Driving Empire Quotes

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.

Stop being so greedy, and so selfish. Realize that there is more to the world than your big houses and fancy stores. People are starving and you worry about oil for your cars. Babies are dying of thirst and you search the fashion pages for the latest styles. Nations like ours are drowing in poverty, but your people don't even hear our cries for help. You shut your ears to the voices of those who try to tell you these things. You label them radicals or Communists. You must open your hearts to the poor and downtrodden, instead of driving them further into poverty and servitude. There's not much time left. If you don't change, you're doomed.

Stories are bulls. Writers come of age full of vigor, and they feel the need to drive the old stories from the herd. One bull rules the herd awhile but then he loses his vigor and the young bulls take over. Stories are nations, empires. They can last as long as ancient Rome or as short as the Third Reich. Story-nations rise and decline. Governments change, trends rise, and they go on conquering their neighbors. Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story . . . your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand [...] The great millions of Africa, and of Asia, have grown impatient of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and are rebelling against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others. Hence the twentieth century has become the century of colonial emancipation, the century of continuing revolution which must finally witness the total liberation of Africa from colonial rule and imperialist exploitation.

Alternative Anthem. Put the kettle on Put the kettle on It is the British answer to Armageddon. Never mind taxes rise Never mind trains are late One thing you can be sure of and that’s the kettle, mate. It’s not whether you lose It’s not whether you win It’s whether or not you’ve plugged the kettle in. May the kettle ever hiss May the kettle ever steam It is the engine that drives our nation’s dream. Long live the kettle that rules over us May it be limescale free and may it never rust. Sing it on the beaches Sing it from the housetops The sun may set on empire but the kettle never stops.

he’s not very pro-American and it drives him mad that the British Empire’s no more, that the U.S. is arbiter of the world’s fate and making obvious mistakes,

She never answers during the day," Max explained. "She lets her machine pick up." People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with," Miles told him. "In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go. It was just where I went.

American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.

On one 50-mile summer hike, Gates demonstrated the persistence and tenacity that was to be his trademark later in life.

And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: "Down with the English anyhow. That's certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's flfty-flve hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then "—he rode against him furiously— "and then," he concluded, half kissing him, "you and I shall be friends.

Even as a child Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best. "Any school assignment, be it playing a musical instrument or writing papers, whatever, he would do at any or all hours of the day".

A word of advice about Ricky ..." Gabriel said as he swung his car from the end of the drive. "Is it going to cost me?" I waved off his answer. "Whatever you're going to say, save your breath." "I overheard him offering you a ride on his motorcycle. I don't believe you understand what that entails." "Grass, gas, or ass. No one rides for free." I looked over at him. "I've seen the T-shirt." "I don't think you're taking this seriously, Olivia. Do you know what a one-percenter is?" I sighed. "Yes, Gabriel. It refers to the portion of bikers who belong to a professional motorcycle club. A gang. Ricky is one. As such, I'm going to guess that the only women who get to ride his bike are also riding him. Am I right?" His mouth tightened as if he didn't appreciate the crass phrasing. "I'm afraid you're under some illusions about Ricky because he does not fit the stereotype." "Oh, I'm not fooled. He may appear to be the heir to a criminal empire, but he's really an undercover cop, working tirelessly to overthrow his father's evil empire and restore justice and goodness to the land." I glanced over. "Am I close?" Not even a hint of a smile.

Gates loved competing- and winning. Just as importantly, he hated losing. He thrived on competition, as long as he was playing or doing something he was good at, and relished opportunities to prove himself, physically and mentally.

erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

As Gates had told the pastor that day in his house. "I can do anything I put my mind to".

Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,” Solo says before adding quietly, “Usually an electrical fire near the hyperspace drive, which Chewie always warns me about…

Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand.

The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions, to see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.

That what guided me was the Force.” “You’re lying. The Force is only for the Jedi.” “No!” Jumon says, not angry so much as he is incredulous. “They wield it, but the Force is in all living things. It is what gives us our intuition, our drive, it’s what connects us to one another. We are all one with the Force.

The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can’t be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why: China has been around for 4,000 years and just doesn’t give a damn. You can’t intimidate them — it’s driving people in Washington berserk. Yet of all the major powers, China has been the least aggressive militarily.

The empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing ‘absolute’ about it.4 Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

It was William who would climb out of his carriage unafraid and help a farmer drive a herd of cattle or sheep across a road when necessary.

Invasion was never a holy war in Islam, but it was holy in political Islam and the Islamic states and empires; after all, what is better than religion to drive people to war?!

In fact, no one noticed that the Empire had lost its drive, its forward look, because Trantor gleamed in shining metal.

She’d just have to pray that the immortality gracing her blood would drive off any infection.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, “willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.

Summary of Scrum vs Kanban Similarities: - Both are Lean and Agile - Both use pull scheduling - Both limit WIP - Both use transperency to drive process improvement - Both focus on delivering releasable software and often - Both are based on self-organizing teams - Both require breaking the work into pieces. - In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity/lead time)

This book is like a supreme car which can drive the world to a new horizon. N.DAS Humans declared themselves masters of their own lives,producers of cities and history,and inventor of heaven.Antonio Negri[EMPIRE]

Hoover’s program aimed to drive a wedge between the Party and its nonblack allies. Today, the popular misconception persists that the Black Panther Party was separatist, or antiwhite. Many current internet postings mischaracterize the Party in this way. 28

Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy

Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically.

Trey Gate's maternal grandmother, Adelle Maxwell, was also an important influence on him, encouraging him to read as much as possible, pushing him to excel in all that he did, challenging him to use his mind. They played card games together frequently, especially games like Concentration that required mental agility.

