Crowd Control Quotes

Moses: God or crowd control?!?

To my surprise, I recognized Dimitri Belikov-Rose's boyfriend-among those doing crowd control. He was easy to spot since he was almost always taller than everyone around him. Dhampirs look very human, and even I could admit that he was pretty good-looking. There was a rugged handsomeness to him, and even in a still photograph, I could see a fierceness as he watched the crowd.

It seemed as though he gave way all at once; he was so languid that he could not control his thoughts; they would wander to her; they would bring back the scene,- not of his repulse and rejection the day before but the looks, the actions of the day before that. He went along the crowded streets mechanically, winding in and out among the people, but never seeing them, -almost sick with longing for that one half-hour-that one brief space of time when she clung to him, and her heart beat against his-to come once again.

I took it for granted that there must be a few men left in the world who had that kind of strength. I assumed that those men would also be looking for women with principle. I did not want to be among the marked-down goods on the bargain table, cheap because they’d been pawed over. Crowds collect there. It is only the few who will pay full price. "You get what you pay for.

The crowd, most on the verge of premature middle age, were mainly drinking in intimate pairs, whispering in one another’s ears, laughing, touching. Public intimacy was the new sexy and still carried a whiff of taboo.

any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.

I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion—simply crowd control.

My space chums think reality was once a primitive method of crowd control that got out of hand. In my view, it’s absurdity dressed up in a three-piece business suit.

I shove the horrible, screaming images in my head into the dark, silent place in my mind that is getting deeper and more crowded each day. One day soon, the things I stuff in there will burst out and infect the rest of me. Maybe that will be the day the daughter becomes like the mother. Until then, I am still in control.

I hate when I can't control my loneliness

I’m an anarchist. I’m implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.

The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well sustained attention firmly and repeatedly focused on the feeling of the wish fulfilled until it fills the mind and crowds all other ideas out of consciousness.

All that meditation amounts to is a controlled imagination and a well sustained attention. Simply hold the attention on a certain idea until it fills the mind and crowds all other ideas out of consciousness. The power of attention shows itself the sure guarantee of an inner force.

Pimps make the best librarians. Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto con men. Gangsters, gunrunners, bank robbers- adept at crowd control, at collaborating with a small staff, at planning with deliberation and executing with contained fury- all possess the librarian's basic skill set.

Crowd control.’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘That’s all civilization is, T’riss. A means by which we manage the proliferation of our kind. It increases in complexity the more of us there are. Laws keep us muzzled and punishment delivers the necessary message when those laws are broken. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding...

Being simply “better than average” is not good enough. You have to be head and shoulders above the crowd to win a minus-sum game.

I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls "intrusives" but the first time she said it, I heard "invasives," which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they speed out of control. Supposedly everyone has them--you look out from over a bridge or whatever and it occurs to you out of nowhere that you could just jump. And then if you're most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all other thoughts until it's the only one you're able to have, the thought you're perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.

Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.

Pimps make the best librarians. Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto conmen. Gangsters, gun runners, bank robbers – adept at crowd control, at collaborating with a small staff, at planning with deliberation and executing with contained fury – all possess the librarian’s basic skill set. Scalpers and loan sharks certainly have a role to play. But even they lack that something, the je ne sais quoi, the elusive it. What would a pimp call it? Yes: the love.

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?

That's when it happens. Maybe it was my argument. Maybe it was my scary zeal. Whatever the reason, as soon as Megan whistles, the crowd is on its feet. They're blowing bubbles. They're raising their lighters high. They're cheering through their fangs... For Dawn Summers, for themselves and each other, for every sibling who got tossed into a situation beyond her control. For me. And for my sister, who whistles again... Once more with feeling.

Fundamentalism is rooted in arrogance. It thrives in fear and control and darkness.

If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?

When I call his name, it’s a sound almost entirely out of my control. It soars over the crowd and hits him. Even from where I’m standing, I can tell that he recognized my voice. Hastily he unwinds himself from the girl, stands to attention like an animal sensing danger. And I try to call him again, but that word, that name, was all I had the energy for. I barely have the strength left to stand. I wait helplessly for him to find the sound, and when he does, when his heterochromatic eyes meet mine, my mouth forms the word again, but just barely. The girl at his side disappears. The crowd blurs into senseless shapes and colors. I can’t feel my heart or my body or the heat of the flames. I can only see his face—his bewildered, beautifully familiar face.

Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

Excellent,” said Queen Scarlet, flicking her tongue between her teeth. “A thrilling demonstration. Everything I was hoping for. As you say, Queen Burn, so much for that prophecy now, right? Peril, back to your place.” I hope you know how to control your new champion, Mother. Because she’s not just a threat to me. The crowd of dragons surged back, struggling to stay out of Peril’s path, as the dragonet walked slowly back to the little cage of rocks. This dragon could destroy the entire world.

I could see the crowd gathered there, one hundred of them, I guessed, maybe more. All people who hated me, whose only objective was to keep me from my work. Under the pious, prayerful guise of religion, they were after control: Control of me. Control of the women coming to the clinic for help. Control of anyone who believed differently than they.

When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways: floods, plague and famine

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do. For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.

But Don you're still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection and society, you know intellectually that you're no less worthy of connection and society than anyone else simply because of how you appear, you know that hiding yourself away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and that will keep you from the kind of life you deserve as much as the next girl, you know that you can't help how you look but that you are supposed to be able to help how much you care about how you look. You're supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you're so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control." "Your voice gets different when you talk about this—" "What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd's visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that you're hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance." "Use less words.

For all that has recently been said about ‘the wisdom of crowds’, the authors prefer to fly with airlines which rely on the services of skilled and experienced pilots, rather than those who entrust the controls to the average opinion of the passengers.

What is power, after all? Every one of the power elite’s overwhelming advantages—military forces, surveillance systems, crowd control technology, control over the media, and nearly all the money in the world—depends on having people obeying orders and executing an assigned role. This obedience is a matter of shared ideologies, institutional culture, and the legitimacy of the systems in which we play roles. Legitimacy is a matter of collective perception, and we have the power to change people’s perceptions.

A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired.

