were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe." - George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo.
for those who identify with the epigraphs

"Let us begin," she always said, "with some fundamental definitions. What is transport? It's the movement of matter through time and space." He loved the next part, and always smiled when he heard it. "Incidentally," she said, "that's also life."

"A harmonious society comes at a price," an instructor - Alberto? - had said to be once, in a lecture at the Service Academy, in another life, "and we are not just the ones who exact that price, we are the ones who pay it."

In a marriage, or any long relationship, you know the other person so well that you develop a kind of ... I don't want to say you don't see them anymore. Of course you do. Or if you don't, you know you're supposed to. But there are rare instances when you look at them and you see something so totally unfamiliar in that face that it's like looking at a stranger, and if we can be honest here, there's fear in that.

What I'd come to understand over the years was that although Service was extensive, Service was fallible, because Service was people.

"I think if you live long enough," Nico said, "you become a migrant from another timeline. There's the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there's nothing left of it, but you're still here. That's what I mean."

So Paolo was right after all. I hadn't lied about anything, but I'd massaged my message, manipulated my phrasing to secure the friendliest reception. I couldn't do that in Chinese.

And then, several months or maybe a year from now, there hopefully existed a version of me who wasn't crying all the time. She would be very glad to have had all these cultural experiences, and disappointed if she'd squandered her summer abroad. So if it made no difference to me now, I might as well create some good memories for that future self.

Why did that require killing a fourth of the population?
To rid the country of reactionary thought.
Why didn't the West do anything to help?
Because the West didn't know. Because the West wasn't looking. Because the leftists in the West, the only people who could have found Cambodia on a map, thought that th Khmer ROuge was carrying on a glorious revolution, and were cheering it on.

Take refuge in the back roads of the self, said Marcus Aurelius. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed, and you haven't ben.
It didn't work. I wasn't resilient enough.

We read an experimentalist science fiction short story by Bei Chuan. I had to read it a few times to understand it. The main character's father has recently passed away, but the main character keeps seeing him pop up on street view in Google Maps. Eventually he is able to confront his father's ghost, who reveals that Google hires ghosts of the recently deceased to photograph distant locations for its navigation apps.

So they had had faculty meetings about me. They had discussed whether I was a good student or not, and if not, then what should be done with me. This had never happened to me before. My best quality was being unobtrusive. I had never posed a problem to anyone, for any reason.

I could pretend that the entire world was limited to things inside my bedroom: my bed, my desk, and my books. I would stay there until the danger had passed. In college I was assigned to read passages from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I learned that this mindset was called Stoicism. You couldn't control external events, but you could control your reactions to them. Things hurt you only as much as you let them.

Or, if I ever fought back, she would say, "Would you prefer that I leave your life forever?" I never knew if she meant this as a threat, or if she herself was afraid - if she was musing out loud about a world where she couldn't be with us. Either way, this terrified me. This made me work very hard to regain her love. If I didn't, then I might not have a mother anymore, and it would be all my fault.

We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves.
...
after several silent minutes in the shade, I no longer felt that life was not worth living.
...
JC reached out and snaked his fingers around mine. I had seen this coming. I had felt his hand knocking against mine for the last few minutes, like a boat attempting to dock, so I didn't flinch when at last he made contact.

Anna's mother and Auntie Wen had competed for the same US graduate study, and her mother had won. An American visa was a source of great envy at the time. AW was wealthy now and could hire a private driver to take her across Taipei to eat in a restaurant inside a hotel. But still Auntie Wen had to take Anna's mother down a peg. My parents had their own rivals who liked to call me fat, so I understood the situation.

"But I sound like an idiot," I said.
"In fact," said Teacher Sun, you have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it."

I could read both writing systems, so I chose Traditional. I didn't have a good reason. It just seemed harder, and I had always felt there was some virtue in choosing the harder path, at least when it came to school.

"You made choices," my grandmother said. "You could have been unhappy anywhere."

The sooner a family can come back together, the less everyone has to regret.

It's Dad. He's having a menty b. Just sitting in the yard.

Thirty thousand dollars, and the thing had just been sitting here, empty in the yard - force-fed with Vivian's purchases like capitalist gavage.