Coming 2 America Quotes

Each time Olan Chapman comes to life, his anti-quarks remain on the far side of the Time Wall. After his life cycle ends, his quarks collapse back to these roots, and – presto – America's most wanted man is ready for his next adventure.

I sighed. "Actually, Mom, we argue pretty regularly." "What?" She gaped at me. "Well, stop it!" "Oh, and I kneed him in the groin once." There was a split second of silence before May barked a laugh. She covered her mouth and tried to stop it, but it kept coming out in awkward, squeaky sounds. Dad's lips were pressed together, but I could tell he was on the verge of losing it himself. Mom was paler then snow. "America, tell me you're joking. Tell me you didn't assault the prince." I don't know why, but the word assault pushed us all on the edge; and May, Dad, and I bent over laughing as Mom stared at us. "Sorry, Mom," I managed. "Oh, good lord." She suddenly seemed very excited in meeting Marlee's parents, and I didn't stop her from going.

When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.

I hear my father's voice. "Political differences divided what used to be America into The Nationalist States and The Patriot States: Then Nats declared war on the Patriots. Why?" Olmo answers in an overly enthusiastic tone. "Because they couldn't agree on the division of derritoryes!" "Territories," corrects Dad. "That, too," says Olmo cheerfully.

If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph, or whatever in the Garden again— if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century, He returned to see how much suffering His abandonment had created, if all He has to offer is death, you should sue the bastard. That’s my only contribution to all this theology: sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He.

Come on, Snow. Let's see America.

Most states still allow restaurant and other service workers to be paid a subminimum wage, which is a meager $2.13 an hour at the federal level, forcing nearly 5 million workers to survive on tips. (Where did the concept of subminimum wage come from? It’s a vestige of slavery. After emancipation, restaurant owners hired formerly enslaved Black workers for free. They had to rely on customers’ charity.) This is indefensible.

What if they come after us?” said Mr. Bucket, speaking for the first time. “What if they capture us?” said Mrs. Bucket. “What if they shoot us?” said Grandma Georgina. “What if my beard were made of green spinach?” cried Mr. Wonka. “Bunkum and tummyrot! You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started!

Here are the two things I have come to believe about diets: 1. Almost any diet works in the short term. 2. Almost no diets work in the long term

The faith itself was simple; he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun HERE. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and i that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all the former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.

Dear Camryn, I know you're scared. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little scared, too, but I have to believe that this time around everything will be fine. And it will be. We've been through so much together. More than most people in such a short time. But no matter what, the one thing that has never changed is that we're still together. Death couldn't take me away from you. Weakness couldn't make me look at you in a bad light. Drugs and all the shit that comes with them couldn't take you away from me. I think it's more safe to say that we're indestructable. Maybe all of this has been a test. Yeah, I think about that a lot and I've convinced myself of it. A lot of people take Fate for granted. Some have everything they've ever wanted right at their fingertips, but they abuse it. Others walk right past their only opportunity because they never open their eyes long enough to see that it's there. But you and I, even before we met, took all the risks, made our own decisions without listening to everybody around us telling us, in so many ways, that what we're doing is wrong. Hell no, we did it our way, no matter how reckless, or crazy or unconventional. It's like the more we pushed and the more we fought, the harder the obstacles. Because we had to prove we were the real deal. And I know we've done just that. Camryn, I want you to read this letter to yourself once a week. It doesn't matter what day or what time, just read it. Every time you open it, I want you to see that another week has passed and you're still pregnant. That I'm still in good health. That we're still together. I want you to think about the three of us, you, me and our son or daughter, traveling Europe and Soth America. Because we're going to do it. I promise you that. You're everything to me, and I want you to stay strong and not let your fear of the past taint the path to our future. Everything will work out this time, Camryn, everything will, I swear to you. Just trust me. Until next week... Love, Andrew

The faith itself was simple: he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun here. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it.

We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

Gray and Drew sitting side by side, with their muscled physiques taking up a good portion of the booth, look like a comic book come to life. They catch me staring and both say, “What?” at the same time. Smiling, I shake my head. “Nothing. I just had this image of Thor and Captain America having a beer.” They both color at the same time. Which is kind of cute. “Ha!” cries Anna at my side. Her cheeks plump with a wide grin. “I had that Captain America thought about Drew too.” Drew perks up. “You did, huh?” Gray snorts. “Dude, I’ve just been compared to Thor. I totally win.” “What the hell does Thor have? A little hammer?” Drew waves a hand as if to say, please. But Gray smirks. “At least he isn’t hiding behind a wussy shield. Thor is a god. Enough said.” “A boring god with the personality of a post,” Drew volleys. “And you’re saying Captain America isn’t boring? Dude. He doesn’t even understand modern culture. He’s like a 1940s Boy Scout.” Drew and Gray eyeball each other for a second. Then Drew relents with a laugh. “Touché.

He's tried to explain this a couple of times to a few of his buddies after about five beers. Like listen, listen. Imagine you live in this country, right? And there's a brutal war, and you witness and maybe participate in a horrific amount of violence, and you lose absolutely everyone you care about. Then you end up in this other country, where the culture and ways of doing things are completely foreign to you, and random assholes make fun of you for how you dress and act and talk while you're still coming to grips with the fact that everyone you love is gone and you can never go home again. Meanwhile, everyone around you is like "smile, motherfucker, you're in the Land of Plenty now, where there's a Starbucks on every corner and 500 channels on TV. You should be grateful! Why aren't you acting more grateful?" So you have to pretend to be grateful while you're dying inside. Sound like an traumatized, orphaned refugee? Also sounds like Steve fucking Rogers, Captain Goddamn America. Except that most refugees were part of a community of other people who were going through the same thing. Steve is all alone, the last damn unicorn, if the last unicorn had horrible screaming nightmares about the time when it helped to liberate Buchenwald.

thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

On September 2, 2011, the bronze statue for the dial-painters was unveiled by the governor in Ottawa, Illinois. It is a statue of a young woman from the 1920s, with a paintbrush in one hand and a tulip in the other, standing on a clock face. Her skirt swishes, as though at any moment she might step down from her time-ticking pedestal and come to life.

Jesus prophesied that “In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.” (John 16:2)

Recalcitrance and malice we find in no Salzburger; the most useless and worst are those who have come to them along the way from other places.

Scrape knees for love. Tell hard truths for love. And definitely run heart-first into the unknown for love. Try to have a plan. But if you don't, make sure you have people. You coming, mi gente?

Laurence, not sure what to do, remained standing below the steps. "And who is this?" Mrs Hamlyn asked. Patrick looked back. "His name is . . . Laurence, mistress." Mrs Hamlyn scrutinized the boy before her. "Where does he come from?" she said, finding him scrawny and dirty. "He came to America on the same ship we did." Mrs Hamlyn pursed her lips. "He's very ragged. Is he from Ireland too?" "England." "But a friend of yours?" Laurence and Patrick looked at each other. "Is he?" Mrs Hamlyn asked again. Patrick said, "He saved my life, twice." "Did he? Then he must be a good friend indeed.