Everything Bill did, he did to the max, said Edmark. What he did always went well, well beyond everyone else. Gifted children - those with IQs near or above the genius level- sometimes grow up to be socially inept, due to limited childhood interactions and experiences. Bill and Mary Gates were determined to see that that didn't happen to their son.

Did you go to the the theatre last time you were here? 'No, it's too expensive.' 'What did you do?' 'What tourists always do in New York City. Empire State, Statue of and all the galleries. There's a million galleries.' 'Where'd you stay?' 'The first two nights, I slept in an abandoned car. A Pontiac Grand Am.' Weren't you scared?' 'Not really. It had a doorman.

Cixi’s lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity. Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi’s future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons’ brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines’ wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more “than nine million taels of silver had gone missing. Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty. Cixi’s great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amounted to 43,200 taels – a colossal sum, next to which his official salary had been a pittance. As he had died a long time ago, his son, Cixi’s grandfather, was obliged to pay half the sum, even though he worked in the Ministry of Punishments and had nothing to do with the state coffer. After three years of futile struggle to raise money, he only managed to hand over 1,800 taels, and an edict signed by the emperor confined him to prison, only to be released if and when his son, Cixi’s father, delivered the balance. The life of the family was turned upside down. Cixi, then eleven years old, had to take in sewing jobs to earn extra money – which she would remember all her life and would later talk about to her ladies-in-waiting in the court. “As she was the eldest of two daughters and three sons, her father discussed the matter with her, and she rose to the occasion. Her ideas were carefully considered and practical: what possessions to sell, what valuables to pawn, whom to turn to for loans and how to approach them. Finally, the family raised 60 per cent of the sum, enough to get her grandfather out of prison. The young Cixi’s contribution to solving the crisis became a family legend, and her father paid her the ultimate compliment: ‘This daughter of mine is really more like a son!’ Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women. Inevitably their conversations touched on official business and state affairs, which helped form Cixi’s lifelong interest. Being consulted and having her views acted on, she acquired self-confidence and never accepted the com“common assumption that women’s brains were inferior to men’s. The crisis also helped shape her future method of rule. Having tasted the bitterness of arbitrary punishment, she would make an effort to be fair to her officials.

the need to create is a drive that lies deep within each of us. We all strive to build empires, whether of stone or people or words. Empires we hope will survive us. In the end, though, each of us must necessarily leave our creations behind. All we can hope for is to also leave behind a worthy successor to continue our work. Or who can at least maintain it for a season.

I have something to show you." He sank down next to me and handed me a sketchbook. I opened it. And saw the mermaid. She was drawn in colored ink, exquisitely detailed; each scale had a little picture in it: a pyramid, a rocket, a peacock, a lamp. Her torso was patterened red, like a tattoo, like coral. She had a thin strand of seaweed around her neck, with a starfish holding on to the center. Her hair was a tumble of loose black curls. She had my face. I turned the page.And another and another. There she was fighting a creature that was half human, half octopus. Exploring a cave. Riding a shark. Laughing and petting a stingray that rested on her lap. "I'm calling her Cora Lia for the moment," Alex told me. "I thought about Corella, but it sounded like cheap dishware." "She's...amazing." "She's fierce. Fighting the Evil Sea-Dragon King and his minions." I traced the red tattoo on her chest. "This is beautiful." Alex reached into my sweater, pulled the loose neck of the T-shirt away from my shoulder. I didn't stop him. "It looks like coral to me." He touched me, then,the pad of his thumb tracing the outline of the scar. It felt strange, partly because of the difference in the tissue, but more because in the last few years, the only hands that had touched me there were mine. I set the book aside carefully. "Guess I don't see what you do." "That's too bad, because I see you perfectly." I curved myself into him. "Maybe you're exactly what I need." "Like there's any doubt?" He buried his face in my neck.I didn't stop him. "So." "So?" "We'll kill a few hours, watch the sunrise, have pancakes, and you'll drive home." "What?" I felt him smile against my skin. "I got you swimming with sharks. Next on the Conquer Your Fears list is driving a stick shift.Right?" "One thing at a time," I said. Then, "Oh. Do that again." In another story, the intrepid heroine would have gone running out and splashed in the surf, hypothermia be damned. She would have driven the Mustang home, booked a haircut, taken up stand-up comedy, and danced on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. But this was me, and I was moving at my own pace. Truth: My story started a hundred years ago. There's time.

then we would enter what he called his “study,” a room whose walls were hung with prints which showed, against a dark background, a pink and fleshy goddess driving a chariot, or standing upon a globe, or wearing a star on her brow—pictures which were popular under the Second Empire because there was thought to be something about them that suggested Pompeii, which were then generally despised, and which are now becoming fashionable again for one single and consistent reason (notwithstanding all the others that are advanced), namely, that they suggest the Second Empire.

