As 2020 Approaches Quotes

Earth is both heaven and hell, a place where the best and worst experiences can be had, all contained within a singular bubble reality. You are rapidly approaching what we refer to as the Splitting Prism of Time.

Contrary to what many people have been expecting, the growth of the human population from roughly 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 has not been accompanied by a lowering of living standards but by an explosion in material abundance. If you approach this volume with an open mind, you will be astounded by the progress that humanity has made, especially over the last 200 years or so. The book will affirm the moral and practical value of every additional human being, leave you appreciative of the abundance that you are enjoying today, and even hopeful about the future fate of humanity

RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.

In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets—the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster—plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.

In our campaign, as in contests around the country, the changing landscape of who is running and who is voting does not change the basics of how to win. The formula for winning is clear: (1) reject the myths of who votes and why, (2) make early and sustained investment in outreach to an expanded voter pool, and (3) recruit and support candidates who demonstrate authentic and consistent beliefs. Together, this approach will improve performance, build on the dramatic support of 2018, and yield electoral successes for 2020 and beyond.

Before Trump, conservatives seeking to appeal to Latinos typically embraced the politics of conservative multiculturalism. Politicians such as George W. Bush reached out to Latino voters by showing a familiarity with their language and history, emphasizing the values of diversity and inclusion. Depicting Latinos as a distinct and valuable part of America’s democratic mosaic, conservative multiculturalism connected Latino culture to Republican values, emphasizing conservative approaches to faith, patriotism and the traditional family. Trump, by contrast, knows nothing of the history of Latinos in the United States and rarely even pretends to find value in Latinos’ distinct identities. Rather than offering his non-White voters recognition, Trump has offered them multiracial whiteness.

Many scholars want to understand themselves as the people who are solving problems, but I think one of the things Nelson [Flores] and I – that brings us together in our work is our deep suspicion that many of the scholarly labels and categories and approaches have in fact emerged from the very systems of power that we’re trying to critique here. I think when we keep pushing – and we always push – “What’s your theory of change? What is it that changes?” These families use language in this way, so this school institutionalizes language in this way to change these behaviors. Then, what happens? Then, people have access to a different world? Then, the structure of the economy transforms? Then, stable housing and living wages and political representation – then that emerges from language use? Or are we facing a fundamentally different kind of challenge? Should our critique, should our efforts towards promoting language learning and our engagement with language, be oriented towards those bigger challenges? Or should they be narrowly focused on changing people’s language practices in their homes, in classrooms – really changing the behaviors of the marginalized? (4/10/2020 on Vocal Fries podcast)

As the 2019 elections were approaching, the Modi government felt the need to appear less pro-rich and more pro-poor again. But the union budget passed in February was somewhat a missed opportunity so far as the peasants were concerned. No loan waivers were announced in their favor, simply an enhanced interest subvention on loans and an annual income support of Rs 6,000 (80 USD)—6 percent of a small farmer’s yearly income—to all farmers’ households owning two hectares or fewer.131 In fact, the union budget was once again more geared to pleasing the middle class. The income tax exemption limit jumped from Rs 200,000 (2,667 USD) to 250,000 (3,333 USD), and the income tax rate up to Rs 5 lakh (6,667 USD) was reduced from 10 to 5 percent. The income tax on an income of Rs 10 lakh (13,333 USD) dropped from Rs 110,210 (1,470 USD) to Rs 75,000 (1,000 USD).132 The poor were doubly affected by the fiscal policy of the Modi government in 2014–2019: not only did the tax cuts in favor of the middle class, the abolition of the wealth tax, and, more importantly, the reduction of the corporate tax rates have to be offset by increased indirect taxes, but the stagnation of fiscal resources did not allow the government of India to spend more on public education and public health—all the more so as Narendra Modi wanted to reduce the fiscal deficit. First of all, tax collection diminished. The exchequer “lost” Rs 1.45 lakh crore (1.933 billion USD) in the reduction of the corporate tax, for instance. That was the main reason why gross direct tax collection dipped 4.92 percent133 in 2019–2020, a fiscal year during which gross tax collections were less than those in 2018–2019. Tax collections had never declined on a year-on-year basis since 1961–1962.134 Second, government expenditures diminished. The central government reduced its spending on education from 0.63 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.47 percent in 2017–2018. The trend was marginally better on the public health front, where the Center’s spending declined from 0.37 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.34 percent in 2015–2016, before rising again to reach 0.38 percent in 2016–2017.