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Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited. There is nothing new or recent about fear—it is doubtless as old as the life of man on the planet. Fears are of many kinds—fear of objects, fear of people, fear of the future, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, fear of old age, fear of disease, and fear of life itself. Then there is fear which has to do with aspects of experience and detailed states of mind. Our homes, institutions, prisons, churches, are crowded with people who are hounded by day and harrowed by night because of some fear that lurks ready to spring into action as soon as one is alone, or as soon as the lights go out, or as soon as one’s social defenses are temporarily removed. The ever-present fear that besets the vast poor, the economically and socially insecure, is a fear of still a different breed. It is a climate closing in; it is like the fog in San Francisco or in London. It is nowhere in particular yet everywhere. It is a mood which one carries around with himself, distilled from the acrid conflict with which his days are surrounded. It has its roots deep in the heart of the relations between the weak and the strong, between the controllers of environment and those who are controlled by it. When the basis of such fear is analyzed, it is clear that it arises out of the sense of isolation and helplessness in the face of the varied dimensions of violence to which the underprivileged are exposed. Violence, precipitate and stark, is the sire of the fear of such people. It is spawned by the perpetual threat of violence everywhere. Of course, physical violence is the most obvious cause. But here, it is important to point out, a particular kind of physical violence or its counterpart is evidenced; it is violence that is devoid of the element of contest. It is what is feared by the rabbit that cannot ultimately escape the hounds.

I found out too that you are bound to be jostled in "the crowded street of life." That in itself need not be dangerous unless you have the open razors of personal vanity in your pants pocket. The passers-by don't hurt you, but if you go around like that, they make you hurt yourself.

Miss Manette!' The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and kept her hand drawn through his arm. 'Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.' To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd. Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all the staring curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him to remain quite still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts to control and steady his breathing shook the lips from which the colour rushed to his heart. The buzz of the great flies was loud again. 'Miss Manette, have you ever seen the prisoner before?' 'Yes, sir.

No more junk talk, no more lies. No more mornings in the hospital getting bad blood drained out of me. No more doctors trying to analyse what makes me a drug addict. No more futile attempts at trying to control my heroin use. No more defending myself when I know I am practically indefensible. No more police using me as practice. No more ODs, no more losses. No more trying to take an intellectual position on my heroin addiction when it takes more than it gives. No more dope-sick mornings, no more slow suicide, no more pain without end. No more AA. No more NA. No more mind control. No more being a victim, no more looking for reasons in childhood, in God in anything but what exists in HERE. No more admitting I am powerless. Down the dusty Los Angeles sidewalks, down the urine stained London back alleys … there goes the connection fading into the crowd like a 1960’s Polaroid. “Business…?” “Whachoo need…?” “Chiva…?

Remember that, in any encounter, the only thing you can control is your own actions and reactions. You cannot dictate the actions of the other person, or in this case, the horse, but you can often send the right signals to get what you want. If you are often baffled by the reactions others have to you, it is probably because you are unaware of the silent signals you send through your posture, your facial gestures, your tone of voice, the amount of personal space you maintain, and so forth. Ever wondered why people don't listen when you try to assert yourself, or why people back away when you're trying to be friendly, or why you're never the one people seek out in a crowded room? Body language. Silent signals. Mixed signals. The trick is to focus outward, not inward.

When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened in my head from which consciousness and memory leaked out and in their place the rash crowded in, and a cold like spoiled roast chicken. But that time before, shaking and clinging to the damp bench, I'd told myself, Hey, take a good look, isn't the world still under your feet? I'm on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running.

The controlled-experiment people felt that public LSD orgies would lead to disaster for their own research. There was little optimism about what might happen when the Angels—worshiping violence, rape and swastikas—found themselves in a crowd of intellectual hipsters, Marxist radicals and pacifist peace marchers. It was a nervous thing to consider even if everybody could be expected to keep a straight head … but of course that was out of the question. With everyone drunk, stoned and loaded, there was nobody capable of taking objective notes, no guides to soothe the flip-outs, no rational spectator to put out fires or hid the butcher knives … no control at all.

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire “intelligent” population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. In

The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the catastrophe experienced by small farmers in Europe and England. The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded into city slums. For the first time in human history, the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide. The symbol of this new development, indeed its currency, was gold. Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw form. Later the pursuit of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much gold as possible. Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd.

We modern people are problem-solvers, but the demand for answers crowds out patience—and perhaps, especially, patience with mystery, with that which we cannot control.

Ceausescu attempted to regain control. He couldn't. Random noise echoed from the sound system. He was rattled and confused. And the crowd- we felt it.

Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures “deserves” to be banned from driving. Crowds of goitrous yahoos don’t excitedly mass to watch the epileptic’s driver’s license be publicly burned. We’ve successfully banished the notion of punishment in that realm. It may take centuries, but we can do the same in all our current arenas of punishment.

But Amarantha rolled her eyes and slouched in her throne. “Shatter him, Rhysand.” She flicked a hand at the High Lord of the Summer Court. “You may do what you want with the body afterward.” The High Lord of the Summer Court bowed—as if he’d been given a gift—and looked to his subject, who had gone still and calm on the floor, hugging his knees. The male faerie was ready—relieved. Rhys slipped a hand out of his pocket, and it dangled at his side. I could have sworn phantom talons flickered there as his fingers curled slightly. “I’m growing bored, Rhysand,” Amarantha said with a sigh, again fiddling with that bone. She hadn’t looked at me once, too focused on her current prey. Rhysand’s fingers curled into a fist. The faerie male’s eyes went wide—then glazed as he slumped to the side in the puddle of his own waste. Blood leaked from his nose, from his ears, pooling on the floor. That fast—that easily, that irrevocably … he was dead. “I said shatter his mind, not his brain,” Amarantha snapped. The crowd murmured around me, stirring. I wanted nothing more than to fade back into it—to crawl back into my cell and burn this from my mind. Tamlin hadn’t flinched—not a muscle. What horrors had he witnessed in his long life if this hadn’t broken that distant expression, that control? Rhysand shrugged, his hand sliding back into his pocket. “Apologies, my queen.” He turned away without being dismissed, and didn’t look at me as he strode for the back of the throne room. I fell into step beside him, reining in my trembling, trying not to think about the body sprawled behind us, or about Clare—still nailed to the wall. The crowd stayed far, far back as we walked through it. “Whore,” some of them softly hissed at him, out of her earshot; “Amarantha’s whore.” But many offered tentative, appreciative smiles and words—“Good that you killed him; good that you killed the traitor.

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of insects. Viruses are nature’s crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crowd in a hurry.

A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever.

