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Diplomacy has never been Alex’s strong suit… When the vampire council puts Alex and James on trial for exposing the species’ existence to the world, Alex's freedom and James's life hang in the balance, though Alex suspects James’s new daywalking ability is the real aim of their inquisition. Any hope of talking their way out of hot water evaporates when one of the council members is found murdered…with James standing over the smoldering corpse. With every vampire looking to claim Alex’s power for themselves, she will have to team up with an unlikely ally, push her magic to its limits, and match wits against a powerful new foe if she hopes to come out unscathed. Praise for L. R. Braden: “Magic, Murder and Romance, oh my! This is an amazing fantasy in which every character is more than they appear.‗Winchester Public Library on A Drop of Magic “A riveting world filled with amazing characters and a tightly woven plot.‗Richelle Rodarte, Netgalley reviewer on Chaos Song “This is one of my favorite fictional worlds to visit. . . . I devoured this like a reader starved for every word, gulping yet somehow managing to savor the delightful taste of the story.‗Lucretia, Goodreads reviewer on Of Mettle & Magic About the Author: L.R. Braden is the bestselling author of the Magicsmith urban fantasy series, the spin-off Rifter Series (Book One Demon Riding Shotgun), and several works of short fiction. Her writing has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Sci-fi/Fantasy, the First Horizon Award for debut authors, the Imadjinn Award for Best Urban Fantasy, and the CAL Award in both the Fantasy and Paranormal categories. She was also honored to be a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers 2021 Writer of the Year award. She and her family live in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies.
Why do you believe what you believe? You’ve been lied to. Probably a lot. We’re always stunned when we realize we’ve been deceived. We can’t believe we were fooled: What was I thinking? How could I have believed that? We always wonder why we believed the lie. But have you ever wondered why you believe the truth? People tell you the truth all the time, and you believe them; and if, at some later point, you’re confronted with evidence that the story you believed was indeed true, you never wonder why you believed it in the first place. In this incisive and insightful taxonomy of lies and liars, New York Times bestselling author Aja Raden makes the surprising claim that maybe you should. Buttressed by history, psychology, and science, The Truth About Lies is both an eye-opening primer on con-artistry—from pyramid schemes to shell games, forgery to hoaxes—and also a telescopic view of society through the mechanics of belief: why we lie, why we believe, and how, if at all, the acts differ. Through wild tales of cons and marks, Raden examines not only how lies actually work, but also why they work, from the evolutionary function of deception to what it reveals about our own. In her previous book, Stoned, Raden asked, “What makes a thing valuable?” In The Truth About Lies, she asks “What makes a thing real?” With cutting wit and a deft touch, Raden untangles the relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda. The Truth About Lies will change everything you thought you knew about what you know, and whether you ever really know it.
When Cedric uses lies and deception to try to drive a wedge between the Guardians, the girls learn that true friendship cannot be broken.Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin know all about illusions.Since they discovered their powers as Guardians of the Veil, they have kept their secret hidden.While the girls use deception only to protect people, Cedric uses lies to turn the girls against one another.It is not until Will's life is put in danger that the girls discover that the one thing that is not an illusion is true friendship.With full colour comic inserts at the start and end of the story.
Chris is an average Joe who wakes up everyday and follows the same old routine...his work, his marriage, and his life becoming more and more stale and unexciting. His life drastically changes on February 26th, in ways that he would have never imagined. He crossed that imaginary line between sanity and insanity, life and death, losing all respect. Then, he experienced the bizarre, in every possible dark way. Accompany Chris on his wild twenty four hour ride into eternity...
The third of Russ Kick’s bestselling Disinformation Guides gathers another all-star line-up of exposés: Juries have ruled in recent trials that Watergate was really about a Democratic Party prostitution ring. Ignored in the U.S. and distorted elsewhere, the Milosevic tribunal hasn’t gone the way authorities were anticipating. (We present exclusive first-hand reporting from the trial). Most theologians don’t believe in the physical Resurrection of Jesus. In 2001, the U.S. uncovered the biggest spy ring in the country since WWII, yet most people never heard about it. The U.S. is engaging in bioweapons research that violates international treaties and federal law. (The New York Times knows about this but refuses to report it). Teddy Roosevelt and Wall Street created Panama for profit. Gandhi wasn’t so wonderful, after all. These are just some of the revelations in the third of our all-star anthologies. Following up on bestsellers You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, editor Russ Kick has again assembled a line-up of leading investigative journalists, academics, activists, commentators, and independent researchers, covering CIA assassinations, the anthrax attacks, fluoride, TWA 800, Abraham Lincoln, child protective services, the tobacco industry, forgotten uprisings, the government's missing trillions, even more revelations about 9/11 and much more. Contributors include Gary Webb, Greg Palast, Noreena Hertz, Howard Zinn, Douglas Valentine, Jim Hougan, Kristina Borjesson, Arianna Huffington and many more well-known writers—some of whom you’ll be extremely surprised to see in these pages!