Tope Awotona, founder of Calendly, started three very different companies for three completely different communities before eventually building the scheduling software business in 2013. In 2020, Calendly posted nearly $70 million in annual recurring revenue, more than double its 2019 figure. But Awotona’s first company was a dating app that never really got off the ground. The second was projectorspot.com, which sold (obviously) projectors, but sales were poor and margins small. He tried again with a third startup, selling grills, but as he says, “I didn’t know anything about grills and I didn’t want to! I lived in an apartment, and never even grilled.” Not only was he not part of the grilling community, but he didn’t even want to be! He took a different approach to building Calendly. He had been a sales rep earlier in his career, and he knew the hassle of sending multiple emails to schedule meetings. He had even run into the scheduling problem while trying to sell his own products as an entrepreneur. As time went on and his other ideas failed to gain traction, he saw a gap in the marketplace and resolved to address it for the community of sales reps he cared about and understood. He says that “the journey to creating something that’s impactful, something that serves people, something that you know people are willing to open up their wallets and pay for—is not something that you can do just for money.” While lots of people have scheduling fatigue, Awotona focused on problems specific to sales reps, which helped him define a problem he could both solve and monetize. What does that mean for you? First, get involved in those communities wherever they are, offline and online. Then, contribute, teach, and, most important, listen. Finally, use the filters above to make sure you are picking the right community to serve. Then, your problem becomes: Which problem should I pick?

However, when we step back and take a longer-term perspective, bitcoin’s supply trajectory looks anything but linear (see Figure 4.2). In fact, by the end of the 2020s it will approach a horizontal asymptote, with annual supply inflation less than 0.5 percent. In other words, Satoshi rewarded early adopters with the most new bitcoin to get sufficient support, and in so doing created a big enough base of monetary liquidity for the network to use. He understood that if bitcoin was a success over time its dollar value would increase, and therefore he could decrease the rate of issuance while still rewarding its supporters.

I need not point out that this affair represents an appalling setback,” he wrote on New Year’s Eve 1952. He pointed out that, in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet orbit, the “perfection of totalitarian police state techniques is approaching ‘1984’ efficiency to a degree where ‘resistance’ can probably exist only in the minds of the enslaved peoples.

growing as rapidly as Amazon, which jumped from roughly 600 employees in 1997 to 9,000 in 2000, and then to 100,000 by 2013 (as of this writing, in 2020, Amazon is approaching one million employees).

In April 2020, Business Breakthrough (BBT) University in Tokyo, Japan held a graduation ceremony for students using avatar robots remotely controlled by graduating students from their homes. The avatar robots, dubbed “Newme”, were dressed in graduation caps and gowns for the ceremony, complete with tablets projecting the graduates’ face. BBT hoped the approach could be used as a model for other schools wishing to avoid large gatherings amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

since the Hollywood Diversity Report began in 2014, people of color (who accounted for approximately 40% of the U.S. population in 2020) approached or exceeded proportionate representation in film leads (39.7%) and primary cast (42%). Just a decade earlier, in 2011, only 10.5% of the top movies starred people of color.