And when you are criticized, as you will be, remind your critics that you have the right to speak your mind. And if they shout you down, as they probably will, then inform them that since they insist on being asses, you will henceforth communicate with them with the appropriate part of your own anatomy. And turning to face them from the posterior, let them know where you stand. Let every fart count as a peal of thunder for liberty. Let every fart remind the nation of how much it has let pass out of its control. It is a small gesture, but one that can be very effective - especially in a large crowd. So fart, and if you must, fart often. But always fart without apology. Fart for freedom, fart for liberty - and fart proudly

His eyes are cold and restless His wounds have almost healed And she'd give half of Texas Just to change the way he feels She knows his love's in Tulsa And she knows he's gonna go Well it ain't no woman flesh and blood It's that damned old rodeo Well it's bulls and blood It's dust and mud It's the roar of a Sunday crowd It's the white in his knuckles The gold in the buckle He'll win the next go 'round It's boots and chaps It's cowboy hats It's spurs and latigo It's the ropes and the reins And the joy and the pain And they call the thing rodeo She does her best to hold him When his love comes to call But his need for it controls him And her back's against the wall And it's So long girl I'll see you When it's time for him to go You know the woman wants her cowboy Like he wants his rodeo

Forget the contracting end,” says Jocelyn. “It’s a sideshow. The main deal is the prison. Prisons used to be about punishment, and then reform and penitence, and then keeping dangerous offenders inside. Then, for quite a few decades, they were about crowd control – penning up the young, aggressive, marginalized guys to keep them off the streets. And then, when they started to be run as private businesses, they were about the profit margins for the prepackaged jail-meal suppliers, and the hired guards and so forth.” Stan nods; he understands all of this.

It would be wrong for anything to stand between you and attaining goodness—as a rational being and a citizen. Anything at all: the applause of the crowd, high office, wealth, or self-indulgence. All of them might seem to be compatible with it—for a while. But suddenly they control us and sweep us away.

The Lady Vader has come. We would hear her words.' 'Then you will hear them in prison.' The dynast gestured, and two more of the official guard left their line, heading purposefully toward the steps. It was, Leia judged, the right moment. Glancing down at her belt, she reached out through the Force with all the power and control she could manage-- And her lightsaber leaped from her belt, breaking free from its quick-release and jumping up in front of her. Her eyes and mind found the switch, and with a snap-hiss the brilliant green-white blade flashed into existence, carving out a vertical line between her and the line of dynasts. There was a sound like a hissing gasp from the crowd. The two Noghri who had been moving toward the maitrakh froze in mid stride...and as the gasp vanished into utter silence, Leia knew that she'd finally gotten their complete attention. 'I am not merely the daughter of the Lord Vader,' she said, putting an edge of controlled anger into her voice. 'I am the Mal'ary'ush: heir to his authority and his power. I have come through many dangers to reveal the treachery that has been done to the Noghri people.' She withdrew as much of her concentration as she could risk from the floating lightsaber to look slowly down the line of dynasts. 'Will you hear me? Or will you instead choose death?

I remember an old worker who was standing near the gates of the building where Odessa News7 used to be. It was the first day the Bolsheviks took control. Suddenly a crowd of boys jumped out from behind the gates with piles of freshly printed Izvestias, crying out, “The bourgeois in Odessa must contribute 500 million rubles to the government!

I've met people who say they don't want relationships; but it's not the relationships that they don't want: it is the mundane dynamic that is named the "relationship", which they despise. The struggle for control; the humdrum motions recycled by a billion other couples; the low rhythm that seems to cycle, repeating its monotonous hymn through the myriad crowds. They want to find someone and feel every vein in their body connect to that person, they want to fly with someone, they want what's natural; they want a partner. It's a partner they want. Not a "relationship"; but a partner. A whole other person who wants to stay with their own whole person. They want something meant for them, or nothing at all.

In the past I was a vicious hunter. I would stalk my prey with pinpoint accuracy. Ever since Monica came into my life I’ve abstained from the game. It almost feels strange to stand here and look to the crowd knowing I could pick one and f*ck them into oblivion. I won’t though. I may love her, but that isn’t the reason. If I were to pick someone for the sake of revenge sex then I’m giving control to Monica and Dalton for betraying me. I’m strong enough to wait. A good hunter is always patient and never stalks in anger.' 'I always crack it until Tobias stops flinching at the sound. It’s never the same amount of times. I don’t want it to become obvious so I always do it a few more times to create a sense of surprise. I coil up the leather and with the flick of my wrist I set a perfect line against Monica’s back. She yelps in pain and surprise, and Tobias joins her. He thought he’d get the first blow. I breathe through the pounding in my cock. It beats in time with my rapidly beating heart. I flick my wrist again taking Monica across the shoulder. I see Tobias tense as she screams. Mustn’t allow the slaves to think they are taking even turns. The blow’s shock is what makes my cock burn for release. I palm my balls as they tighten, threatening to shoot my release up the stock of my dick. I inhale through my nose and breathe out my mouth until I regain my control. I flick my wrist again and hit Monica across her thighs. She screams bloody murder at the ceiling and I smile to myself. It hurts like a bitch, but the marks will fade. I never break skin. This is my passion- my gift.

They’re not worthy to rule. None of them. I will go and get the Half-Breed and prove to you just how untrustworthy they are. All of them know about her. Every last one. I challenge Prince Galen to deny it.” Galen locks eyes with Toraf. How could he do this to me? How could he do this to Emma? Now everyone present knows of her existence. She won’t be safe anywhere, not with Jagen in control. Especially because Toraf, the best Tracker in Syrena history, has just vowed to find her and bring her here. Which will be excessively easy, since he knows exactly where she is. She trusts him. Rachel trusts him. It will be so simple for him. And I have no way of warning her, of getting to her. All I can do is protect her when she gets here. Tandel quiets the crowd, one of his primary duties as of late. When he has achieved control, he turns to Galen. “Your Highness, would you like to address these accusations against you?” Galen swims to the center stone without taking his eyes off Toraf. “If something happens to her because of you,” he whispers to his one-time friend, his voice raw with hurt, “your death will be my priority.” Toraf opens his mouth to say something, but Galen cuts him off to address the crowd. There is nothing Toraf can say to him that will make this right. There is nothing Toraf can say to him that will hurt him more. “I have nothing at all to say to these accusations.” Tandel sighs. “Very well, Highness. Thank you.” Galen swims to the Trackers who hold his sister. His sister who now sobs uncontrollably. “Come on, minnow,” he says. “He’s not worth your tears.” “Yes, he is,” she wails. The Trackers release her to her brother. They’re distressed with the task of comforting a hysterical female. Galen squeezes her to him, but won’t let her turn around and look at Toraf. “He isn’t. In time you’ll see that.” “Why would he bring Emma here, Galen? Why would he do this to us?” Galen swallows the vomit creeping its way into his throat. “I don’t know, minnow. I don’t know.