I used to be like that once. I never gave anybody a second chance. It’s a very sad way to live your life.” “Do you believe the dragons should provide patternform technology to humans?” “Yes, I do. Denise is convinced that because we didn’t create it for ourselves we won’t be able to handle it properly, that it will be constantly misused. To me it’s completely irrelevant that we didn’t work out every little detail for ourselves.” “Why?” “Other than pride? We know the scientific principles behind technology. If we don’t understand this particular theory, I trust in us to learn it soon enough. There’s very little we can’t grasp once it’s fully explained and broken down into its basic equations. But that’s just the clinical analysis. From a moral point of view, consider this: when the Americans first sent a man to the Moon, there were people living in Africa and South America and Asia who had never seen a lightbulb, or known of electricity or antibiotics. There were even Americans who didn’t have running water to their houses, or an indoor toilet. Does that mean they shouldn’t have been given access to electricity or modern medicine, because they personally didn’t invent it? It might not have been their local community’s knowledge, but it was human knowledge. We don’t have a clue how to build the nullvoid drive that the Ring Empire’s Outbounds employed in their intergalactic ships, but the knowledge is there, developed by sentient entities. Why shouldn’t we have access to that? Because it’s a shortcut? Because we don’t have to spend centuries of time developing it for ourselves? In what way will using ideas other than our own demean and diminish us? All knowledge should be cherished, not denied.” “I believe you would make an excellent dragon, Lawrence.” A

But its exclusive character and irreconcileable hostility to the religious cults and ceremonies with which the whole social life of the city-state and the empire were inseparably connected at every turn, brought the Christians into inevitable conflict with the government and with public opinion. To the man in the street, the Christian was an anti-social atheist who would take no part in the public feasts and the games, which played such a large part in city life. To the authorities he was a passive rebel, who would neither take his share of municipal offices nor pay loyal homage to the Emperor. Hence the rise of persecution, and the driving of the Christians into an underground existence, as a proscribed sect. The Church grew under the shadow of the executioner's rods and axes, and every Christian lived in the peril of physical torture and death. The thought of martyrdom coloured the whole outlook of early Christianity. But it was not only a fear, it was also an ideal and a hope. For the martyr was the complete Christian, he was the champion and hero of the new society and its conflict with the old, and even the Christians who failed in the moment of the trial - the lapsi - looked on the martyrs as their saviours and protectors

The Mongols who inherited Genghis Khan’s empire exercised a determined drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. When their highly skilled engineers from China, Persia, and Europe combined Chinese gunpowder with Muslim flamethrowers and applied European bell-casting technology, they produced the cannon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles. While each item had some significance, the larger impact came in the way the Mongols selected and combined technologies to create unusual hybrids. The

THE 5 DISCIPLINES OF THE MULTIPLIERS Diminisher The Empire Builder: Hoards resources and underutilizes talent The Tyrant: Creates a tense environment that suppresses people’s thinking and capability The Know-It-All: Gives directives that showcase how much they know The Decision Maker: Makes centralized, abrupt decisions that confuse the organization The Micro Manager: Drives results through their personal involvement Multiplier The Talent Magnet: Attracts talented people and uses them at their highest point of contribution The Liberator: Creates an intense environment that requires people’s best thinking and work The Challenger: Defines an opportunity that causes people to stretch The Debate Maker: Drives sound decisions through rigorous debate

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife’s edge. We’re a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there’s a dial tone, and your front yard isn’t underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there’s no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating.

The local cultures around the world that are carried by today’s immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism’s drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a “scattered” human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God’s intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted out and busted up business as usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time—if our tongues would but dare to loosen.

By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called 'strategic hamlets,' essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This 'pacification' ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1961.

Few people put more thought into the tiny details than the team behind the ever-expanding Roscioli empire, one of the nerve centers of the cucina romana moderna, found just a few steps from the Campo de' Fiori. Sitting at a small table inside the Ristorante Salumeria Roscioli, a hybrid space that functions as a deli counter in the front and a full-service restaurant in the back, general manager Valerio Capriotti tells me with conviction that Italian food is flourishing- advancing in ways it hasn't in years, if ever, thanks in large part to the efforts of small producers who put their lives into raising rare breeds of pig, growing heirloom varietals of wheat, and milking pampered dairy cows and sheep to create the types of ingredients that drive restaurants like Roscioli forward. "Modern Italian cuisine isn't about technique," he tells me, "it's about ingredients. We know more now than we ever did about how things are made and what they do when we cook and eat them.

Power has always been a temptation, and I want to argue that majority rule in America carries with it an empire temptation for many Christian citizens. Those of us who know our American history might be tempted to say, “That’s precisely the opposite of what our democracy, or representative democracy, stands for.” True enough, at one level, because giving everyone a voice vastly surpasses anything less. But take any heated political issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage to national health care to free-market enterprise to nuclear build-up for security, and you may glimpse what I’m trying to say. The political left takes one posture on issues while the political right draws swords from another posture. If we step back we see that each side seeks to impose its view on the minority. This is ruling over the other. Now to a few questions. Is this imposition of power over others consistent with following Christ? Do we ever wonder if the right to vote is the right to coerce and impose, the right to use the power of the majority against the minority?17 Is the power of the majority that different from the power of King Charles when the pilgrims and Puritans left England to establish the “city on a hill”? We would all agree that empowering the people improved the conditions, but I want to ask another question: Does it make the political process of voting the source of seeking for power over others? What is the best Christian response to the drive for power? I call this quest for power through the political process the “eschatology of politics”—that is, the belief that if we usher in the right political candidates and the right laws, then kingdom conditions will arrive. Every two years America goes through convulsions as one candidate after another promises (all but) the kingdom if he or she is elected. Every two years Americans go through the same convulsions as they lather up for the election because they believe if they get their candidate, not only will they win, but (all but) the kingdom will come. This is idolatry and yet another example of Constantinianism

You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.