In 2000, Walmart joined hands with a leading Silicon Valley investment firm, Accel Partners, to launch Walmart.com. Accel, by the way, gained much fame (and a gargantuan fortune) as a result of its $12.7 million investment in an early-stage company called Facebook in 2005.16 In about eighteen months, in mid-2001, Walmart acquired the minority stake of Accel to own Walmart.com fully. By 2020, Walmart’s e-commerce sales had climbed to $24 billion and Walmart.com was approaching 10 percent of Walmart’s overall U.S. sales. What had started as a “neutral” strategy in 2000 is now fast becoming the centerpiece of Walmart’s approach to gaining market share.

In Orchestration, we rely on a central system to control and call other Microservices to complete a task. In Choreography, each Microservice works like a State Machine and reacts based on the input from other parts. Orchestration is a tightly coupled approach for integrating Microservices. Whereas, Choreography is a loose coupling approach. Choreography based systems are more flexible and easy to change than Orchestration based systems. Orchestration is often implemented by synchronous calls. Choreography is implemented by asynchronous calls. The synchronous calls are much simpler compared to asynchronous communication.

Everything is a risk. That’s what’s hitting so many people so hard right now, here, as we approach May 2020. They didn’t know that they didn’t know.

Note: I am sure that now they will approach Medium to stop me from writing. Let’s see what happens. “A genuine person or celebrity doesn’t need a certificate or blue tick. Such ways are blackmailing your passion, emotion, or willingness. Criminals and money-mongers misuse and try to earn in an ugly and easy way. This trend also discriminates against others who cannot afford such an awkward notion.” Istay determined every day. I cannot tolerate liars and those who misuse their authority and attempt to victimize the righteous for their will and purpose in an illegitimate way to please their godfathers of the mafia and international criminal intelligence agencies. I am pretty sure, after reviewing again the replies from the Twitter team that mirror and endorse the Twitter team, that someone works for intelligence agencies or criminal and mafia groups. Since the beginning months of this year, I have been continuously victimized without specifying why I was posting the wrong things. I am going to publish a few emails that will exhibit the picture of how I was being victimized, harassed, and even threatened about things that I was neither aware of nor that the team explained. I was already under the attacks of criminals and even the gang of filthy-minded gays who were suffering from mental issues and sexual frustration; knowing it, I am not gay. In the Twitter team, the presence of such ones is not excluded since I felt a similar style of victimization. How do they dare to adopt such mean tactics to gain their will and desire? This reply email shows that a screenshot article has been displayed since 2020. After four years, it became an issue for someone in the Twitter team who continued to lock my account and tag the restriction flag. Text of my emails; “I am still uncertain about what to post and what not to post. You didn’t specify why my account was locked, whether it was because of the content I removed or something else. Is it permissible for me to share media and social media links in which my quotes are mentioned? My writings do not contain any personal attacks; nonetheless, thank you.” “You locked my Twitter, @EhsanSehgal, again; you know why you are doing it. Now, I can say only goodbye to my locked account and enjoy your terror. It is not a protection of my account; it is victimization. No more requests to unlock my account. Someone of angelic character will do it without my request. Shame on you all, involved ones.” Team replied; Hello, “We had a look at your account, and it appears that everything is now resolved! If that’s not the case, please reply to this message, and we’ll continue to help. Thanks,” X Support This was a screenshot article from Wikipedia about me on my profile that was illegitimately removed by such people as the Twitter team forced me to remove. Despite that, they continued locking my account to identify and provide an ID or passport. I did that twice and identified several times, but the team seemed not satisfied since their goal was something else; they would not approach nor be able to do it. To stop such criminal torture, I deactivated my account and decided never to come back there again.