The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world, for which end it is prepared to use any means necessary. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War II the United States has: 1) Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected; 2) Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries; 3) Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; 4) Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries; 5) Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started!

As Catholic Christians, we may have come to a point today where we feel like foreigners in our own country—“ strangers in a strange land,” in the beautiful English of the King James Bible (Ex 2: 22). But the deeper problem in America isn’t that we believers are “foreigners.” It’s that our children and grandchildren aren’t.

Shit, man, democracy failed before it started. Who thought it was a good idea to let the masses of fucktards decide anything? [Guess I've got more faith in people.] People? The election of 2044 -- Curls Bellberry, a boy band presidency on the platform that the Earth is flat and that he'd nuke New York to save Social Security. There's a good reason he was the last president. Problem with letting people pick a leader is they gravitate towards confident sociopaths no matter how stupid they are. It's the perception of qualification that fools people. At least by having corporate executives rule us we get folks who are good at business. Life hurts, the world is fucked, and that's not going to change. . .

He was born in Odessa and settled on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in 1906; his family's house had been burned down the previous October. Pogroms, massacres. America was in the massacre racket, too, Heshie observed, but they concentrated on Negroes and Indians for the most part. He figured they'd come for him once they ran out, but that might take years.

When you grow up Indian, you quickly learn that the so-called American Dream isn't for you. For you that dream's a nightmare. Ask any Indian kid: you're out just walking across the street of some little off-reservation town and there's this white cop suddenly comes up to you, grabs you by your long hair, pushes you up against a car, frisks you, gives you a couple good jabs in the ribs with his nightstick, then sends you off with a warning sneer: "Watch yourself, Tonto!" He doesn't do that to white kids, just Indians. You can hear him chuckling with delight as you limp off, clutching your bruised ribs. If you talk smart when they hassle you, off to the slammer you go. Keep these Injuns in their place, you know. Truth is, they actually need us. Who else would they fill up their jails and prisons with in places like the Dakotas and New Mexico if they didn't have Indians? Think of all the cops and judges and guards and lawyers who'd be out of work if they didn't have Indians to oppress! We keep the system going. We help give the American system of injustice the criminals it needs. At least being prison fodder is some kind of reason for being. Prison's the only university, the only finishing school many young Indian brothers ever see. Same for blacks and Latinos. So-called Latinos, of course, are what white man calls Indians who live south of the Rio Grande. White man's books will tell you there are only 2.5 million or so of us Indians here in America. But there are more than 200 million of us right here in this Western Hemisphere, in the Americas, and hundreds of millions more indigenous peoples around this Mother Earth. We are the Original People. We are one of the fingers on the hand of humankind. Why is it we are unrepresented in our own lands, and without a seat — or many seats — in the United Nations? Why is it we're allowed to send our delegates only to prisons and to cemeteries?

The Boston Consulting Group recently released a study showing that there were 5.2 million households in America that could be classified as millionaires.1 I would love to see a candidate for national office, especially president, come out and announce that his platform was squarely oriented toward creating wealth, that in 8 to 10 years we would have 50 million millionaires in America.

Barry said he can hide me – get me a new identity and a new life. I could come to America.” He’s silent, and then he says, “You’re going to annoy me by visiting every day, aren’t you?” “If I take him up on his offer, then yes.” “I’d rather spend a year back down in confinement.” I smile at his joking tone. “I think we’re becoming friends, Tobias.” He lets out a disbelieving laugh and hangs up on me.

The world Gary Henderson predicted when he coined the term “designer drugs” in 1988 is now with us. Counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl and made in Mexico now dominate the market and have replaced the sloppy Magic Bullet blender in a dealer’s kitchen and the powder fentanyl coming from China. In Los Angeles, DEA agents seized 120,000 of these pills crossing the border in 2017, and 1.2 million of them in 2020.

despite these changes, the student bodies of the elite schools were still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper-middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares’s analysis in The Power of Privilege, consistent with other such analyses, 79 percent of students at “Tier 1” colleges as of the 1990s came from families in the top quartile of socioeconomic status, while only 2 percent came from the bottom quartile.16

There is some interesting new research15 that suggests that the Little Ice Age might have been caused in part by reforestation after the genocide of native people in the Americas. Following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans killed about 90 percent of the indigenous population, either directly or by spreading disease. The dead stopped farming, and trees started to grow back, reducing CO2 concentrations enough to cause a global cooling.

Mostly because of the harm they do. Not just to users,’ he says, ‘but the whole way along the chain, from poor farmers in Latin America who are terrorised by the cartels, to the organised crime and violence that goes with distributing drugs right here in Australia. And, of course, the damage it does to your body and the pain and criminal behaviour that comes with addiction. Using drugs recreationally might seem like fun in the moment but you’re supporting a whole world of violence and crime.

I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH). From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits? We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea? What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?

The reason we haven’t solved the race problem in America after hundreds of years is that people apart from God are trying to create unity, while people under God who already have unity are not living out the unity we possess. The result of both of these conditions is disastrous for America. Our failure to find cultural unity as a nation is directly related to the church’s failure to preserve our spiritual unity. The church has already been given unity because we’ve been made part of the same family. An interesting point to note about family is that you don’t have to get family to be family. A family already is a family. But sometimes you do have to get family to act like family. In the family of God, this is done through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. A perfect example of spiritual unity came on the Day of Pentecost when God’s people spoke with other tongues (Acts 2:4). When the Holy Spirit showed up, people spoke in languages they didn’t know so that people from a variety of backgrounds could unite under the cross of Jesus Christ. The people who heard the apostles speak on the Day of Pentecost were from all over the world, representing at least sixteen different geographical areas, racial categories, or ethnic groups (Acts 2:8–11). But in spite of the great diversity, they found true oneness in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual oneness always and only comes to those who are under God’s authority because in that reality He enables them with the power of His Spirit.

Just seven minutes after most of Murphysboro was leveled, the Tri-State Tornado hit DeSoto at 2:48 P.M. No town in the path would proportionally suffer a higher fatality rate than this tiny village in which sixty-nine people died. Thirty-three of them were children buried in the burning ruins of the DeSoto Schoolhouse, a heartbreaking record that remains the single worst tornado-related death toll for a school in US history. One in four DeSoto children who walked off to school that day would never come home to supper.

[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?