Take a clever boy, who knows nothing about the principle of internal combustion or the inside of an engine, and leave him inside a motor-car, first telling him to move the various knobs, switches and levers about and see what happens. If no disaster supervenes, he will end by finding himself able to drive the car. It will then be true to say that he knows how to drive the car; but untrue to say that he knows the car. As to that, the most we could say would be that he has an 'operative' knowledge of it - because for operation all that is required is a good empirical acquaintance with the dashboard and the pedals. Whatever we say, it is obvious that what he has is very different from the knowledge of someone else, who has studied mechanics, though he has perhaps never driven a car in his life, and is perhaps too nervous to try. Now whether or no there is another kind of knowledge of nature, which corresponds to 'engine-knowledge' in the analogy, it seems that, if the first view of the nature of scientific theory is accepted, the kind of knowledge aimed at by science must be, in effect, what I will call 'dashboard-knowledge.

The picture is nevertheless complicated in Britain – at home, if not in its former empire – and might provide some of the reasons why white people here sometimes find terms like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ either inapplicable to Britain or hard to understand. First, Britain never practised open white supremacy on domestic soil as it did in the colonies, so those of us who hail from the colonies have a different understanding of British racial governance, even if we were born here. Second, the most deprived and violent regions of Britain remain areas that are almost exclusively white, such as the rough parts of Glasgow, Belfast and north-east England, a subject to which we will return later. Can the white people who burned to death in Grenfell Tower along with the ‘ethnics’, or were crushed to death at Hillsborough and then demonised in the press as thieves, or the dead at Aberfan, be said to have had ‘white privilege’? I can totally see why this might at first seem absurd to some people. Especially in relation to Kensington and Chelsea, where the working-class Muslim population in the north of the borough so visible during the Grenfell fire contrasts sharply with another large population of Muslims in the south of the borough who hail from the Gulf states, and are rich enough for the paupers to know not to aim their hatred of Muslims at them as they drive up Kensington High Street in their Louis Vuitton-patterned Lamborghinis.

As he deployed his forces, Newton imposed the same empirical rigor on his new job as he had with his pendulums and prisms. The Mint could not operate any faster than his men could spin their capstans, and every other step had to be timed to match the work of his presses. So Newton watched to “judge of the workmen’s diligence.” He saw how quickly the brutal effort needed to turn the press wore out its team. He observed just how nimble the man loading blanks and pulling finished coins from the press had to be to keep his fingers. Eventually, he identified the perfect pace: if the press thumped just slightly slower than the human heart, striking fifty to fifty-five times a minute, men and machines could stamp out coins for hours at a time. By autumn, Newton had the Mint’s output up to £100,000 every working week—a century ahead of Adam Smith, and more than double again before Henry Ford showed the world just how powerful time-and-motion rigor could be. Newton continued to drive his horses and men for the next two and a half years until the nation’s entire silver money supply had been remade. In all, under his command, the Mint recoined over £6 million—£6,722,970 0s. 2d., to be exact. As that last tuppence indicates, Newton, having spent the whole of his prior life as an essentially solitary thinker, proved to be a truly extraordinary administrator, bringing the effort home with accounts accurate to the penny and stunningly free of corruption.

The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society. This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

In spring that year (1930), by a symbolic act whose significance I myself did not grasp, a march through the stifling heat to the sea with a little band of followers to make illegal salt, Gandhi had aroused the Indian people from the lethargy into which they had long sunk after nearly three centuries of British rule, if you counted the incredible period when they were governed for two hundred years not by a foreign country but by a bizarre band of traders greedy for profit, the honourable members and agents of the East India Company. These hustlers had first came out from England early in the seventeenth century, found the pickings beyond their fondest dreams, and by hook and by crook and by armed might, had stolen the country from the Indians. It was the only instance in history, I believe, of a private commercial enterprise taking over a vast, heavily populated subcontinent, ruling it with an iron hand and exploiting it for private profit. Probably only the British, with their odd assortment of talents, their great entrepreneurial drive, their ingrained feeling of racial superiority, of which Rudyard Kipling would sing so shrilly, their guile in dividing the natives and turning them against one another, and their ruthlessness in putting down all who threatened their rule and their profits, could have done it, and got away with it so long. Perhaps only the Indians, divided as they were after the decay of the Mughal Empire into dozens of quarrelling, warring states, great and small, could have succumbed so easily and so quickly to the aggression of a handful determined merchants, backed by a small handful of British troops in the service of the Company, and remained so long in abject subjection. As Radhakrishnan, the great Hindu philosopher, put it in our own time: "The day India lost her freedom, a great curse fell on her and she became petrified.

The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled The Times and The BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England's greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England's class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they. Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, Anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.

Oil “Soviet Russia cannot survive without Baku’s oil,” told comrade Vladimir Lenin. One of the plans was to drain the Caspian Sea: “Is it possible? Can you drain the Caspian Sea?” said the powerful Stalin. It was more an order than a question.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Azerbaijan - Oil Country). Mafia “With his wife Victoria, they reigned here for nineteen years. This period Georgians called ironically the Victorian Era, and his wife got the name Queen Victoria. Victoria created the system when all was for sale: state documents ten times the price; 5,000 roubles to enter the Communist party; 50,000 for the judge job, … “ (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Gruzia - Where Soviet Mafia Was Born). Smoking “Smoking breaks in the USSR were long and often—and became an official excuse not to work, causing huge damage to the already failing state economy. But on the other hand, with zero unemployment and prison terms, if you are not on a payroll, the state could not provide enough work for everybody. People had to show up every day in the workplace. Boredom from nothing-to-do turned into massive laziness and Soviet workers spent long hours in the smoke rooms. For some, it was a place to relax, for others, to provoke a frank conversation—because … Well, let’s talk about it later.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Litva - Friends and Rebels). God “The bus was driving slowly, just forty km an hour on the slippery winter road. Outside was a spectacular view of the Caucasus mountains. Here and there appeared churches: nearby and far away, but always on the top of the hill: “Closer to God, as high as possible,” crossed His mind. The bus stopped with a creaking sound, and He slowly got off: “For me, Khor Virap Monastery will be the resting place: from the Soviet life … from the communist lies … I shall spend here the rest of my life. And from here … I shall go to eternity …” these were His last thoughts before He entered the monastery gate. He was dead tired from all that happened, walking uphill closer to God.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Armenia - Road in the First Christian State).