You commit a crime if you support and collaborate with hired members of the criminal intelligence agencies who approach you to eliminate the truth. Sure, you also perpetrate and exploit the rules in an unfair context; indeed, it obtains a desired outcome that victimizes the victim.” “As a human, I love and respect all people; I fight for others’ rights as an advocate of humanity; and I also bring to justice those who commit crimes and misdeeds, regardless of distinctions, even if I face the consequences and victimization. Despite that, I never hesitate to exercise and practice it, feeling and learning that if death is everyone’s fate and destiny, then why not accept it in such a glorious way?” After being victimized by fake accounts of Rumi and the son of a shit, Sa Sha, on social media, I blocked them. However, they cannot escape from the inhuman crimes that they have been committing on social media while living in a civilized society. He, the son of a snake, and she, the shit of a snake, disappeared, working together to victimize me for many years with the consent of criminal intelligence agencies and Qadiyanis, the followers of a fake religion of a fake Jesus. More than a decade ago, their profiles started with fake names; behind that were a top cheater, criminal, inhuman, sadist, pretender, and worse than a beast, with the conspiracy of other criminals. However, I became the victim of those criminals and inhuman nature who succeeded in putting me on the death list. In 2020, the criminal’s chief and his gang from Canada, Germany, the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and around the world, along with other criminals, succeeded in deleting an article on me on Wikipedia and sending abusive, insulting, and discriminating emails to my immediate family. They remained in their criminal ways to defame and damage me, but they significantly failed and faced the penalty for their wrong deeds by God and the law of the world. Despite that, they reached their mental match once to further victimize me; this time, they were directly on my social media, but through their team of evil-minded people to victimize, harass, threaten, and damage my writings, label restrictions, and lock my account every time. Read this underlined link in detail. As a result, I became compulsive enough to deactivate my profile on Twitter to stay away from all such scoundrels. Alas, deactivated Twitter account will automatically become deleted forever after thirty days; consequently, I will lose more than one hundred thousand tweets and my post data because of Elon Musk and his dastard team, who support the political mafia and forced me to remove a screenshot of a Wikipedia article that was illegitimately removed as they harassed me by tagging, restricting, and locking my account and asking my ID card to transfer my privacy to third parties of political criminals and to make my opponents happy. It is a crime to restrict freedom of expression through such tactics under the umbrella of community behaviour.

Chinese authorities started systematically removing any mention of the virus online. This began on December 31, when technology services in China censored key words linked to the pandemic. The live-streaming platform YY censored words including “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”. WeChat censored phrases related to the pandemic, banned both speculative and factual information related to the outbreak, and removed even “neutral references to Chinese government efforts to handle the outbreak that had been reported on state media”, according to the Citizen Lab’s March 2020 report. The CCP censorship alarmed doctors and Chinese health authorities, who knew the precise opposite approach should be taken in order to save lives. This crucial point clearly shows China’s deliberate, intentional and clear-eyed decision to cover up the virus; to stop their own people and those internationally from finding out about it.

For Facebook, Jin wrote, cleaning up the messes it made meant that it needed to pay particular attention to its recommendation systems and features that encouraged bad behavior or were disproportionately prone to abuse. To avoid a disaster in the 2020 elections, he wrote, the company would either have to cut back on the features that amplified social problems or get better at plucking out the bad stuff. Facebook preferred the latter approach, Jin noted, but it was technically much harder to pull off. Besides, cleaning up Facebook and Instagram by targeting misbehavior raised inevitable concerns about censorship. No matter how much money Facebook spent on the effort, it still risked losing control of its platforms.

Some of the world’s biggest banks and investor groups have swung behind a pledge to raise $200bn by the end of next year to combat climate change. In a move the UN said was unprecedented, leading insurers, pension funds and banks have joined forces to help channel the money to projects that will help poorer countries deal with the effect of global warming and cut reliance on fossil fuels. The announcement came at the start of a UN climate summit in New York aimed at bolstering momentum for a global agreement to lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions due to be signed in Paris at the end of 2015. “Change is in the air,” said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. “Today’s climate summit has shown an entirely new, co-operative global approach to climate change.” The summit opened with business and government pledges to make cities greener, create a renewable energy “corridor” in Africa and rein in the clearing of forests for palm oil plantations. The private sector’s contributions marked a “major departure” from past climate summits, the UN said, adding in a statement that financial groups “had never previously acted together on climate change at such a large scale”. One obstacle to the Paris agreement is developing countries’ insistence that richer nations must fulfil pledges made nearly five years ago to raise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate action.

the same people who are taking this approach to any idea of sending an American accused to a court in the Hague are the very people demanding that my friend must be sent by Britain to the United States to disappear for the rest of his life for publishing documents which revealed war crimes.