This need for me to settle somewhere, on something. To make some choices about my life. What is the life I've dreamed of? Growing up in America, when I was younger, I didn't see many kids who looked like me in books, in video games, on television. What I did see were stereotypes---good at math, studying, working hard. Narrow versions of myself. Now, my world has expanded. I can have things at the touch of my fingertips. But there are still rules to abide by. Princess rules. What I can do and can't. Like my major. I may choose it but within certain parameters. Does life always come with constraints? Is that part of growing up?

As Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argue, one of the negative consequences of this colorblind ideology that it “inhibit[s] racialized minorities from struggling against their marginalized status. . . . It gives those who have enjoyed little power in our society no mechanisms for understanding and challenging the systemic nature of their oppression. . . . The way race has been used both to distribute resources and to camouflage the unfairness in that distribution remains invisible. . . . And the political space, where groups come together to give voice to their collective experience and mobilize to engage in fundamental social change, vanishes

Yet laying the blame on a lack of personal responsibility obscures the fact that there are powerful and ever-changing structural forces at play here. Service sector employers often engage in practices that middle-class professionals would never accept. They adopt policies that, purposely or not, ensure regular turnover among their low-wage workers, thus cutting the costs that come with a more stable workforce, including guaranteed hours, benefits, raises, promotions, and the like. Whatever can be said about the characteristics of the people who work low-wage jobs, it is also true that the jobs themselves too often set workers up for failure. The

Bless me, readers, for I have published. It's been five years since my last book. Greetings, fellow sinners! If you picked up a copy of this book, it means you are either: 1) wracked with guilt and are looking for penance, or 2) need to spend over $10.00 at the airport newsstand so you can use your credit card. Either way, welcome to Stephen Colbert's Midnight Confessions. As America's foremost TV Catholic, it was natural for me to do a segment inspired by the church. After all, the Catholic Church and late night TV actually have a lot in common: our shows last about an hour, we're obsessed with reaching younger demographics, and the hosts are almost always men. This religious-adjacent tome contains all my favorite confessions from The Late Show. These are things that aren't necessarily sins, but I do feel guilty about them. For instance, repackaging material from the show and selling it in a book. I've always been a big fan of confession. The confessional is a great place to go to relieve yourself of your sins. Unless you're claustrophobic, in which case it's a suffocating death trap of despair! And while most confession books just give you run-of-the-mill mortal sins, I go one step further and provide you with mortal sins, venial sins, deadly sins, and even sins of omission (Notice that the previous sentence didn't have a period!) This book is a throwback to a simpler life when people would go to a priest to confess their sins. As opposed to how it's done now - getting drunk and weeping to Andy Cohen on Bravo. Confessing your sins is a great way to get things off your chest. Second only to waxing. The only downside is that you get introduced to it as a kid, before you have any juicy sins to confess. Oh, you stole a cookie? That's adorable, Becky. Come back when you total your dad's Chevy. Now you might be asking yourself, "What if I'm not Catholic - can I still enjoy this book?" Of course. After all, no matter what religion you are - be it Jewish, Muslim, Lutheran, Pagan, or SoulCycle - we all have things to feel guilty about. For example, not being Catholic.

[W]hen you look at who’ll be collecting this tax, the chances of drumming up a conspiracy suddenly look even worse. In America, .03 percent of all of America’s companies—688 companies, to be exact—sell 48.5 percent of all of the merchandise. Those companies aren't going to help you cheat; there’s simply too much at stake. Date also show that 3.6 percent of all of America’s companies—92,334 firms—collectively make 85.7 percent of all sales… When it comes to the services sector, the fact is that 1.2 percent of all businesses make approximately 80 percent of the sales in the services sector. They have too much to lose to risk helping you cheat. Even if the FairTax were paid only by these few companies, we would still have a better collection rate than the IRS currently has with the income tax.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU WOULD do if tens of thousands of Israelis were being murdered by Palestinians? If heroin deaths in Israel suddenly tripled and 90 percent of the heroin was coming into Israel through the Palestinian territories—some of it through a tunnel the length of six football fields?1 If ISIS butchers were on Israel’s border? If you guessed, “Give them in-state college tuition, driver’s licenses, and free medical care,” you would be wrong. In 2012, Israel had sixty thousand illegal aliens, which would be the equivalent of a mere 2 million illegals in America. Warning that the illegals would overwhelm Israel and destroy the nature of the country, Netanyahu vowed to complete a border fence. Even opposition leader Yair Lapid supported a fence, as well as “the arrest and deportation of infiltrators.”2

MARY: It’s called a Schloss. That’s what small castles are called in Styria, Laura told me. CATHERINE: Yes, but do you think our English readers are going to know that? Or our American readers? I’m hoping for some American sales, if the deal with Collier & Son comes through, and there are no Schlosses in America—just teepees and department stores. BEATRICE: The slaughter of the native population is a shameful stain on American history. Clarence says— CATHERINE: For goodness’ sake, how are we going to sell to readers in the United States if you go on about the slaughter of the native Americans? Who’s going to want to read about that? BEATRICE: Those who do not want to read about it are exactly those who should be made aware, Catherine. This may be a story of our adventures, but we must not shy away from confronting the difficult issues of the times. Literature exists to educate as well as entertain, after all. DIANA: You all went from Schlosses to teepees to a political discussion, and you think I ramble?

and by staff doctors, at least one of which resulted in a pregnancy. Earlier in the chain—on March 27—Walker, wary of the effect the scandal might have on his campaign, had written, “We need to continue to keep me out of the story as this is a process issue and not a policy matter.”1 Walker’s staff labored through the spring and summer to satisfy his wish. On September 2, Rindfleisch wrote, “Last week was a nightmare. A bad story every day on our looney bin. Doctors having sex with patients, patients getting knocked up. This has been coming for months and I’ve unofficially been dealing with it. So, it’s been crazy (pun intended).” Later, in an attempt to reassure a colleague on Walker’s staff, Rindfleisch somehow found it in herself to write: “No one cares about crazy people.”2 I began to rethink my determination not to write this book. I realized that my ten years of silence on the subject, silence that I had justified as insulation against an exercise in self-indulgence, was itself an exercise in self-indulgence. The

Parents like Jennifer, Susan, and Rae express desires that are quite modest. Full-time hours come first. That is a prize that can be astonishingly hard to wrest from a low-wage employer who wants to avoid added costs associated with full-time employment, such as health insurance and paid time off. A predictable schedule, so parents can arrange for safe, reliable child care, comes next. A few say they would be happy if they could get just those two things. Yet finding a job with even those basic attributes is something Susan Brown feels she can only dream of, not expect. Most parents, like Jennifer and Rae, hope for a little more. If they could just make $12 or $13 per hour, they say, they could make it; $15 per hour is really shooting the moon. Safe working conditions, and some sick or personal days, would be a real plus. The other “extras” that once came routinely with a full-time job—health insurance, vacation days, and retirement benefits—don’t often come up in conversations with the $2-a-day poor. These perks are so uncommon among the jobs available to low-wage workers that they seem all but outside the bounds of reality.

Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics currently holds in the social sciences. In many ways it is treated as a kind of master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything important in America is expected to have some training in economic theory, or at least to be familiar with its basic tenets. As a result, those tenets have come to be treated as received wisdom, as basically beyond question (one knows one is in the presence of received wisdom when, if one challenges some tenet of it, the first reaction is to treat one as simply ignorant—“You obviously have never heard of the Laffer Curve”; “Clearly you need a course in Economics 101”—the theory is seen as so obviously true that no one exposed to it could possibly disagree). What’s more, those branches of social theory that make the greatest claims to “scientific status”—“rational choice theory,” for instance—start from the same assumptions about human psychology that economists do: that human beings are best viewed as self-interested actors calculating how to get the best terms possible out of any situation, the most profit or pleasure or happiness for the least sacrifice or investment—curious, considering experimental psychologists have demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply aren’t true.2

Obama’s father had studied in a missionary school and was working as a clerk in Nairobi. He was encouraged to come to America for further study by two missionary women, Helen Roberts and Elizabeth Mooney, who were living at the time in Kenya. In Obama’s Selma narrative, this was made possible by the Kennedy family. “What happened in Selma, Alabama, and Birmingham also, stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House,” he said. “The Kennedys decided we’re going to do an airlift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country.” Soon after that Obama got married and “Barack Obama Jr. was born.... So I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.” Except that the Kennedys had nothing to do with Obama’s father coming to America. As Obama’s staff eventually acknowledged, Obama Sr. arrived here in 1959. John F. Kennedy was elected president the following year.1 The two American teachers who had encouraged Obama Sr. to make the trip paid his travel costs and the bulk of his expenses. There was an airlift, organized by the Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya with financial support from a number of American philanthropists. It brought several dozen African students to America to study, but Barack Obama Sr. did not come on that plane. Rather, he came on his own and enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.2 Moreover, the march in Selma occurred in March 1965, while Obama Jr. was born in August 1961; Selma had nothing to do with the circumstances of Obama’s birth.

If a man jumped as high as a louse (lice), he would jump over a football field. In Ancient Egypt, the average life expectancy was 19 years, but for those who survived childhood, the average life expectancy was 30 years for women and 34 years for men. The volume of the moon is equivalent to the volume of the water in the Pacific Ocean. After the 9/11 incident, the Queen of England authorized the guards to break their vow and sing America’s national anthem for Americans living in London. In 1985, lifeguards of New Orleans threw a pool party to celebrate zero drownings, however, a man drowned in that party. Men and women have different dreams. 70 percent of characters in men’s dreams are other men, whereas in women its 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Men also act more aggressively in dreams than women. A polar bear has a black skin. 2.84 percent of deaths are caused by intentional injuries (suicides, violence, war) while 3.15 percent are caused by diarrhea. On average people are more afraid of spiders than they are afraid of death. A bumblebee has hairs on its eyes, helping it collect the pollen. Mickey Mouse’s creator, Walt Disney feared mice. Citarum river in Indonesia is the dirtiest and most polluted river in the world. When George R R Martin saw Breaking Bad’s episode called “Ozymandias”, he called Walter White and said that he’d write up a character more monstrous than him. Maria Sharapova’s grunt is the loudest in the Tennis game and is often criticized for being a distraction. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for “kangaroo” translates literally to “bag rat”. The first product to have a barcode was a chewing gum Wrigley. Chambarakat dam in Iraq is considered the most dangerous dam in the world as it is built upon uneven base of gypsum that can cause more than 500,000 casualties, if broken. Matt Urban was an American Lieutenant Colonel who was nicknamed “The Ghost” by Germans because he always used to come back from wounds that would kill normal people.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

Manhattan Prep started out as one lone tutor in a Starbucks coffee shop. Less than ten years later, it was a leading national education and publishing business that employed over one hundred people and was acquired by a public company for millions of dollars. How did that happen? We delivered a service that customers liked more than what was otherwise available. They sought us out and rewarded us with their business. We hired more people, grew, and kept improving. This process—a new company filling a need and flourishing as a result—is an example of value creation. It’s the fuel of economic growth, and what our country has been seeking a formula for. It’s the process that leads to new businesses and jobs. Value creation has a polar opposite: rent-seeking. In the 1980s, economists began noticing that countries with ample natural resources experienced lower economic growth rates than others. From 1965 to 1998 in the OPEC (oil-producing) countries, gross domestic product per capita decreased on average by 1.3 percent, while in the rest of the developed world, per capita growth increased by 2.2 percent (for an overall difference of 3.5 percent). This was a surprise—if you had lots of oil in the ground, wouldn’t that give you more wealth to invest and thus spur more rapid growth? Economists cited a number of factors to explain this “resource curse,” including internal and external conflict, corruption, lower monitoring of government, lack of diversification, and being subject to higher price volatility. One other possible explanation on offer was that a country’s smart people will wind up going to work in whatever industry is throwing off money (like the oil industry in Saudi Arabia). Thus fewer talented people are innovating in other industries, dragging down the growth rate over time. This makes sense—it’s a lot easier for a gifted Saudi to plug into the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and extract economic value than to come up with a new business or industry. Does this sort of thing happen in the United States? Yes, you can make money through rent-seeking as opposed to value or wealth creation.

I am assured that this is a true story. A man calls up his computer helpline complaining that the cupholder on his personal computer has snapped off, and he wants to know how to get it fixed. “Cupholder?” says the computer helpline person, puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m confused. Did you buy this cupholder at a computer show or receive it as a special promotion?” “No, it came as part of the standard equipment on my computer.” “But our computers don’t come with cupholders.” “Well, pardon me, friend, but they do,” says the man a little hotly. “I’m looking at mine right now. You push a button on the base of the unit and it slides right out.” The man, it transpired, had been using the CD drawer on his computer to hold his coffee cup. I bring this up here by way of introducing our topic this week: cupholders. Cupholders are taking over the world. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The New York Times recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. A car dealer acquaintance of ours tells us that they are one of the first things people remark on, ask about, or play with when they come to look at a car. People buy cars on the basis of cupholders. Nearly all car advertisements note the number of cupholders prominently in the text. Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question. Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of the family had a Slurpee and a personal bottle of