[I]n the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desired martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it was said that the scripture promised ‘multiplication, even to a hundred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homes’. Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clear but the general principle was: those who died early, publicly and painfully would be best rewarded. In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less that the Romans want to kill – and more that the Christians want to die. Why wouldn’t they? Paradoxically, martyrdom held considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that – provided you believe in its promised rewards – martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later Emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had ‘begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants’.

When I spoke to you here the last time, my old party comrades, I did so fully conscious of victory as hardly a mortal has been able to do before me. In spite of this, a concern weighed heavily on me. It was clear to me that, ultimately, behind this war was that incendiary who has always lived off the quarrels of nations: the international Jew. I would no longer have been a National Socialist had I ever distanced myself from this realization. We followed his traces over many years. In this Reich, probably for the first time, we scientifically resolved this problem for all time, according to plan, and really understood the words of a great Jew who said that the racial question was the key to world history. Therefore, we knew quite well-above all, I knew-that the driving force behind these occurrences was the Jew. And that, as always in history, there were blockheads ready to stand up for him: partly spineless, paid characters, partly people who want to make deals and, at no time, flinch from having blood spilled for these deals. I have come to know these Jews as the incendiaries of the world. After all, in the previous years, you saw how they slowly poisoned the people via the press, radio, film, and theater. You saw how this poisoning continued. You saw how their finances, their money transactions, had to work in this sense. And, in the first days of the war, certain Englishmen-all of them shareholders in the armament industry-said it openly: “The war must last three years at least. It will not and must not end before three years.”-That is what they said. That was only natural, since their capital was tied up and they could not hope to secure an amortization in less than three years. Certainly, my party comrades, for us National Socialists, this almost defies comprehension. But that is how things are in the democratic world. You can be prime minister or minister of war and, at the same time, own portfolios of countless shares in the armament industry. Interests are explained that way. We once came to know this danger as the driving force in our domestic struggle. We had this black-red-golden coalition in front of us; this mixture of hypocrisy and abuse of religion on the one hand, and financial interests on the other; and, finally, their truly Jewish-Marxist goals. We completely finished off this coalition at home in a hard struggle. Now, we stand facing this enemy abroad. He inspired this international coalition against the German Volk and the German Reich. First, he used Poland as a dummy, and later pressed France, Belgium, Holland, and Norway to serve him. From the start, England was a driving force here. Understandably, the power which would one day confront us is most clearly ruled by this Jewish spirit: the Soviet Union. It happens to be the greatest servant of Jewry. Time meanwhile has proved what we National Socialists maintained for many years: it is truly a state in which the whole national intelligentsia has been slaughtered, and where only spiritless, forcibly proletarianized subhumans remain. Above them, there is the gigantic organization of the Jewish commissars, that is, established slaveowners. Frequently people wondered whether, in the long run, nationalist tendencies would not be victorious there. But they completely forgot that the bearers of a conscious nationalist view no longer existed. That, in the end, the man who temporarily became the ruler of this state, is nothing other than an instrument in the hands of this almighty Jewry. If Stalin is on stage and steps in front of the curtain, then Kaganovich and all those Jews stand behind him, Jews who, in ten-thousandfold ramifications, control this mighty empire. Speech in the Löwenbräukeller Munich, November 8, 1941

However, implicit knowledge is not always correct. Kahneman and Klien (2009) have conducted extensive research into decision making and have identified two conditions that are necessary in order for people to develop correct implicit (i.e., intuitive) beliefs. The first is that there must be cues in the environment that provide accurate information about the actual state of things. That is, the environment must be consistent enough for people to be able to make accurate judgments. Making an accurate determination regarding which route is quickest to drive provides many reliable cues. For example, highways will generally be faster than surface streets because highway speed limits are higher and there are no stoplights or stop signs. Being a highway, however, is not a perfect indicator, as there may sometimes be an accident on the highway that makes it slower than the surface street. What is important is that highways are usually faster. If there were frequent accidents on the highway such that it was not usually faster, then highways would not be a reliable indicator for the quickness of a trip.

The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The Creator invited him to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and dance. And the experimental creature wasn't killed after the banquet. He was transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced from the palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation didn’t hurt at all. And then the cells were stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet. They would evolve into ever more complicated life forms as the eons went by. Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will. Trout didn't give the experimental creature a proper name. He simply called him The Man. On the virgin planet, The Man was Adam and the sea was Eve. The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve. Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain. He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water. He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next—and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man yelled this: “Cheese!” Another time he yelled, “Wouldn't you really rather drive a Buick?

Psychologists have generally ignored the epistemology, that is, theoretical framework, that drives Piaget’s work. Philosophers, on the other hand, have dismissed the relevance of Piaget’s empirical work for epistemological questions because “philosophical and psychological questions…are different from each other, and…there are no grounds for the belief that philosophical questions can be answered by appeal to empirical evidence or vice versa” (Hamlyn, 1971, p. 19).