As the USA was returning to manned spaceflight in 2020, it was ironic that we were rapidly approaching the end of the biologically toxic Space industry.

康考迪亚大学毕业证2020本科办理咨询Q微2026614433办理康考迪亚大学毕业证办康考迪亚大学文凭办康考迪亚大学假学位办理康考迪亚大学假学历证书。 KAJAKHSJKSJKSJKSSJNBSNSBSNM I will say that the set up of a new Apple TV remains sort of a pain. It’s weird, Apple has made the very initial part a breeze — you just hold your iPhone close to the device and it copies over your main details like WiFi and iTunes login. But for each app you’ll have to re-auth in. And again, this sucks using a remote (as it does with any remote). It’s better using the software remote built into iOS, but it still sucks that you have to do this at all. And it especially sucks because it’s not just entering log-ins and passwords, but often using a phone or computer to visit URLs and entering codes to auth. Amazon is actually by far the best at this, as they give you a QR code to scan with your phone’s camera and you’re done. Everyone: copy this approach.

1/11/2020 X Marks the Spot Sound Tangler Riddle-Puzzle The X: The idea of this puzzle is like trying to say something awkward 10 times, but here each X entry has its own subtle pronunciation, which would limber up any tongue in the X-ese language. Another approach is to write them out in whatever order you want pronunciation as you go. You will find both confusingly challenging. X (chi/ki, now YZ indeed? eks, plural exes): eks __ ks gz kzh k/sh h z gzh kh kh eks __ ks gz kzh k/sh h z gzh gzh kh eks __ ks gz kzh ks/h h z z gzh kh eks __ ks gz kzh k/sh h h z gzh kh eks __ ks gz kzh k/sh k/sh h z gzh kh eks __ ks gz kzh kzh k/sh h z gzh kh eks __ ks gz gz kzh k/sh h z gzh kh eks __ xxxxxxxx8 marks the spot Sound Key: -X (own name; X-ray) not listed -(k)/eks (excite, extra, intellectual) -__ (silent: Sioux Falls, faux) -ks (exit, ox, xion, ction) -gz (exert, exaltation, auxillary, exhaust) -kzh (luxury, Tupuxuara-flying dinosaur) -k/sh (complexion, obnoxious, textual) -h (Don Quixote, Xavier) -z (xylophone, Xerox, Xanadu) -gzh (luxurious, luxuriate) -kh (chi, ki) (Overlapping is subtle) *Zenzizenzizenic8 –“the eighth power of a number.” See the archaic word site The Phrontistery online, a great collection of rare, obsolete and extinct words of all sorts. exit.... dlaurent 2 of 2 end

Some have called for “degrowth”, a movement that embraces zero or even negative GDP growth that is gaining some traction (at least in the richest countries). As the critique of economic growth moves to centre stage, consumerism’s financial and cultural dominance in public and private life will be overhauled.[42] This is made obvious in consumer-driven degrowth activism in some niche segments – like advocating for less meat or fewer flights. By triggering a period of enforced degrowth, the pandemic has spurred renewed interest in this movement that wants to reverse the pace of economic growth, leading more than 1,100 experts from around the world to release a manifesto in May 2020 putting forward a degrowth strategy to tackle the economic and human crisis caused by COVID-19.[43] Their open letter calls for the adoption of a democratically “planned yet adaptive, sustainable, and equitable downscaling of the economy, leading to a future where we can live better with less”. However, beware of the pursuit of degrowth proving as directionless as the pursuit of growth! The most forward-looking countries and their governments will instead prioritize a more inclusive and sustainable approach to managing and measuring their economies, one that also drives job growth, improvements in living standards and safeguards the planet. The technology to do more with less already exists.[44] There is no fundamental trade-off between economic, social and environmental factors if we adopt this more holistic and longer-term approach to defining progress and incentivizing investment in green and social frontier markets.