Later, when the other Beatles arrived, the crowd in the street had swelled to an estimated twenty-thousand, some of whom were whipped up in a terrific heat. Others, many of them young girls who had been waiting since dawn, suffered from hunger and exhaustion. The police force, which had been monitoring the situation nervously, called in the army and navy to help maintain order, but it was short-lived. By late afternoon, with chants of "We want the Beatles!" ringing through the square, the shaken troops, now four-hundred strong, felt control slipping from their grasp. They didn't know where to look first: at the barricades being crushed, the girls fainting out of sight, the hooligans stomping on the roofs of cars or pushing through their lines. A fourteen-year-old "screamed so hard she burst a blood-vessel in her throat." It was "frightening, chaotic, and rather inhuman," according to a trooper on horseback. There most pressing concern was the hotels plate-glass windows bowing perilously against the violent crush of bodies. They threatened to explode in a cluster of razor-sharp shards at any moment. Ambulances screamed in the distance, preparing for the worst; a detachment of mounted infantry swung into position.

The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.

Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.

Crowdists love “competition” of a fixed nature, where a single vector determines the winner. They do not like real life competition, including evolution, as it assesses the individual as a whole and does not simply rank individuals by ability. For this reason crowds love both sports events and free market capitalism, as each allow people to gain power according to a linear system. The more time you put into the system with the sole goal of making profit, excluding all else, the more likely it is that you can get wealth – and it can happen to anyone! That is the promise that makes crowds flock to these ideas. It is like the dream of being a rock star, or a baseball hero, or a billionaire: what makes it attractive is the idea that anyone can do it, if they simply devote themselves to a linear path of ascension – one that is controlled by the whims of the crowd. The crowd decides who is a baseball hero, or what to buy and thus who to make rich. Control without control.

I’ve never understood the phenomenon, but everyone absolutely loses their minds whenever they see someone pull out a T-shirt gun. It’s a universal constant that transcends all cultural divides: Republicans, Democrats, rich, poor, glassblowers, Inuit Indians, Motown nostalgia acts: They all pay a fortune for their tickets and sit nicely dressed and civilized. Then the dudes with the T-shirt guns come out and everyone gets that crazy red demon glow in their eyes, ready to tear arms out of their sockets and dive off balconies for three dollars of cotton. On the other end, the guys with the guns are in complete control of the crowd and get a God complex, teasing them, faking shots and making thousands of screaming loons sway left and right with their slightest move. And yet nobody but me can see the potential, like the next time the rest of the world is giving America a bunch of shit, our president just goes before the UN General Assembly and busts out a T-shirt gun. Problem fucking solved.

Turn it beautiful. His words came faintly at first, but they came again and again, always softly, always with the insistence of an elder commanding wisdom. Turn it all to beauty. She walked to the rail. When she turned and sat upon it, she heard a sailor in the crowd murmur that she might play them a tune. She hoped he was right. She needed the voices to be wrong. Fin raised the instrument to the cleft of her neck and closed her eyes. She emptied her mind and let herself be carried back to her earliest memory, the first pain she ever knew: the knowledge that her parents didn’t want her. The despair of rejection coursed through her. It fathered a knot of questions that bound her, enveloped her. Waves of uncertainty and frailty shook her to the bones. Her body quivered with anger and hopelessness. She reeled on the edge of a precipice. She wanted to scream or to throw her fists but she held it inside; she struggled to control it. She fought to subjugate her pain, but it grew. It welled up; it filled her mind. When she could hold it no more, exhausted by defiance and wearied by years of pretending not to care, Bartimaeus’s words surrounded her. Got to turn it beautiful. She dropped her defenses. She let weakness fill her. She accepted it. And the abyss yawned. She tottered over the edge and fell. The forces at war within her raced down her arms and set something extraordinary in motion; they became melody and harmony: rapturous, golden. Her fingers coaxed the long-silent fiddle to life. They danced across the strings without hesitation, molding beauty out of the miraculous combination of wood, vibration, and emotion. The music was so bright she felt she could see it. The poisonous voices were outsung. Notes raged out of her in a torrent. She had such music within her that her bones ached with it, the air around her trembled with it, her veins bled it. The men around fell still and silent. Some slipped to the deck and sat enraptured like children before a travelling bard.

wasn’t until paramedics arrived on scene with a stretcher that I sprang into action, pushing my way through the crowd until I reached him.  I hopped the fence and no one tried to stop me – it was chaos down there.  As the paramedics lifted Nate onto the stretcher, I didn’t like the way his entire body flopped around like he had no control over it.  His eyes were open but vacant, staring at something only he could see.  Blood was gushing from his nose, intermingling with mud and dirt.  His left arm was bent at an

On a few occasions in his own books, Thomas [Mann] thought, he had risen above the ordinary world from which the work emerged. The death of Hanno in -Buddenbrooks-, for example, or the quality of the desire described in -Death in Venice-, or the séance scenes in -The Magic Mountain.- Maybe in other parts of other books too. But he did not think so.He had let dry humor and social settings dominate his writing; he was afraid of what might take over if he did not exercise caution and control. He could imagine decency, but that was hardly a virtue in a time that had grown sinister. He could imagine humanism, but that made no difference in a time that exalted the will of the crowd. He could imagine a frail intelligence, but that meant little in a time that honored brute strength. As the slow movement [of Beethoven's String Quartet, op. 132] came gravely to an end, he realized that, if he could summon the courage, he would have to entertain evil in a book, he would have to open the door to what was darkly outside his own comprehension.

For half the young men, that was it. They were the control group. For the other half, there was a catch. As they walked down the hallway with their questionnaire, a man—a confederate of the experimenters—walked past them and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. The already narrow hallway now became even narrower. As the young men tried to squeeze by, the confederate looked up, annoyed. He slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut, jostled the young men with his shoulder, and, in a low but audible voice, said the trigger word: “Asshole.” Cohen and Nisbett wanted to measure, as precisely as possible, what being called that word meant. They looked at the faces of their subjects and rated how much anger they saw. They shook the young men’s hands to see if their grip was firmer than usual. They took saliva samples from the students, both before and after the insult, to see if being called an asshole caused their levels of testosterone and cortisol—the hormones that drive arousal and aggression—to go up. Finally they asked the students to read the following story and supply a conclusion: It had only been about twenty minutes since they had arrived at the party when Jill pulled Steve aside, obviously bothered about something. “What’s wrong?” asked Steve. “It’s Larry. I mean, he knows that you and I are engaged, but he’s already made two passes at me tonight.” Jill walked back into the crowd, and Steve decided to keep his eye on Larry. Sure enough, within five minutes, Larry was reaching over and trying to kiss Jill. If you’ve been insulted, are you more likely to imagine Steve doing something violent to Larry?