Phlogiston was without color, smell, weight, or taste. When you burned something, you were dephlogisticating it—that is, driving all of the phlogiston out of the material. Often this left behind only ash.

on 3 March 1918 the new Soviet republic signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ending the war on the Eastern Front. It was a humiliation for Russia. The country lost one-quarter of the former Russian Empire’s population and industry, including 90 per cent of its coalmines. It renounced all territorial claims to Finland, Belarus and Ukraine, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Poland became an independent state. The driving force behind the signing of the treaty was Lenin. Despite the enormous losses, he believed that only an immediate peace would allow the young Bolshevik government to consolidate power in Russia, against all its enemies.

It takes all my effort to drive the dark, handsome Alexander and his imaginary kisses out of my mind.

Jealousy is the biggest force that motivates humankind. Why do empires compete with each other? Why do kings try to outsmart each other in what they do, if not motivated by the jealousy they feel? Jealousy is the driving force of progress, envy is the motivating force of life. The need for importance is the most important of urges after the basic physical urges of food, shelter and sex. Even these basic urges have their root in jealousy. To deny jealousy is to deny the basic instincts of man.

Much of the drive for Roman conquests, Montgomery argues, was fueled by poor agricultural practices that were whittling away the productivity of the empire’s cultivated areas. Montgomery hypothesizes that exhaustion and erosion of the soil was a major factor in the fall of most once great civilizations, including the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Mayans.

Glow Worm With miles to drive On a cerebral highway Where it leads our hearts to That empire where all unfolds We drag our knees Through these badlands And we hurt ourselves Just to feel anything In the mecca of us We all glow forever With cobwebbed eyes An affair with the puppets You've seemed to have forgotten And now you sleep with the rats all alone I held you so warm Like a brother A part of you in a part of me so spoiled I cut you off like a cancer In the mecca of us We all glow forever It's simple How you complete my core So potent in your eyes To move mountains To burn skies We've broken Our arms and throats For our portraits Demons or not It doesn't make a difference to me I'm so tired of screaming In the mecca of us We all glow forever

THE MIGHTY SCREEWEE™ EMPIRE™ IS POISED TO ATTACK EARTH! OUR BATTLESHIPS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED IN A SNEAK RAID! NOTHING CAN STAND BETWEEN EARTH AND THE TERRIBLE VENGEANCE OF THE SCREEWEE™! BUT THERE IS ONE STARSHIP LEFT . . . AND OUT OF THE MISTS OF TIME COMES ONE WARRIOR, ONE FIGHTER WHO IS THE LAST HOPE OF CIVILIZATION! YOU! YOU ARE THE SAVIOR OF CIVILIZATION. YOU ARE ALL THAT STANDS BETWEEN YOUR WORLD AND CERTAIN OBLIVION. YOU ARE THE LAST HOPE. ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND!™ ACTION-PACKED WITH NEW FEATURES! JUST LIKE THE REAL THING! FULL-COLOR SOUND AND SLAM-VECTOR™ GRAPHICS!   Suitable for IBM PC, Atari, Amiga, Pineapple, Amstrad, Nintendo. Actual game shots taken from a version you haven’t bought. Copyright © 1992 Gobi Software, 17834 W. Agharta Drive, Shambala, Tibet. All Rights Reserved. All company names and product names are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies. The names ScreeWee, Empire, and Mankind are trademarks of Gobi Software 1992.

Pasquale considered his friend’s face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee’s face, like Michael Deane’s face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality—that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires. This reminded him of Alvis Bender’s contention that stories were like nations—Italy a great epic poem, Britain a thick novel, America a brash motion picture in Technicolor—and he remembered, too, Dee Moray saying she’d spent years “waiting for her movie to start,” and that she’d almost missed out on her life waiting for it.

By shifting the empirical emphasis from the search for mental faculties as unified neurobiological categories towards developing a more componential, constructionist functional architecture of the human brain, the overlap in empirical findings across psychological domains is not a problem for reverse inference, but becomes the engine that drives a more valid approach to reverse inference.

Empirical proof doesn't drive progress. Progress is driven by curiosity, something we all have built into us. Empirical proof is a safety net for those uncomfortable with the unknown.

With the logic o f Real-as-impossible you h ave this notion of the unattainable object - the l ogic of desire, whe r e desire is structured around a pr imordial void. I would argue that the no tion of drive that i s present here c annot be read in these transcendentalist term s : that is to s ay, i n terms of an a priori loss where empiric a l obje cts never coincide with das Ding, the Thing. The vulgar example that I wo uld give here is the following. Let us s ay you are in love with a woma n . and that y o u a r e obsessed wi t h her vagin a . You do all the p o s ­ sible things : y o u p enetrate it, ki s s it, whatever - i t' s your problem; I won ' t go into tha t . Now, from a trans c endental­ ist perspective the idea is that this is a typical illusi o n : you think the vagina is the Thing itself, but really it's not, and you should accept the gap between the void o f the Thing and the contingent object filling it up. But when you are in such an intense s exual love relationship, I don ' t think the idea can be that the vagina is j ust an ersatz for the impo s s ibl e Thing. N o, I think that it is this p arti cul a r object, but that this obj ect is strangely split. There is a s elf- distance - you know it is the vagi n a , but you get never e n ough - the split is within the object itself The split is no t b etween the e mpirica l reality and the impossible Thing. No, it is rather that the vagina is both itself and, at the s ame time, something e l s e

That Hadrian’s profound Hellenophilia and his love of travelling, the two major driving impulses of his reign, were closely linked is clear. That his early experiences of Greece were formative in a different way – one which was to have considerable resonances for his spiritual curiosity and what was perhaps an innate predisposition to melancholy – is less well known.

The revolt Samuel Sharpe had started on a Caribbean island was building to a culmination at Westminster – a final drive to asphyxiate slavery throughout the British Empire. But it came not through a spectacular legislative duel or an inspiring floor speech, but rather through the grind of parliamentary process and the unromantic reality of dickering in the shadows.

Saddle horses lined the hitching-rails as far as Brite could see. Canvas-covered wagons, chuck-wagons, buckboards, vehicles of all Western types, stood outside the saddle horses. And up one side and down the other a procession ambled in the dust. On the wide sidewalk a throng of booted, belted, spurred men wended their way up or down. The saloons roared. Black-sombreroed, pale-faced, tight-lipped men stood beside the wide portals of the gaming-dens. Beautiful wrecks of womanhood, girls with havoc in their faces and the look of birds of prey in their eyes, waited in bare-armed splendor to be accosted. Laughter without mirth ran down the walk. The stores were full. Cowboys in twos and threes and sixes trooped by, young, lithe, keen of eye, bold of aspect, gay and reckless. Hundreds of cowboys passed Brite in that long block from the hotel to the intersecting street. And every boy gave him a pang. These were the toll of the trail and of Dodge. It might have been the march of empire, the tragedy of progress, but it was heinous to Brite. He would never send another boy to his death.

started with the number of vehicles driving to the site each day. Then he examined the number of residents who lived around the location, in expanding concentric circles to which he assigned a decreasing value according to distance. He also assessed the demographic makeup of the population, the average age, the number of children and the ethnic makup, knowing from experience that some groups are less likely to shop at convenience stores.

Peaches coughed once, then chuckled. “Erich? Did you ever, you know, kill anyone?” “I run a drug empire in Baltimore,” Erich said. “Of course I’ve killed someone. Why?” “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just here we are, three murderers, and what’s going to save our asses if anything does is that we happen to have the skill set to repair a fusion drive.” Erich smiled. “We are kind of well suited to this, aren’t we?

The Ottoman army wanted more war and conquest, and a simple setback would not be enough to stop its drive.

Mughal success was the product of hard-driving, active rulership exercised by extremely capable rulers who acted as their own chief executives.

Liberalism was one of the early driving forces of the French Revolution, and was initially an ally of democratic forces that wanted to expand political participation beyond the narrow circle of upper- and middle-class elites. The partisans of equality, however, broke with the partisans of liberty, and created a revolutionary dictatorship that ultimately gave way to the new empire under Napoleon. The latter, nonetheless, played a critical role in spreading liberalism in the form of law—the Code Napoléon—to the far corners of Europe. This then became the anchor for a liberal rule of law on the Continent.

Plutarch describes how this system worked in reality: ‘But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law, that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighborhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor… were thus deprived of their farms.’ Flushed with righteous zeal, Tiberius Gracchus ran for the office of tribune on a platform of redistributing land to the poor so they could fee themselves. The idea, though riotously popular with the plebs, horrified the plantation owners and their moneyed allies. Gracchus won the election, but… the patricians cried that Gracchus was exploiting those same masses to seize power and declare himself king. ... On the day that Gracchus’s reforms were due for debate in the Curia Julia, the honorable gentlemen of the Senate arrived in a state of eagerness bordering on cannibal savagery… Again, Plutarch describes the scene: ‘Tiberius [Gracchus] tried to save himself by flight. As he was running, he was stopped by one who caught hold of him by the gown; but he threw it off, and fled in his under-garments only. And stumbling over those who before had been knocked down, as he was endeavoring to get up again, Publius Satureius, a tribune, one of his colleagues, was observed to give him the first fatal stroke, by hitting him upon the head with the foot of a stool. The second blow was claimed, as though it had been a deed to be proud of, by Lucius Rufus. And of the rest there fell above three hundred, killed by clubs and staves only, none by an iron weapon.

Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.

It’s not that all rewards at all times are bad. For instance, when the Italian government gave blood donors paid time off work, donations increased.15 The law removed an obstacle to altruism. So while a few advocates would have you believe in the basic evil of extrinsic incentives, that’s just not empirically true. What is true is that mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks—deploying them without understanding the peculiar science of motivation—is a very dangerous game. When used in these situations, “if-then” rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.

In all its variations, universalistic ethics is therefore characterised by an effacement of the difference between Is and Ought (polemics against this difference between Is and Ought in recent years has not by chance become all the more fierce) as well as by the detachment from empirical anthropology and history. Compared with the classical ethical tradition - from the pre-Socratics up to the Enlightenment via Plato, Aristotle and Christianity - a loss in the content of reality and the sense of reality is to be noted in so far as that tradition started from the fact and from the necessity of the unremitting struggle of Reason against the escalating yearning of ineradicable drives and passions, and directly or indirectly placed this struggle at the center of its considerations.

Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved's clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.

Strange as it may seem — and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy — the dollar glut is what finances America’s global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America’s expanding military empire. The result is a new form of taxation without representation. Keeping international reserves in dollars means recycling dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills — U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military spending that has been a driving force in the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit since the Korean War broke out in 1950. [...] “China National Offshore Oil Corporation go home” is the motto when foreign governments try to use their sovereign wealth funds (central bank departments trying to figure out what to do with their dollar glut) to make direct investments in American industry, as happened when China’s national oil company sought to buy Unocal in 2005.[...] So Europeans and Asians see U.S. companies pumping more dollars into their economies not only to buy their exports (in excess of providing them with goods and services in return), not only to buy their companies and commanding heights of privatized public enterprises (without giving them reciprocal rights to buy important U.S. companies), and not only to buy foreign stocks, bonds and real estate. The U.S. media neglect to mention that the U.S. Government spends hundreds of billions of dollars abroad — not only in the Near East for direct combat, but to build military bases to encircle the rest of the world, and to install radar systems, guided missile systems and other forms of military coercion, including the “color revolutions” that have been funded all around the former Soviet Union.