The flag story is important, Berntson thought. Before the assault was over, Christmas had sent Frank Thomas, his gunnery sergeant, to find an American flag. He knew it was against the rules. This was a war on behalf of the Republic of Vietnam, and the correct flag to run up the pole at its province headquarters would have been Saigon’s yellow and red ensign. But Christmas’s men had bled and died all the way across southern Hue, not ARVN troops. They had looked up at that enemy flag the whole way. They had taken it down, and they wanted to show who had done it. The Stars and Stripes had earned its place. Berntson continued jotting down Christmas’s words: “‘Proudest moment of my life—to be given opp to do it’ . . . ‘main thought was getting the flag up—so it would fly and everyone could see that flag flying’ . . . Capt. Ron Christmas, 27, 2001 S.W. 36th Ave, Fort Lauderdale, FLA CO for 2/5 Hotel . . . ‘street fighting is dirtiest close in. Biggest problem is control—keeping all platoons in line—communication also problem . . . platoons have done extremely well . . . flag. ‘inspiration thing I have ever seen in my lifetime—because it was a hard thing. That feeling of patriotism . . . all you could hear are cheers . . . really brings out America Spirit.’” Hours later, Christmas was paid a visit by two officers, both majors, one army and the other marine. They had been sent by Colonel Hughes from the compound. They said the American flag would have to come down. The South Vietnamese flag was the appropriate one. The men around Christmas were still loading up the wounded and dead. “I don’t think my men are going to like that,” he said. “That doesn’t make any difference,” said one. “You are violating protocol.” “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Christmas. “If you want to take the flag down, you guys go take it down. But I cannot be responsible for all of my men.” Kaczmarek, who was sitting close enough to overhear the exchange, chose that moment to reposition his rifle. The majors left. The flag remained. Christmas had a gunny sergeant haul it down at sunset, and the next morning a bright yellow South Vietnamese flag flew in its place. But watching Old Glory run up that afternoon was a sight none of the marines who witnessed it would ever regret, or forget.

The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

WILL WORK FOR FOOD © 2013 Lyrics & Music by Michele Jennae There he was with a cardboard sign, Will Work For Food Saw him on the roadside, As I took my kids to school I really didn’t have time to stop, Already running late Found myself pulling over, Into the hands of fate The look in his eyes was empty, But he held out his hand I knew my kids were watching, As I gave him all I had My heart in my throat I had to ask, “What brought you here?” He looked up and straight into my eyes, I wanted to disappear. CHORUS He said… Do you think I really saw myself, Standing in this light Forgotten by society, After fighting for your rights WILL WORK FOR FOOD, WILL DIE FOR YOU I AM JUST A FORGOTTEN SOLDIER, I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO v. 2 He put the money in his pocket, Then he took me by the hand Thank you dear for stopping by, I am sure that you have plans He nodded toward my children, Watching from afar It’s time they were off to school, You should get in the car My eyes welled up and tears fell down, I couldn’t say a word Here this man with nothing to his name, Showing me his concern I knew then that the lesson, That today must be taught Wouldn’t come from textbooks, And it could not be bought CHORUS He said… Do you think I really saw myself, Standing in this light Forgotten by society, After fighting for your rights WILL WORK FOR FOOD, WILL DIE FOR YOU I AM JUST A FORGOTTEN SOLDIER, I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO v. 3 I told him then that I had a job, That I could give him work And in return he’d have a meal, And something to quench his thirst He looked at me and shrugged a bit, And followed me to the car We went right over to a little café, Just up the road not too far After I ordered our food he looked at me, And asked about the kids “Shouldn’t these tykes be in school, And about that job you said.” “Your job,” I said, “is to school my girls, In the ways of the world Explain to them your service, And how your life unfurled.” He said… Do you think I really saw myself, Standing in this light Forgotten by society, After fighting for your rights WILL WORK FOR FOOD, WILL DIE FOR YOU I AM JUST A FORGOTTEN SOLDIER, I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO v. 4He wasn’t sure quite what to do, As he ate his food And began to tell us all about his life… the bad… the good. He wiped his own tears from his eyes, His story all but done My girls and I all choked up, Hugged him one by one Understanding his sacrifice, But not his current plight We resolved then and there that day, That for him, we would fight. We offered him our friendship, And anything else we had He wasn’t sure how to accept it, But we made him understand LAST CHORUS That we had not really seen before, Him standing in the light No longer forgotten by us, We are now fighting for his rights He had… WORKED FOR FOOD HE HAD ALL BUT DIED FOR ME AND YOU NOT FORGOTTEN ANYMORE BUT STILL A SOLDIER IN TRUST

Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

In October, 2008, radical Muslims drove 3,000 Christians out of their homes in Mosul, Iraq, in what the media described as a “killing campaign.” Nevertheless, one displaced Christian cleric was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “We are at a loss to understand the violence. We respect the Islamic religion and the Muslim clerics.” Respecting people who are sworn to kill you, because they think your death at their hand is a favor to Allah, may not be the wisest conclusion. Jesus prophesied that “In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.” (John 16:2)

We have the money. We've just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians' canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

Gray and Drew sitting side by side, with their muscled physiques taking up a good portion of the booth, look like a comic book come to life. They catch me staring and both say, “What?” at the same time. Smiling, I shake my head. “Nothing. I just had this image of Thor and Captain America having a beer.

I am claiming that the making of life for the oppressed is a love of the enemy in the sense that the enemy is challenged to come out of prevailing systems of death to embrace, support, and enter into what makes for life and justice for the oppressed and ultimately for all.

Over and over, early Christian writings tell us of how Christians were branded atheists by the imperial courts and executed for this capital crime. They had lost all faith in the empire and had become faithful to God alone as the one who could preserve peace and prosperity. They claimed Jesus as their only emperor (Acts 17:7), they preached the kingdom of their God, and they pledged allegiance to the slaughtered Lamb. Today, there are many things I love about “America the Beautiful,” and yet the book of Revelation sounds a clear warning that any glory we give to Babylon is glory that belongs only to God. As my friend Tony Campolo says, “We may live in the best Babylon in the world, but it is still Babylon, and we are called to ‘come out of her.’” John warns the church in Asia Minor to be “faithful unto death” (Rev. 2:10). He describes a marriage between God and God’s people. They are to be loyal to their lover, Yahweh, their faith remaining in God alone, adorned as a bride, the New Jerusalem. Describing Rome as the whoring seductress Babylon the Great, John warns the Christians that the empire will entice them with a counterfeit splendor, and he warns against flirting with her pleasures and treasures, which will soon come to ruin. They are not to be shocked and awed by Babylon’s power nor dazzled by her jewels. Rather than drinking humanity’s blood from her golden cup of suffering (17:6), they are to choose the eucharistic cup filled with the blood of the new covenant. We are faithful not to the triumphant golden eagle (ironically, also an imperial symbol of power in Rome) but to the slaughtered Lamb.