I woke a few moments ago from a fever and a host of interlocking fever dreams, one after the next. There was one where I was in London, walking through old abandoned formerly beautiful buildings, all of them about to be demolished. Sometimes I'd find myself walking past the enormous line of people waiting to attend the television memorial for a dead author friend of mine, but his memorial was a television spectacular with comedians and big band music. There was the one where I had accidentally connected my bank card to a portable printer and the little printer kept printing cash but on the wrong paper and at the wrong size, so my money had huge, incredibly detailed faces on it, works of art that could not be spent. Then I woke from one dream into another: I was asleep in the passenger seat of the car, and saw that we were driving through a densely populated town, and that the driver was also asleep. I tried hard to wake her up and failed, and knew that no one was in control, no one was at the wheel, and soon someone was going to be killed, and I was shouting and calling without effect; but I whimpered and snuffled enough in the real world that my wife stroked my face and said, "Honey? You're having a nightmare," and, finally, I woke for real. But I woke into a world in which, somewhere, I am still being driven through my life by a sleeping driver, in which money is only good as art, in which we can write the finest books but at the end the crowds will come out and say good-bye for the entertainment, in which the buildings and cities we inhabit will relentlessly be destroyed by progress and time: a world colored by dreams and illuminated by them, too.

You know Shay Coleman?” the guy asked, sounding doubtful. The girl was still laughing. She had no clue what was going on. “I’m in a class with him. It’s all good. I’m not like a stalker or anything.” I shuddered at that thought, and as the girl pulled me forward and into a large crowd in the bar, I couldn’t help but think about the control a stalker had. They chose when to say something. They chose when to approach, when to look, when to retreat. They had all the control. That was creepy as fuck. I never wanted to be a stalker. Why was I thinking about that?

Here is a paradox for the creator: if you love your work, let it go.15 Because if you grip it too tightly, you will strangle it. If you hold it in open hands, you may actually find that the work has a life of its own. Creativity is more about listening and following than it is about forcing or manipulating. The truth for the creator is that you have a very limited control over anything in the world, even your own creation. You can work on it. You can help mold and shape its form. But there will come a point in the creative process where your creation is what it is. There comes a point where there is nothing left to do but to rest. To open your hands and let it go. You cannot control how others will receive it. They

The ABM strategy—a very shrewd plan, on paper—was to hold McGovern under the 1500 mark for two ballots, forcing him to peak without winning, then confront the convention with an alternative (ABM) candidate on the third ballot—and if that failed, try another ABM candidate on the fourth ballot, then yet another on the fifth, etc…. on into infinity, for as many ballots as it would take to nominate somebody acceptable to the Meany/Daley axis. The name didn’t matter. It didn’t even make much difference if He, She, or It couldn’t possibly beat Nixon in November… the only thing that mattered to the Meany/Daley crowd was keeping control of The Party; and this meant the nominee would have to be some loyal whore with more debts to Big Labor than he could ever hope to pay… somebody like Hubert Humphrey, or a hungry opportunist like Terry Sanford.

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.

Harry Truman,” Mark was saying to the crowd,” had only one regret in his Presidency, according to his sister’s testimony, and that is signing the National Security Act into power. Truman felt he had been tricked into signing it, and foresaw it as the downfall of the country he loved and served so well. The 1947 National Security Act fully allows for the takeover of the American government by a secret government, or shadow government as it has been called. Here in the United States of America we have laws, Constitutional Laws, and the Bill of Rights enabling we-the-people from succumbing to such takeover; yet the National Security Act overrides them all. We don’t need more laws to stop the proliferation of these criminals in control of our country and their blatant child abuse, mind control, erosion of justice, drug dealings, murders, genocide, and dominance of the world’s technology and resources. We only need to repeal the 1947 National Security Act!

Unlike the rain-slicked streets of Oblakgrad, Dírorth was a stir of activity. The streets were lined with vendors selling greasy meat pies to passersby. The clogging crowd of Humans cramped together as they pushed past one another, rushing from one errand to the next. The shouting of a thousand voices melted together into a perpetual buzz, like a great swarm of bees hovering over the street. And yet a strange silence hung over the city. It filled in the background, inhabiting dark corners where the din of the crowd could not squelch it. It had a strange omnipresence, like something that you are subconsciously aware of, but do not consciously see with your eyes. It was a silence ignored, hidden by the façade of hectic traffic. You wouldn’t really notice it, not unless you were looking for it. Not unless you actually stopped to listen. If the city folk had stopped, frozen, if they had stilled themselves for a moment, the silence would have gaped wide open like a dark, hungry maw. But they ignored it. For the past century, they had covered that silence with the commotion of everyday life, refusing to let it control them. To define them. They did not hear it. They would not hear it. I myself did not hear it for years and years, not until the day that I actually stopped to listen. Can you hear it, now? Can you hear it in the words your reading, the words I say to you? Listen. Hear its empty resonance across the cobbles. Feel it in the dust beneath Notak’s boot, damp with last night’s rain. Smell it on the ragged clothes of the peasants, hidden in the folds of dirty fabric. See it in their eyes, latent beneath the gloss of the everyday. Taste it in the clamor of the streets, clamor born out of a unconscious urge to fill the quiet with something, anything to drive it away, anything to stave off the silence that reeked with defeat. It was the echo of a hundred years of slavery. It was the song of a people, waiting for God.

When we did the majestic march on the stage at the school in the auditorium for the others to see us, we felt the warmth of the crowds, yet that did not last all that long. At the start of our walk, no one would have ever known. Yet some big mouths could not help, but make their nasty comments, their families did not approve of us going to prom in the condition she was in. Like one called out, ‘see the slut dirtbag, that got knocked up!’ One yield- ‘There is a thing called birth control, you two should have used it!’ Why it is any of their business, I do not know. It is our choice not there’s. Yet that was not going to stop us or spoil our night together. Ava and her sisters and friends were saying all kinds of things there and at the dance. Ava and her girlfriends and their dates would gather around us, and they even kept bumping into us on the dance floor. Yet all she wanted was one slow dance and a photo, and we got it. Oh God, I can still hear their comments!