At other charter networks, the changes made to boost college success might look a little different, but they share one commonality: making students more independent learners and thus more likely to survive on a college campus. At Boston’s Brooke Charter Schools, for example, which just launched its first high school and has yet to send any graduates to college, the mindset begins in the earliest grades. During one visit there, I watched fourth-grade teacher Heidi Deck practice “flipped instruction,” in which students, when presented with a new problem, are first asked to solve it on their own, armed only with the tools of lessons learned from previous problems. “We really push kids to be engaged with the struggle,” said Deck. Next, she invites them to collaborate with one another to solve the problem, followed by more individual attempts to do the same. Always, Deck expects the students to figure out the puzzle. This is exactly the opposite of the most common approach to instruction, in which teachers demonstrate and then have students practice what they just watched. That’s dubbed the “I do —we do —you do” approach. With flipped instruction —and the many other teacher innovations here —“kids have to do the logical work of figuring something out rather than repeating what the teacher does,” said Brooke’s chief academic officer, Kimberly Steadman. The goal: Starting with its Class of 2020, the first graduating class Brooke sends off to college, all its students will be independent learners, able to roll with the surprises that confront all college students, especially first-generation college-goers.

LIKE ALL AMERICANS, I was shocked by what happened on January 6. But it was, at the same time, deeply familiar. President Trump’s defiance after losing the 2020 election reminded me of other presidents, from Nicolás Maduro, who in the months before Venezuela’s 2015 election declared he would not relinquish his post no matter the outcome, to Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to concede after Ivory Coast’s 2010 election because he claimed it was stolen. Venezuela slid toward authoritarianism; the Ivory Coast descended into civil war. A part of me did not want to accept the implications of what I was seeing. I thought of Daris, from Sarajevo, who, even years later, still struggled to understand how the people of his multicultural, vibrant country had turned so violently on one another. This is America, I thought. We are known for our tolerance and our veneration of democracy. But this is where political science, with its structured approach to analyzing history as it unfolds, can be so helpful. No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war; the decay is often so incremental that people often fail to notice or understand it, even as they’re experiencing it. If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America—the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela—you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered dangerous territory.

The second stage of insurgency, which the CIA calls the incipient conflict stage, is marked by discrete acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh’s attack in Oklahoma City could be viewed as the very earliest attack, in some ways years before its time. The insurgents’ goal is to broadcast their mission to the world, build support, and provoke a government overreaction to their violence, so that more moderate citizens become radicalized and join the movement. The second stage is when the government becomes aware of the groups behind these attacks, but according to the CIA, the violence is often dismissed “as the work of bandits, criminals, or terrorists.” Timothy McVeigh seemed to many Americans a lone wolf actor. But McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, were suspected members of the Michigan Militia. In 2012, the number of right-wing terrorist attacks and plots was fourteen; by August 2020, it was sixty-one, a historic high. The open insurgency stage, the final phase, according to the CIA’s report, is characterized by sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes, as well as hit-and-run raids on police and military units. These groups also tend to use more sophisticated weapons, such as improvised explosive devices, and begin to attack vital infrastructure (such as hospitals, bridges, and schools), rather than just individuals. These attacks also involve a larger number of fighters, some of whom have combat experience. There is often evidence “of insurgent penetration and subversion of the military, police, and intelligence services.” If there is foreign support for the insurgents, this is where it becomes more apparent. In this stage, the extremists are trying to force the population to choose sides, in part by demonstrating to citizens that the government cannot keep them safe or provide basic necessities. The insurgents are trying to prove that they are the ones who should have political power; they are the ones who should rule. The goal is to incite a broader civil war, by denigrating the state and growing support for extreme measures. Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized country on the edge of anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.