Survival strategies come in three forms. The first is taking advantage of public spaces and private charities—the nation’s libraries, food pantries, homeless shelters, and so on. Then come a variety of income-generation strategies, such as donating plasma—means for gleaning at least some of that all-important resource that families seem unable to survive without: cash. Finally, there’s the art—often finely honed through years of hardship—of finding ways to stretch your resources and make do with less.   Public

Burridge, Richard A. Four Gospels, One Jesus? A Symbolic Reading. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. *Campbell, Anthony F., and Mark A. O’Brien. Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History: Origins, Upgrades, Present Text. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. *Clifford, Richard J. Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994. Dever, William G. Who Were the Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006. *Dillard, Raymond B. 2 Chronicles. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1988. *Dunn, James D. G. The New Perspective on Paul. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Earl, Douglass S. The Joshua Delusion: Rethinking Genocide in the Bible. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011. Enns, Peter, and Jared Byas. Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible. Colorado Springs: Patheos Press, 2012. Enns, Peter. Ecclesiastes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. ———. Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker,

Ocean, the future center of global trade. Why should it not prosper? Nobody can predict the future with 100 percent certainty. I’m not convinced it will happen. But I am a possibilist and these facts convince me: it is possible. The destiny instinct makes it difficult for us to accept that Africa can catch up with the West. Africa’s progress, if it is noticed at all, is seen as an improbable stroke of good fortune, a temporary break from its impoverished and war-torn destiny. The same destiny instinct also seems to make us take continuing Western progress for granted, with the West’s current economic stagnation portrayed as a temporary accident from which it will soon recover. For years after the global crash of 2008, the International Monetary Fund continued to forecast 3 percent annual economic growth for countries on Level 4. Each year, for five years, countries on Level 4 failed to meet this forecast. Each year, for five years, the IMF said, “Next year it will get back on track.” Finally, the IMF realized that there was no “normal” to go back to, and it downgraded its future growth expectations to 2 percent. At the same time the IMF acknowledged that the fast growth (above 5 percent) during those years had instead happened in countries on Level 2, like Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya in Africa, and Bangladesh in Asia. Why does this matter? One reason is this: the IMF forecasters’ worldview had a strong influence on where your retirement funds were invested. Countries in Europe and North America were expected to experience fast and reliable growth, which made them attractive to investors. When these forecasts turned out to be wrong, and when these countries did not in fact grow fast, the retirement funds did not grow either. Supposedly low-risk/high-return countries turned out to be high-risk/low-return countries. And at the same time African countries with great growth potential were being starved of investment. Another reason it matters, if you work for a company based in the old “West,” is that you are probably missing opportunities in the largest expansion of the middle-income consumer market in history, which is taking place right now in Africa and Asia. Other, local brands are already establishing a foothold, gaining brand recognition, and spreading throughout these continents, while you are still waking up to what is going on. The Western consumer market was just a teaser for what is coming next.

What are we talking about in 2001? A Tuesday morning with a crystalline sky. American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175, also from Boston to Los Angeles, crashes into the South Tower at 9:03. American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles hits the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. And at 10:03 a.m., United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco crashes in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There are 2,996 fatalities. The country is stunned and grief-stricken. We have been attacked on our own soil for the first time since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. A man in a navy-blue summer-weight suit launches himself from a 103rd-floor window. An El Salvadoran line chef running late for his prep shift at Windows on the World watches the sky turn to fire and the top of the building—six floors beneath the kitchen where he works—explode. Cantor Fitzgerald. President Bush in a bunker. The pregnant widow of a brave man who says, “Let’s roll.” The plane that went down in Pennsylvania was headed for the Capitol Building. The world says, America was attacked. America says, New York was attacked. New York says, Downtown was attacked. There’s a televised benefit concert, America: A Tribute to Heroes. The Goo Goo Dolls and Limp Bizkit sing “Wish You Were Here.” Voicemail messages from the dead. First responders running up the stairs while civilians run down. Flyers plastered across Manhattan: MISSING. The date—chosen by the terrorists because of the bluebird weather—has an eerie significance: 9/11. Though we will all come to call it Nine Eleven

Table 2.1. Percentage saying “Most people can be trusted” Cultural Zone % N Protestant Europe 61 (20,530) Confucian 46 (7,736) English-speaking 42 (10,533) Baltic 31 (4,147) Catholic Europe 28 (22,284) South Asia 25 (10,646) Orthodox 19 (21,321) Islamic 18 (28,990) Sub-Saharan Africa 15 (16,865) Latin America 11 (17,177) Total (160,229) Source: Latest available survey for each country in the Values Surveys. Weber predicted

You get out,” Foley said, “you’re free, they can’t deport you?” “Fidel won’t take us back.” “You glad you came to America?” “I’m grateful for the ways they are to improve myself since I come to La Yuma. I respect how justice wears a blindfold, like a fucking hostage.

Just think about the incredible transformation that took place in Steve’s life and career after Pixar. In 1983, Apple launched their computer Lisa, the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs returned to the company after running Pixar, Apple became customer-centric, compelling, and clear in their communication. The first campaign he released went from nine pages in the New York Times to just two words on billboards all over America: Think Different. When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers. I’ll teach you about these three pillars and more in the coming chapters, but for now just realize the time Apple spent clarifying the role they play in their customers’ story is one of the primary factors responsible for their growth. Notice, though, the story of Apple isn’t about Apple; it’s about you. You’re the hero in the story, and they play a role more like Q in the James Bond movies. They are the guy you go see when you need a tool to help you win the day.

As they crossed the assembly yard, all three men suddenly heard the start up of construction noise, coming from the nearby thick forest, on the far side of the wire. A distant whistle, some shouts, and the rat-a-tat of hammers and the ripping sound of handsaws. "They start those poor bastards early, don't they?" Scott asked rhetorically. "And then they work them late. Makes you glad you weren't born a Russian," he said. Then he smiled wryly. "You know, there's probably a joke in that some- where. Do you suppose right now one of those poor s.o.b.'s is saying he's glad he wasn't born black in America? After all, the damn Germans are just working them to death. Me? I've got to worry about my own country- men shooting me.

Outlaw Prairie Thunder [Verse] This old town's got nothing left, storefronts boarded tight, Once was a place of hope and pride, now lost to endless night. Biden's bowed out gracefully, Kamala's on parade, Trump's stirring up the winds of change, on a roaring train of rage. [Verse 2] Folks around these parts are weary, they’re standing in the sun, Fighting for the scraps they get, wondering if help will come. Saw old man Jenkins cry today, says he can't stand the weight, Bank just took his family farm, he's cursing his cruel fate. [Chorus] Oh, where’s the heart of this country, when our leaders just play the game? Trading blows on TV screens, while we live with loss and pain. Oh, America’s torn at the seams, can’t find trust or grace, In this outlaw prairie thunder, we’re all part of the race. [Verse 3] Mama's working double shifts, just to pay the rent, Daddy's out there driving trucks, all his money's spent. Kids are dreaming 'bout a life, where they ain't gotta fight, These backroads tell a story, of a million restless nights. [Bridge] Brother's in the army now, they sent him overseas, Fighting for a notion, that he barely believes. Sister’s waiting tables, barely getting by, As the politicians holler, and the flags of freedom fly. [Chorus] Oh, where’s the heart of this country, when our leaders just play the game? Trading blows on TV screens, while we live with loss and pain. Oh, America’s torn at the seams, can’t find trust or grace, In this outlaw prairie thunder, we’re all part of the race.