One more thing. I...I kind of hate people. Seriously, I've thought about how to phrase this and the best thing I can say isn't, "I'm not a people person," or something like that. It's that I hate people. some persons, individual persons, I like and love, but when you get eight or more together in a group, I hate that. I mean HATE that. I hate cliques, I hate crowds, and the only reason i got anywhere in retails is that I was always moving around. I had a purpose. My idea of hell is being one of those people in the middle of those crowd shots you see in concerts, you know, where fifteen thousand people are watching some band or something. But it's not just the number of bodies; it's that a person gets stupid when they become people. They are easily convinced of things. So I guess if my story had a heading, like, in your book, it might be "How Clara stopped hating people because they started doing what she said," Or something less wordy that doesn't make me sound like a controlling bitch.

They made their way into the sleeping bag. It was crowded, and she was still naked, so it only took about three seconds flat for him to get hard again. She reached between them. “Are you sure there aren’t any more condoms?” He flexed at her words, then groaned softly. It was going to be a long night. “Positive.” He was torn between asking her to stop tormenting him and begging her to keep on doing it. The outcome of the latter as inevitable, and in a sleeping bag, more than a little messy. Just a few seconds more, he told himself as he closed his eyes and gave himself up to the steady stroking of her hand. He would stop her before things got out of control. But Phoebe being Phoebe and his attraction to her being what it was, that point of “out of control” arrived a lot faster than he would have realized. Painfully aroused and right on the edge, he grabbed her wrist. “You’re killing me.” “So not my purpose.” Then she stunned him by opening the sleeping bag, pushing it away and sliding down between his legs. As her fingers toyed with his testicles, her mouth settled on his erection. From there it was a thirty-seven-second journey to heaven.

But it makes no sense," she said, "Why would this one death in Paris spark riots throughout the Reich?" "That's what I'm saying, Truus. It isn't the cause of the riots. It's the excuse. When Goebbels said they wouldn't hamper demonstrations, he was inviting this violence. It's what the Nazis do so well. They create a crisis--like they did with the Reichstag fire in '33--which they then use to increase their military control. They want every German to see the havoc they can wreak at the snap of a finger. They want every German to know the violence they can bring to bear on any single person for the slightest perceived offense, What better way to silence citizens opposing the regime than with the prospect that their resistance will jeopardize their families and their lives?" "It isn't just the Nazis now, though. They're saying crowds of ordinary Germans have been flocking into the streets to gape at the wreckage and to cheer. 'Like holiday makers at a fairground,' Joop. Where are the decent German people? Why aren't they standing against this? Where are the leaders of the world?" Joop said, "You put more faith in politicians than they warrant. They cower at the slightest threat to their power, although of course no one but Hitler has any real power in Germany now.

Cannabinoids relax the rules of cortical crowd control, but 300 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide break them completely. This is a clean sweep. This is the Renaissance after the Dark Ages. Dopamine—the fuel of desire—is only one of four major neuro modulators. Each of the neuromodulators fuels brain operations in its own particular way. But all four of them share two properties. First, they get released and used up all over the brain, not at specific locales. Second, each is produced by one specialized organ, a brain part designed to manufacture that one potent chemical (see Figure 3). Instead of watering the flowers one by one, neuromodulator release is like a sprinkler system. That’s why neuromodulators initiate changes that are global, not local. Dopamine fuels attraction, focus, approach, and especially wanting and doing. Norepinephrine fuels perceptual alertness, arousal, excitement, and attention to sensory detail. Acetylcholine energizes all mental operations, consciousness, and thought itself. But the final neuromodulator, serotonin, is more complicated in its action. Serotonin does a lot of different things in a lot of different places, because there are many kinds of serotonin receptors, and they inhabit a great variety of neural nooks, staking out an intricate network. One of serotonin’s most important jobs is to regulate information flow throughout the brain by inhibiting the firing of neurons in many places. And it’s the serotonin system that gets dynamited by LSD. Serotonin dampens, it paces, it soothes. It raises the threshold of neurons to the voltage changes induced by glutamate. Remember glutamate? That’s the main excitatory neurotransmitter that carries information from synapse to synapse throughout the brain. Serotonin cools this excitation, putting off the next axonal burst, making the receptive neuron less sensitive to the messages it receives from other neurons. Slow down! Take it easy! Don’t get carried away by every little molecule of glutamate. Serotonin soothes neurons that might otherwise fire too often, too quickly. If you want to know how it feels to get a serotonin boost, ask a depressive several days into antidepressant therapy. Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, and all their cousins leave more serotonin in the synapses, hanging around, waiting to help out when the brain becomes too active. Which is most of the time if you feel the world is dark and threatening. Extra serotonin makes the thinking process more relaxed—a nice change for depressives, who get a chance to wallow in relative normality.

After years of fighting, the war was a complete stalemate and would have ended almost immediately in a negotiated settlement (as had most other European conflicts) had not the U.S. declared war on Germany.   As soon as Wilson's re-election had been engineered through the "he kept us out of war" slogan, a complete reversal of propaganda was instituted. In those days before radio and television, public opinion was controlled almost exclusively by newspapers. Many of the major newspapers were controlled by the Federal Reserve crowd. Now they began beating the drums over the "inevitability of war." Arthur Ponsonby, a memebr of the British parliament, admitted in his book Falsehood In War Time (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1928): "There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history." Propaganda concerning the war was heavily one-sided. Although after the war many historians admitted that one side was as guilty as the other in starting the war, Germany was pictured as a militaristic monster which wanted to rule the world. Remember, this picture was painted by Britain which had its soldiers in more countries around the world than all other nations put together. So-called "Prussian militarism" did exist, but it was no threat to conquer the world. Meanwhile, the sun never set on the British Empire! Actually, the Germans were proving to be tough business competitors in the world's markets and the British did not approve.