[D]uring the years 1219-21 Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol empire in eastern Asia, burst into western Asia. Offended by the insolent behaviour of the same ruler of Khwarazm who a few years earlier had annihilated the Ghurids, the Mongol leaders personally marched across Asia to punish the impudent monarch. In the course of this expedition, Mongol cavalry inflicted fire and fury throughout Central Asia and Khurasan, driving many thousands of terrified town-dwellers and semi-nomadic peoples into India, where they sought and found refuge. It was a propitious moment both for them and for Iltumish, who needed men skilled in civil and military affairs in order to govern his fledgling kingdom. The influx of a host of refugees in search of a stable state with a successful and generous Muslim ruler boosted the Sultan's claims to being precisely that sort of sovereign. For Iltumish and the youthful Delhi sultanate, then, the Mongol holocaust in Central Asia proved a timely book, unlike the catastrophy it represented for millions in Asia and the Middle East.

Vietnam was originally a matriarchy and, in 111 B.C. China tried to integrate it into the Han Empire, the first resistance leaders were women. A female military commander who managed, for a time, to successfully oppose the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, famously exhorted her troops: 'I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man.' Such heroines became iconic symbols of Vietnamese patriotism. The Chinese ruled Vietnam for one thousand five hundred years, imposing Confucian principles of male superiority. This provoked a deep divide between the north of the country, strongly influenced by China, and the south which kept alive the more relaxed culture of feminine sensuality. The nation's struggle for independence, finally won in 1428, was shaped by women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy. The whore was a distinct image of South Vietnam during two decades of the Vietnam War until the communist North's victory in 1975. Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — the 'Paris of the East' was dominated by corrupt politicians, army officers and gangsters who enjoyed and profited from prostitution rackets. After Communists seized power, a decade of severe repression followed, then an increasingly flagrant resurrection from prostitution in the late 1980s in reaction to poverty and austerity and austerity under communism.

Emmie, my hellcat, my queen, my wife. You changed my life in ways I never could have imagined. You’ve challenged me in ways I didn’t think possible, and every day you make me a better man because I have you by my side.  “I promise to always stand by your side as we embark on the rest of our lives. I promise to be on the other side of the ring when you need to fight, and I promise to always push you to be the best version of yourself. And, I promise to let you win, every now and then.  “I promise to always have your back and to keep an eye on you, even when you don’t know I’m watching.” That earns groans from the guys. “And I promise to make you scowl every single day and make you question why we were born to drive each other crazy.  “I love you, Hellcat. And in return, I promise to give you the best and the worst that I have to offer.

hate that people think you must be in a relationship to be happy. Having another person in my space twenty-four-seven will drive me insane. I have my family, friends, and a successful diamond empire. There’s nothing lacking in my life.

I hate that people think you must be in a relationship to be happy. Having another person in my space twenty-four-seven will drive me insane. I have my family, friends, and a successful diamond empire. There’s nothing lacking in my life.

For almost eight years I made this drive, usually alone, usually in about three and a half hours, trekking back and forth to Springfield for a few weeks in the fall and through much of the winter and early spring, when the Illinois legislature did the bulk of its work. I’d drive down Tuesday night after dinner and get back home Thursday evening or Friday morning. Cell phone service dropped about an hour outside of Chicago, and the only signals that registered on the dial after that were talk radio and Christian music stations. To stay awake, I listened to audiobooks, the longer the better—novels mostly (John le Carré and Toni Morrison were favorites) but also histories, of the Civil War, the Victorian era, the fall of the Roman Empire.

You occupy the conscious mind with one thing, then drive a spike into the subconscious mind with something else while the walls are down.

Manipulative advertising based on personal characteristics is far from the passive distribution of third-party content Congress envisaged when it adopted Section 230 a quarter century ago. And behavioral ads drive many of tech platforms’ worst pathologies—the surveillance, the addiction race, the data pilfering. But Section 230’s shield from liability is worth far more to Big Tech than even behavioral advertising. Section 230 is the giant government subsidy on which Big Tech feeds and has built its empire.

Typically, the big cycle in the capital markets, along with cycles in wealth, values, and class divisions, drive the political left/right cycle because these create the motivations for political change. When capital markets and economies are booming, wealth gaps typically increase. While some societies succeed at striking a relatively sensible and steady balance between left and right, more frequently we see cyclical swings between norms. These swings typically occur throughout empires’ rises and declines, in roughly 10-year cycles. The big economic crises that mark the end of the Big Cycle often herald revolutions. For more, see the addendum to this chapter.

The quest for absolute empirical validation is a Sisyphean task. It's not immutable laws but evolving paradigms that truly drive scientific progress.

The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if—he thought with a shudder—as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if—he thought with a shudder—as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth. He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation. Her line of attack, which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear—it was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone’s will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt—as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.

The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if—he thought with a shudder—as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth. He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation. Her line of attack, which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear—it was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone’s will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt—as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers. For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, or establish dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man. Yours was the code of life—he remembered the voice of his lost young teacher—what, then, is theirs?