Enlightenment with regard to this matter comes slowly,” the State Department’s Stanley Hornbeck mused. “Some people learn by observation, reasoning, and the use of the imagination. Others learn only by experience.”[

Many Christians have put their trust in changing laws rather than, with God’s help, changing hearts of fellow sinners for whom Christ died (1 John 2:2). The church in America often depends on legislation to do the work that God calls his people to do. The Spirit’s transformation of ourselves and of those around us comes when we love God and neighbor—the very core of our Christian commitment.

Two of the three events that must take place before the fall of the Daughter of Babylon, i.e.: 1.) the persecution of God’s people and 2.) the betrayal of Israel, may be linked. God may well expect that His American Believers will take Him at his Word, believe His Word, and conclude that His people have an obligation to: 1.) bless Israel (Genesis 12:3); 2.) pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6)  insure that their nation keep its sworn covenant treaty obligation to come to Israel’s defense if Israel is attacked (Romans 1:31). The failure of His people to do these things may be tied to their own persecution and martyrdom. What has His church in America, with very limited exceptions, done to help, defend, pray for, and bless Israel? God is a God of linkage.

America’s role appears to come to an abrupt end before the final years of the end times. Surprising as it may seem to some, the Author of the Word has provided to us a great deal of detail about the United States of America in the end times. Frankly, that’s what we would expect from the Creator of the Universe. Daniel described God, as “the revealer of mysteries” and “a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (Daniel 2:28 and 29).

the nine separate calls given by God, through three different writers, both in the Old and New Testaments, to His people, to flee from the Daughter of Babylon before its destruction. Seven of God’s warnings to flee the Daughter of Babylon are addressed simply to His people. One such warning is in Revelation 18:4, and is linked to the Old Testament’s almost identical warnings, thus clearly referring to believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Two other warnings to flee the Daughter of Babylon, however, stand apart, as specifically addressed to His Jewish people: “Come, O Zion! Escape, you who live in the Daughter of Babylon!’ (Zechariah 2:7).

Many have observed that Hollywood has the unique talent to ‘weave magic spells’ in its movies. But that will come to an end, apparently, as Jeremiah tells us that “Her images will be put to shame and her idols filled with terror” (Jeremiah 50:2d). Price Waterhouse Coopers projects that Americans will spend $495 Billion on entertainment in 2013. No other nation on earth spends so much of its national treasure on entertaining itself.

If there is to come a great shaking, what is the hope? I would answer that it is just the opposite: with no shaking, there is little chance of hope. America has grown so hardened to God’s will and so deafened to His voice, that only something of great magnitude has any hope of breaking through. It is written that God is not willing that any should perish but all should come to repentance (2 Pet. 3:9). The heart of God is to save, to restore, and to redeem. And thus all things, even shaking and calamity, must be seen through that truth.

referring to the end times nation that is rich and powerful, and that will fall in a moment as “The Daughter of Babylon,” the Bible also refers to this end times nation as: BABYLON THE GREAT. Those capital letters are as the words are set forth in Revelation 17:5. John refers to Babylon the Great as “a mystery.” In Revelation 14:8 we read: A second angel followed and said, “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.”  Then in Revelation 17:1-2: “One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries’ (referring three verses later to “a mystery, BABYLON THE GREAT” [capitalization in original]).

If the new world exploration did not come to anything like its happy expected fulfillment even in North America, where the odds were more favorable, it was because the new colonizers and settlers brought so much of the Old World in their refined equipment and their brutal customs with them. The wonder is rather that the hopeful dream has remained alive for so long, for some of its original luminosity still dazzles and blinds the eyes of many of our contemporaries who continue to pursue the same archaic fantasies, planning further voyages through outer space. Contemporary 'space age' prophets, who proclaim space exploration as the endless frontier and astronauts as the coming pioneers, throw an unrealistic glamour over both the past, and even more, the future of such efforts.

Five-sixths (84%) of the invading great army will fall “on the mountains of Israel” and “on the open field.” (Ezekiel 39:2-4) The destruction of the Russian/Muslim invading army won’t stop with its armed forces. “I will send a fire on Magog and on those who live in safety in the coastlands, and they will know that I am the LORD.” (Ezekiel 39:6) Thus, Russia, and the invading Muslim nations, will suffer divine intervention in their homelands in such a way that they will have no doubt that the heavy destruction comes from the hand of the Lord.

The three future occurrences that scripture tells us we should be expecting and watching for are: 1.) Israel will truly be “at peace” for the first time since its founding in 1948; 2.) The Daughter of Babylon will severely persecute many of God’s people; 3.) The Daughter of Babylon will betray Israel, by not coming to its defense when a Russian-Muslim coalition invasion of Israel occurs, causing many in Israel to die.

They don’t trust me. They hate the Irish and the Jews and the Chinese and the Italians, and God knows who all, for coming to America too late. They hate the French and the Mormons on general principles. And they hate the Indians for being in America too early. Who the hell do they like?

IDENTITY CLUE 10: THE DAUGHTER OF BABYLON MOUNTS UP TO HEAVENS “Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify the height of her strength, yet from me spoilers come unto her, saith the LORD.” (Jeremiah 51:53) This is a fascinating verse, in that it was written over 2,600 years before man perfected flight and could rise up to the heavens.

What we do have reason to believe, though, is that Israel’s only earthly defender will abandon her, that it will betray Israel and that it will NOT come to Israel’s defense in the face of this mighty invading army. ‘The Message’ translation of Lamentations 4:17 reads: “We watched and watched, wore our eyes out looking for help. And nothing. We mounted our lookouts and looked for the help that never showed up.” This verse implies that some time passes as the Russian-Muslim coalition comes against Israel. It is further supported by the Prophet Joel (1:1-2:17) who prophecies a land invasion into Israel that clearly takes time, before God removes “the Northern Army” from the strategic position it will gain between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean Sea (Joel 2:20). The relevance of these prophecies is twofold:

When God revealed through Daniel (Daniel 2), that there would be four world empires, with the fourth empire coming in two phases, the last in the end times, He made no mention of the “hammer of the whole earth” reigning at the same time as the revived Roman Empire. Not there.