Saul Smilansky presents an original treatment of the problem of free will, which lies at the heart of morality and human self-understanding. He maintains that we have most of the resources we need for a proper understanding of the problem; and the key to it is the role played by illusion. The major traditional philosophical approaches are inadequate, Smilansky argues: their partial insights need to be integrated into a hybrid view, which he calls Fundamental Dualism. Common views about justice, responsibility, human worth, and related notions are radically misguided, and the absurd looms large. We do, however, find some justification for enlightened moral views, and grounding for some of our most cherished views of human nature. The bold and perhaps disturbing claim of Free Will and Illusion is that we could not live adequately with a complete awareness of the truth about human freedom: illusion lies at the centre of the human condition. The necessity of illusion is seen to follow from the basic elements of the free will issue, helping keep our moral and psychological worlds intact. Smilansky offers the challenge of recognizing the centrality of illusion and trying to free ourselves to some extent from it; this is not only a philosophical challenge, but a moral and psychological one as well.
“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.
As politicians, media, scientists, and religions vie over truth, "Truth and Illusion" leads us on a quest to discover why we believe what we do. Dethroning patriarchy and overcoming dualistic thinking, "Truth and Illusion" paves the way to understanding one another, cultivating inner wisdom, and expanding our abilities to access ultimate truths. When East meets West in Truth and Illusion, the yogic science of spirituality extends psychology's understanding of human nature, so that finally we can understand why one person's lie is another one's truth. You will learn: *how to cultivate inner wisdom*why we must harmonize dualistic thinking, such as East-West, male-female, left brain-right brain, rich-poor, and individualistic-communal, so we can find truth*how the seven chakras represent our progress in understanding life, truth, ourselves, and one another*how patriarchy has overpowered humanity culturally and religiously, limiting our human development and blocking our access to ultimate truths*how feminine qualities, masculine qualities, love, fear, and the worldviews of each of our seven chakras combine to explain why we see the world the way we do. You will be amazed to discover yourself and others so clearly described along the developmental journey through the chakra system. You will understand why we are who we are, and how all of us can progress in our quests for truth. Truth and Illusion ultimately leads us to transcend duality to a state of oneness, discovering Truth and creating harmony together.
"I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare...."-- Montaigne "All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.'" -- Tennessee Williams Truth and deception--like good and evil--have long been viewed as diametrically opposed and unreconcilable. Yet, few people can honestly claim they never lie. In fact, deception is practiced habitually in day-to-day life--from the polite compliment that doesn't accurately relay one's true feelings, to self-deception about one's own motivations. What fuels the need for people to intricately construct lies and illusions about their own lives? If deceptions are unconscious, does it mean that we are not responsible for their consequences? Why does self-deception or the need for illusion make us feel uncomfortable? Taking into account the sheer ubiquity and ordinariness of deception, this interdisciplinary work moves away from the cut-and-dried notion of duplicity as evil and illuminates the ways in which deception can also be understood as a adaptive response to the demands of living with others. The book articulates the boundaries between unethical and adaptive deception demonstrating how some lies serve socially approved goals, while others provoke distrust and condemnation. Throughout, the volume focuses on the range of emotions--from feelings of shame, fear, or envy, to those of concern and compassion--that motivate our desire to deceive ourselves and others. Providing an interdisciplinary exploration of the widespread phenomenon of lying and deception, this volume promotes a more fully integrated understanding of how people function in their everyday lives. Case illustrations, humor and wit, concrete examples, and even a mock television sitcom script bring the ideas to life for clinical practitioners, behavioral scientists, and philosophers, and for students in these realms.
Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and social psychology research, an acclaimed author demonstrates how so much of our thinking is informed by false assumptions—making us dangerously mistrustful as a society and needlessly unhappy as individuals. The desire to fit in is one of the most powerful, least understood forces in society. Todd Rose believes that as human beings, we continually act against our own best interests because our brains misunderstand what others believe. A complicated set of illusions driven by conformity bias distorts how we see the world around us. From toilet paper shortages to kidneys that get thrown away rather than used for transplants; from racial segregation to the perceived “electability” of women in politics; from bottled water to “cancel culture,” we routinely copy others, lie about what we believe, cling to tribes, and silence people. The question is, Why do we keep believing the lies and hurting ourselves? Todd Rose proves that the answer is hard-wired in our DNA: our brains are more socially dependent than we realize or dare to accept. Most of us would rather be fully in sync with the social norms of our respective groups than be true to who we are. Using originally researched data, Collective Illusions shows us where we get things wrong and, just as important, how we can be authentic in forming opinions while valuing truth. Rose offers a counterintuitive yet empowering explanation for how we can bridge our inference gap, make decisions with a newfound clarity, and achieve fulfillment. **National Bestseller** **Wall Street Journal Bestseller** **Named Amazon's 2022 Best Book of the Year in Business, Leadership, and Science**