At its height, the rebellion can best be described as an insurrection. Large crowds of looters in the early part of July 23 gave way to roving bands of looters and fire bombers, who were much harder to control. Some coordinated their tactics by shortwave radio. Apparently, the rebels saw all government officials as the enemy, and they attacked firemen as well as policemen. By 4:40 P.M. on July 24, rebels had stolen hundreds of guns from gun shops. As police began to shoot at the looters, black snipers started shooting back. Hubert Locke, executive secretary of the establishment Committee for Equal Opportunity, called it a “total state of war.” Police officers and firemen reported being attacked by snipers on both the east and west sides of the city. Snipers made sporadic attacks on the Detroit Street Railways buses and on crews of the Public Lighting Commission and the Detroit Edison Company. Police records indicate that as many as ten people were shot by snipers on July 25 alone. A span of 140 blocks on the west side became a “bloody battlefield,” according to the Detroit News. Government tanks and armored personnel carriers “thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . . It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot blackened streets.” The mayor said, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”55 The black uprisings in Detroit and Newark were the largest of 1967 but by no means the only ones. Urban rebellions rocked cities large and small all across America. According to the Kerner Commission, 164 such rebellions erupted in the first nine months of the year.56

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

He’s a murdering chud,” Zil was yelling. “What do you want to do? Lynch him?” Astrid demanded. That stopped the flow for a second as kids tried to figure out what “lynch” meant. But Zil quickly recovered. “I saw him do it. He used his powers to kill Harry.” “I was trying to stop you from smashing my head in!” Hunter shouted. “You’re a lying mutant freak!” “They think they can do anything they want,” another voice shouted. Astrid said, as calmly as she could while still pitching her voice to be heard, “We are not going down that path, people, dividing up between freaks and normals.” “They already did it!” Zil cried. “It’s the freaks acting all special and like their farts don’t stink.” That earned a laugh. “And now they’re starting to kill us,” Zil cried. Angry cheers. Edilio squared his shoulders and stepped into the crowd. He went first to Hank, the kid with the shotgun. He tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Give me that thing.” “No way,” Hank said. But he didn’t seem too certain. “You want to have that thing fire by accident and blow someone’s face off?” Edilio held his hand out. “Give it to me, man.” Zil rounded on Edilio. “You going to make Hunter give up his weapon? Huh? He’s got powers, man, and that’s okay, but the normals can’t have any weapon? How are we supposed to defend ourselves from the freaks?” “Man, give it a rest, huh?” Edilio said. He was doing his best to sound more weary than angry or scared. Things were already bad enough. “Zil, you want to be responsible if that gauge goes off and kills Astrid? You want to maybe give that some thought?” Zil blinked. But he said, “Dude, I’m not scared of Sam.” “Sam won’t be your problem, I will be,” Edilio snapped, losing patience. “Anything happens to her, I’ll take you down before Sam ever gets the chance.” Zil snorted derisively. “Ah, good little boy, Edilio, kissing up to the chuds. I got news for you, dilly dilly, you’re a lowly normal, just like me and the rest of us." “I’m going to let that go,” Edilio said evenly, striving to regain his cool, trying to sound calm and in control, even though he could hardly take his eyes off the twin barrels of the shotgun. “But now I’m taking that shotgun.” “No way!” Hank cried, and the next thing was an explosion so loud, Edilio thought a bomb had gone off. The muzzle flash blinded him, like camera flash going off in his face. Someone yelled in pain. Edilio staggered back, squeezed his eyes shut, trying to adjust. When he opened them again the shotgun was on the ground and the boy who’d accidentally fired it was holding his bruised hand, obviously shocked. Zil bent to grab the gun. Edilio took two steps forward and kicked Zil in the face. As Zil fell back Edilio made a grab for the shotgun. He never saw the blow that turned his knees to water and filled his head with stars. He fell like a sack of bricks, but even as he fell he lurched forward to cover the shotgun. Astrid screamed and launched herself down the stairs to protect Edilio. Antoine, the one who had hit Edilio, was raising his bat to hit Edilio again, but on the back swing he caught Astrid in the face. Antoine cursed, suddenly fearful. Zil yelled, “No, no, no!” There was a sudden rush of running feet. Down the walkway, into the street, echoing down the block.

Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you're a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you. That's what fame is like. You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don't get to decide if we are beautiful. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I'm attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like. Fame is not this way. A person's fame is in everyone's head except their own. You could be checking into your flight at the airport and 999 people will see you as just another face in the crowd. The thousandth might think you're more famous than Jesus. As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because you went to college with them or because they've been watching your videos or listening to your music or reading about you in magazines for years. You never know if they know you and love you. Worse, you never know if they know you and hate you.

You’re awfully quiet,” Travis said, glancing up from the road. “Are you falling asleep on me?” “Not yet.” Cat swallowed a yawn. “Just thinking.” “About what?” “This and that. Mostly that.” Travis smiled. “Sounds important.” Cat gave up and yawned openly. “Nope. You’ve unraveled my brain.” He changed lanes to pass a huge motor home that belonged on the multilane interstate highway, not on Laguna’s crowded street. She enjoyed watching him control the car with ease and precision. When he downshifted, sunlight ran like gold water over the tawny hair on his arm. As he transferred his grip from gearshift to steering wheel, the tendons on the back of his hand moved beneath tanned skin. His fingers closed firmly over the leather-sheathed wheel. Cat remembered the intense pleasure Travis could give to her with a simple caress. Sudden, stark need coursed through her, leaving her shaken. She wanted to touch him, taste him, take him so deeply into her body that she could feel every wild pulse of his release. “If you keep looking at me like that,” Travis said, “I’m going to pull over to the side of the road and do things to you that will get us arrested.” His husky drawl did nothing to cool Cat’s blood. She looked away from his knowing hands to his lips smiling beneath his tawny mustache. She remembered the feel of his beard sliding down her skin, the exciting silky roughness against her neck, her breasts, her stomach. She wondered what it would be like to feel him . . . everywhere. With a small groan Cat closed her eyes. “What am I going to do with you?” “I’ll pull over so we can find out.” “Not a good idea.” “Chicken.” “Cluck cluck. I can’t afford bail.” “I can.” “They’ll put us in separate cells.” “Damn. I didn’t think of that.