The dictionary defines ‘hindermost’ as a variant of hindmost; farthest to the rear; last. (American Heritage Dictionary). The Hebrew word used in Jeremiah 50:12, “achariyth,” appears 61 times in scripture, translated 31 times as end, and 12 times as latter. In the KJV it is never translated as “least” as does the NIV. The same word, achariyth, for example, is translated in Isaiah 2:2 as “last”: “It shall come to pass in the last days.” In Daniel 10:14 the angel’s words are translated, including the same word, achariyth, as: “Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the last days.” The NIV version of Daniel 10:14, translates achariyth as the “future,” not the ‘least.’ Translating acariyth as ‘least’ is not only contrary to other interpretations of achariyth, it is also inconsistent with the other Daughter of Babylon verses, which tell us that the nation is the world’s preeminent superpower, not the ‘least’ nation.

Shock and awe” is deployed in U.S. city streets, complete with police in full body armor, helmeted and masked, with rubber-bullets (as well as live ammunition), flash bang grenades, armored personnel carriers, drones and more. Studying over 800 SWAT team actions between 2010 and 2013, the ACLU report, The War Comes Home, details the extraordinary intensification of militarized police.

What Sadiq found when he reached the welcoming shores of the United States was a history of institutional racism and Asian exclusion laws for which he was unprepared. White nationalism would already be working against the Mufti’s message. Later he would write that if Jesus Christ comes to America and applies for admission to the United States under the immigration laws, [he] would not be allowed to enter this country because: 1. He comes from a land which is out of the permitted zone. 2. He has no money with him. 3. He is not decently dressed. 4. His hands have holes in the palms. 5. He remains bare-footed, which is a disorderly act. 6. He is against fighting for the country. 7. He believes in making wine when he thinks necessary. 8. He has no credential to show that he is an authorized preacher. 9. He believes in practicing the Law of Moses [polygamy].7

People who should know better are utterly clueless. When pressed on the difference between a Democrat and a socialist by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz couldn’t come up with an answer.2

In 2010 the NRA received $71 million in donations, much of it coming from manufacturers of assault weapons. 74% of their funding comes from corporations. According to Firearm Industry Statistics, there are 465 gun manufacturers in the U.S. The number of guns manufactured in the U.S. increased from 2.9 million in 2001 to almost 5.5 million in 2010. In 2013, guns and ammo sales rose to an estimated $14.7 billion. The NRA isn’t fighting for the rights of the average American to own a 30-clip magazine. They’re fighting for the rights of gun manufacturers to make and sell them, both in the U.S. and abroad. That’s why they spend millions each year to make sure the politicians they bought remain in office. Between

The three future occurrences that scripture tells us we should be expecting and watching for are:                   1.) Israel will truly be “at peace” for the first time since its founding in 1948;            2.) The Daughter of Babylon will severely persecute many of God’s people;            3.) The Daughter of Babylon will betray Israel, by not coming to its defense when a Russian-Muslim coalition invasion of Israel occurs, causing many in Israel to die.

The historical origins of today’s enormously expanded mass incarceration system lie in the ways U.S. state power responded to black and other dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s. The frenzy of concern with such dissidents prompted key state leaders to target entire racialized communities from which dissidents might come. To

Moreover, in private prisons people of color are even more overrepresented than they are in federal and state prison populations. This is because private prisons contract to avoid housing the more costly elderly prisoner. They prefer the younger bodies, and so they hold more of the youth of color, the bulk of these coming in as targets of the recent “war on drugs.

The practice continues throughout the country. Immigrants can feel “on the border” almost anywhere in the territory of the U.S., and have been subject to such raids in many Northern cities. The key is surprise and drama, especially sudden unexpected violence, or simply the threat of it, which instills wariness and unease in whole immigrant families as they come to and from work. In

All prisoners, as sexual beings and as bodies generally, come under threat when they make “transit” into the prison. All bodies in prisons then undergo what I term a “trans-terror”, a systematic vulnerability that often includes sexual violation. In

I’m sorry, but you didn’t make me promise not to worry.” With a big sigh, Jenna said, “Okay, but after this, you have to promise that, too.” “Deal,” Sara said, smirking. After seeing how much and how violently Jenna had been sick not all that many hours ago, Easy was sympathetic to Sara’s worrying.“I’ll clean up this stuff and give you all some privacy,” he said, reaching for the tray. “Thanks for getting dinner for us, Easy,” Jenna said. She looked at him with such gratitude and affection that it both set off a warm pressure in his chest and made him self-conscious—because he was acutely aware that Sara was observing them. She had to know that something was going on. Given how little he thought of himself sometimes, it wasn’t a big leap to imagine others would think the same. Just because Sara had seemed appreciative that he’d helped Jenna didn’t mean she’d approve of anything more. “You know, you set off a milk-shake-making party,” Becca said. Sara laughed. “Yeah. Shane made us shakes, then we took them over to the gym, and Nick was all jealous he didn’t have one.” Grinning, Becca rolled her eyes. “Which was hilarious because he didn’t even know they owned a blender.” Easy stood. “Well, I guess I’m glad I could provide such a valuable service.” He winked and looked at Jenna. “Need anything else while I’m downstairs?” Smiling, she shook her head. “Don’t think so, but thanks.” Easy made his way out of the room and back down to the Rixeys’, where he found all the guys in front of the big flat-screen TV—Nick and Marz kicking back in the recliners, Beckett and Shane sprawled on one couch, and Jeremy and Charlie on the other, with Eileen between them. It was dark in the room except for the flickering light of the screen. A round of greetings rose to meet him. “Sexual Chocolate!” Marz yelled over the others. Easy couldn’t help but smile as his gaze settled on the television, where the classic Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America was playing. One of Easy’s all-time favorites. He placed the tray on the counter, then turned and held his hands out. “Good morning, my neighbors!” he said, mimicking one of the prince’s lines. Right on cue, Marz said in a thick New York accent, “Hey, fuck you!” Easy could quote this movie all day. “Yes, yes! Fuck you, too!” The guys all chuckled, and Easy leaned his butt against the arm of the couch next to Jeremy and got sucked into the movie. Jeremy and Charlie made room for him, and it felt damn good to be with the guys. Not working, not stressed, not under fire. Just kicking back and shooting the shit.

Starting in 1930 and continuing through 1933, almost 9,100 commercial banks failed with deposits of $6.8 billion. The deposits of these failed banks represented 13.3 percent of total commercial bank deposits as of 1929. Net losses to depositors of these failed banks were about $1.3 billion, or approximately 19 percent of the deposits of failed commercial banks. Sounds bad, right? But do the math. If 19 percent of deposits were lost at those 9,100 banks, and those 9,100 banks held 13.3 percent of all deposits, then the total loss of deposits at failed banks in those years was 19 percent of 13.3 percent—or 2.5 percent. So, in the worst period of bank failures our country has ever experienced (by far), 2.5 percent of all bank deposits were lost because of bank failures. I’m not saying that’s nothing, but most years that much value is erased in Americans’ checking accounts by inflation alone.

Like the Bible says, the prudent see the danger coming….