You are a passenger. We are all, often, passengers. The boat, history, is going somewhere. You are not the captain. But you have excellent accommodations. Of course, down there in the hold are famished immigrants or enslaved Africans or press-ganged tars. You can’t help them—you do feel sorry for them—and you can’t control the captain, either. Cosseted though you may be, you are actually quite powerless. A gesture on your part might relieve your bad conscience, if you have a bad conscience, but would not materially improve their situation. How would it help them to give up your own spacious cabin, with the room you require for your copious belongings, since, although those below have very few belongings, there are so many of them? The food you are eating would never be enough to feed all of them; indeed, if prepared with them in mind as well, it would no longer be as refined; and of course the view would be spoiled (crowds spoil a view, crowds litter, etc.). So you have no choice but to enjoy the excellent food and the view. Nevertheless, assuming you are not indifferent, you think a lot about what is going on. Even if it is not your responsibility, how can it be your responsibility, you are still a participant and a witness. (First- or second-class passengers, these are the points of view from which most accounts of history are written.) And if those being persecuted are those who might have had accommodations as agreeable as your own, people of your own rank or who have your interests, you are far less likely to be indifferent to their present distress. Of course, you cannot prevent them from being punished if they are in fact guilty. But, assuming you are not indifferent, that you are a decent person, you will try to intervene when you can. Counsel leniency. Or at least prudence. The

Mike continued to walk unhurriedly toward the crowd until he loomed up in the stereo tank in life size, as if he were in the room with his water brothers. He stopped on the grass verge in front of the hotel, a few feet from the crowd. "You called me?" He was answered with a growl. The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of golden light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in his own beauty, beauty that made Jubal's heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, "Look at me. I am a son of man." . . . . "God damn you!" A half brick caught Mike in the ribs. He turned his face slightly toward his assailant. "But you yourself are God. You can damn only yourself and you can never escape yourself." "Blasphemer!" A rock caught him just over his left eye and blood welled forth. Mike said calmly, "In fighting me, you fight yourself... for Thou art God and I am God * . . and all that groks is God-there is no other." More rocks hit him, from various directions; he began to bleed in several places. "Hear the Truth. You need not hate, you need not fight, you need not fear. I offer you the water of life-" Suddenly his hand held a tumbler of water, sparkling in the sunlight. "-and you may share it whenever you so will . . . and walk in peace and love and happiness together." A rock caught the glass and shattered it. Another struck him in the mouth. Through bruised and bleeding lips he smiled at them, looking straight into the camera with an expression of yearning tenderness on his face. Some trick of sunlight and stereo formed a golden halo back of his head. "Oh my brothers, I love you so! Drink deep. Share and grow closer without end. Thou art God." Jubal whispered it back to him. . . . "Lynch him! Give the bastard a nigger necktie!" A heavy-gauge shotgun blasted at close range and Mike's right arm was struck off at the elbow and fell. It floated gently down, then came to rest on the cool grasses, its hand curved open in invitation. "Give him the other barrel, Shortie-and aim closer!" The crowd laughed and applauded. A brick smashed Mike's nose and more rocks gave him a crown of blood. "The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control yourself. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes." Another shotgun blast was followed by two more shots. One shot, a forty-five slug, hit Mike over the heart, shattering the sixth rib near the sternum and making a large wound; the buckshot and the other slug sheered through his left tibia five inches below the patella and left the fibula sticking out at an angle, broken and white against the yellow and red of the wound. Mike staggered slightly and laughed, went on talking, his words clear and unhurried. "Thou art God. Know that and the Way is opened." "God damn it-let's stop this taking the Name of the Lord in vain!"- "Come on, men! Let's finish him!" The mob surged forward, led by one bold with a club; they were on him with rocks and fists, and then with feet as he went down. He went on talking while they kicked his ribs in and smashed his golden body, broke his bones and tore an ear loose. At last someone called out, "Back away a little so we can get the gasoline on him!" The mob opened up a little at that waning and the camera zoomed to pick up his face and shoulders. The Man from Mars smiled at his brothers, said once more, softly and clearly, "I love you." An incautious grasshopper came whirring to a landing on the grass a few inches from his face; Mike turned his head, looked at it as it stared back at him. "Thou art God," he said happily and discorporated.

Engine room fire alarm’?” Rusty said. There was a moment of confusion before it kicked in. “ENGINE ROOM FIRE ALARM?” * * * “What the hell is that sound?” Harvey Tharpe said, rubbing his eyes as he opened the cabin door. Being on this yacht was better than being on the lifeboat but not much. They were packed in like sardines. There was food but being woken up in the middle of the night by a blaring “Squeee! Squeee! ” was not his idea of fun. The former businessman had been “robust” before being cast adrift on a lifeboat in a zombie apocalypse. He still had his height and some solidity. So he was more than a bit surprised when the short, blonde skipper of the boat, wearing not much more than a camisole and panties smashed him out of the way like an NFL linebacker on her way aft. “MOVE PEOPLE!” the boat captain shouted, continuing to hammer her way through the crowd of refugees. * * * “Fuck a freaking duck,” Sophia said, opening the door to the engine compartment. The smoke wasn’t so bad she needed a respirator but it was bad. And they were dead in the water. All the power except the shrieking alarm was out. She threw the main battery disconnect, then picked up one of the industrial fire extinguishers and played it over the exterior of the main breakers which were the source of the fire. “Skipper?” Paula said, picking another one up. “We need to get it open before we use them all up,” Sophia said, putting her hand on the extinguisher. “Get Rusty to get all the passengers up, out and on the sundeck.” She slid one hand into a rubber glove and popped open the main breaker panel. The whole thing was smoldering so she played the rest of the fire extinguisher over it until it was cold. A tick checker showed that the whole thing was electrically cold as well. Now if only the batteries hadn’t discharged their whole load into the panel and killed themselves as well. “What can I do, Skipper?” Patrick said groggily. The “engineer” was wearing not much more than the skipper. “Get a hand-held,” Sophia said. “See if there’s a sub in range. Tell them we had a major electrical fire. Fire is under control. No power at this time. May be repairable but we may need assistance. Don’t at this time but may. Got it? Do not call mayday or PON-PON. Do not.” “Got it, Skipper,” Patrick said. “And get these people the HELL OUT OF MY ENGINE COMPARTENT!

The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill. Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives. After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.16 As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed. The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.17 Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. ... The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

Every special human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the majority—where he can forget the rule-bound "people," for he is an exception to them;—but for the single case where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these rules, as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense. Anyone who, in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer with all the colours of distress—green and gray with disgust, surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness—is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, always keeps away from it, and stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for, knowledge. For if he were, he would one day have to say to himself, "The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception—than I am, the exception!"— and he would make his way down , above all, "inside." The study of the average man—long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company - (all company is bad company except with one’s peers):—that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part, the richest in disappointments. But if he’s lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he encounters real shortcuts and ways of making his task easier; I’m referring to the so-called cynics, those who, as cynics, simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the "rule-bound man" in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses;—now and then they even wallow in books, as if in their very own dung. Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder and more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust—for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat and ape; as in the Abbé Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted, and perhaps also the foulest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal quieter. More frequently it happens that, as I’ve intimated, the scientific head is set on an ape’s body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul; among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that’s not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak "badly" of human beings—not even in a nasty way—there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE