Economical Travel Quotes

Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.

Quantitatively speaking, 'conversation' is inversely proportional to economic standing. If you are traveling in a bus, your fellow passengers will get into a conversation with you very quickly and without any reservation. If you are traveling by first class on a train, people will be more reserved. If you are traveling by air, then the likely hood of getting into a conversation is quite small. If you are in first class on an international flight then you may travel 24 hours without exchanging a single word with the person sitting next to you.

Your VISION and your self-willingness is the MOST powerful elements to conquer your goal

This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

Autumn is a momentum of the natures golden beauty…, so the same it’s time to find your momentum of life

Your traditional EDUCATION is not going to CHANGE your life but the life you are experiencing that can change you. Choose a POSITIVE life STYLE with positive ATTITUDE which could bring you a life with HAPPINESS and WISDOM

Your every positive action in your life will increase your self-esteem and this self-esteem will boost you for more positive action to take you on success

How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside

If you are not EXCITED enough at your present life its mean your future is not EXITING. Excitement will give you ENTHUSIASM and enthusiasm will give you a positive energetic LIFE STYLE which could give you a successful exiting life…

Give yourself a great self-respect to know who you are then your confidence will shine on you

There are often evolutionary parallels on the different worlds because creation tends to be economical.

CONFIDENCE is not showing off your VANITY, it’s about to be HUMBLED and KIND to others what are you truly SKILLED and PROFESSIONAL about…

Shamanism is not confined to specific socio-economic settings or stages of development. It is fundamentally the ability that all of us share, some with and some without the help of hallucinogens, to enter altered states of consciousness and to travel out of body in non-physical realms - there to encounter supernatural entities and gain useful knowledge and healing powers from them.

He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.

Colonialism and its attitudes die hard, like the attitudes of slavery, whose hangover still dominates behaviour in certain parts of the Western hemisphere. Before slavery was practised in the New World, there was no special denigration of Africans. Travellers to this continent described the inhabitants in their records with natural curiosity and examination to be expected of individuals coming from different environments. It was when slave trade and slavery began to develop ghastly proportions that made them the base of that capital accumulation which assisted the rise of Western industrialism, that a new attitude towards Africans emerged. 'Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the man of colour. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism, rather racism was the consequence of slavery.' With this racial twist was invented the myth of colour inferiority. This myth supported the the subsequent rape of our continent with its despoliation and continuing exploitation under the advanced forms of colonialism and imperialism.

REJECTION is kind of your negative ILLUSION which has no value but it’s give you a CLUE to go for next level of your ACTION.

when you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it's can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS

Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw. It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.

Recycling is better--I won't write "good"--for the environment. But without economics--without supply and demand of raw materials--recycling is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in glorifying garbage. No doubt it's better than throwing something into an incinerator, and worse than fixing something that can be refurbished. It's what you do if you can't bear to see something landfilled. Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. (269)

There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.

A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to “restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture.”28

Indeed, in Central Europe, communism claimed to be the cure for the economic inequalities and other cruelties wrought by bourgeois industrial development, a radical liberal populism of a sort, while in the former Byzantine-Ottoman empire, where there had never been such modern development, communism was simply a destructive force, a second Mongol invasion.

Beijing has organised for itself the best of all three worlds: First World armed power, Second World economic strength and Third World handouts.

Setting a goal is like to set your destination point in your life GPS which could take you to your desire position as you dreamed about...

Personal disruption is the vehicle through which success and economic growth travels

The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian Right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working classes into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we rapidly re-enfranchise our dispossessed workers into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.

Then, in the late summer of 1790, Humboldt began to study finance and economics at the academy of trade in Hamburg. He hated it for it was all numbers and account books. In his spare time, Humboldt delved into scientific treatises and travel book, he learned Danish and Swedish - anything was better than his business studies. Whenever he could, he walked down to the River Elbe in Hamburg where he watched the large merchant vessels that brought tobacco, rice and indigo from the United States. The 'sight of the ships in the harbour', he told a friend, was what held him together - a symbol of his hopes and dreams. He couldn't wait to be finally the 'master of his own luck'.

Imagine a world where you could gain more knowledge by reading fewer books, see more of the world by minimizing travel and get more fit by doing less exercise. Certainly, a world where doing less gets you more is highly inconsistent with much of our lived experience, but is just the way Wall Street Bizarro World operates. If we are to learn to live in WSBW (and we must), one of the primary lessons to be learned is to do less than we think we should.

Being a whole person was powerful, but the economics of sports (defined and maintained by men) didn’t leave much space for that. Contracts penalized the rocky road inherent to life, especially the one commonly traveled by women.

They would tell you that governments could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less! They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an argument such as that? And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—I’m an individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was “paternalism,” and that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And they really thought that it was “individualism” for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have been “Paternalism”!

The traveler didn't see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn't simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.

The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism,” writes Peter Drucker, “has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”9 No less significant

Respect for humanity! Respect for humanity! If such respect is rooted in the human heart, humanity will eventually establish a social, political, or economic system that reflects it. A civilization is before all else rooted in its substance. At first this was a blind urge for warmth. Then by trial and error man found the way to the fire. That is probably why, my friend, I have such need of your friendship. I need a companion who - beyond the struggles of reason - respects in me the pilgrim on his way to that fire. I sometimes need to feel the promised warmth ahead of time and to rest somewhere beyond myself in that meeting place that will be ours. [...] Beyond the clumsiness of my words, beyond my defective reasoning, you are ready to see me as a human being. You are ready to honor in me the representative of beliefs, customs, loves. If I differ from you, far from wronging you, I enrich you. You question me as you would a traveler.

From then on he would make two or three trips a week to similar premises – bookstores, crystal shops, candle parlours, short-let niche operations selling a mix of pop-cultural memorabilia and truther merchandise from two or three generations ago – which had flourished along the abandoned high streets of the post-2007 austerity, run by a network of shabby voters hoping to take advantage of tumbling rents. Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental theology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing. The internet was killing them. The speed of things was killing them. They were like old-fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 – denizens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies.

I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.

Mosul, the native city of the historian Ibn al-Athir, was the capital of Jazira, or Mesopotamia, the fertile plain watered by the two great rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It was a political, cultural, and economic centre of prime importance. The Arabs boasted of its succulent fruit: its apples, pears, grapes, and pomegranates. The fine cloth it exported - called 'muslin', a word derived from the city's name - was known throughout the world. At the time of the arrival of the Franj, the people of the emir Karbuqa's realm were already exploiting another natural resource, which the traveller Ibn Jubayr was to describe with amazement a few dozen years later: deposits of naphtha. This precious dark liquid, which would one day make the fortune of this part of the world, already offered travellers an unforgettable spectacle.

Having nothing more than those two pennies was both horrible and just the slightest bit funny, the way being flat broke at times seemed to me. As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to a credit card that someone else is paying off. But now I could see the line between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too.

Differences between Catholic and Protestant countries did not incite rivalries between European states, or cause the growing sense of national identity and, sometimes, isolationism that was developing among the countries of Europe. These were happening anyway, for a complex variety of political and economic reasons. But religious differences did, at times, contribute to them—for example in Spain, where the inward-looking institutions of the Counter-Reformation seemed aimed at creating a nation of soldiers and ecclesiastics in great contrast to the outgoing, trade-based, profit-minded society of the Calvinist Netherlands. These generalizations hide many local variations—there were busy Spanish merchants, and contemplative, spiritual, people in many Protestant lands. But travelers across Europe remarked on the increasingly striking differences between nations.

Encouraging consumers to think more seriously about the financial, environmental, and personal costs of their consumption would be a major step in addressing the crisis of quality and the environmental and social impacts of too much stuff. Better yet, it would spur businesses to seek economic incentives to design and market better products. Today's secondhand economy, faltering in search of quality, should have more than it can handle.

As I traveled between Clarksburg and Chicago in that year of election, I was sometimes struck that, for all their differences, Black Chicagoans and white Appalachians had come to share a sensation that was calcifying in America’s political culture—a feeling of being trapped by an undertow of economics and history, of being ill-served by institutions, of being estranged from a political machinery that was refined, above all, to serve itself.

Medicine was religion. Religion was society. Society was medicine. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere (you had to have or borrow enough money to buy a pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required), and so was music (if you didn't have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn't be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn't be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick). In fact, the Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American one, in which the practice of medicine has fissioned into smaller and smaller subspecialties, with less and less truck between bailiwicks. The Hmong carried holism to its ultima Thule. As my web of cross-references grew more and more thickly interlaced, I concluded that the Hmong preoccupation with medical issues was nothing less than a preocupation with life. (And death. And life after death).

As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to a credit card that someone else is paying off.

Thus political economy — despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance — is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house, the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save — the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour — your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theater; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power — all this it can appropriate for you — it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

We started with the illusory hope of ‘improving socialism within the existing system.’ But toward the end of 1986, it had already become clear to me and my associates that renewal could not be achieved by hewing to the old approaches. Upon reflection, we decided to take major steps to reform the system. We chose an evolutionary approach to reforming Soviet society on the principles of freedom, democracy and market economics – which, in effect, amounted to a social-democratic project.

commodification of information is the only thing that’s made space travel economically feasible. It’s the only commodity whose value exceeds its transportation cost. We’d be exporting biologicals or photonics if it paid. But our trading partners can build the machines and grow the organics much cheaper than we can send them, if they just have the codes and specs. If information were free, the way the radicals want, then there would be nothing to trade, and there goes the only incentive for interstellar ties.

Travel now by all means—if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space. Take the prairies, for example; you’re wasting your time visiting these unless you know the saga of the homesteaders, the influence of law and religion at different times, the economic problems, the difficulties of communication, and the effects of successive mineral finds.

[Robert] Newell's recommendation of walking is also interesting: 'The best way undoubtedly of seeing a country is on foot. It is the safest, and most suited to every variety of road; it will often enable you to take a shorter track, and visit scenes (the finest perhaps) not otherwise accessible; it is healthy, and, with a little practice, easy; it is economical: a pedestrian is content with almost any accommodations; he, of all travellers, wants but little, 'Nor wants that little long'. And last, though not least, it is perfectly independent.' Newell cites independence, as do a number of the 'first generation' of Romantic walkers I have already surveyed; more striking are his commendation of walking as the safest option, which reflects a very altered perception of the security of travel from that which prevailed in the eighteenth century, and his advocacy of the practical and health benefits of pedestrianism, which against suggests its institutionalisation as a form of tourism and its extension to lower reaches of the middle classes.

I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn't perceive my passion for books. And without exception, each one would lend me a book on a subject we had been discussing. No paperwork, no formalities of any kind, no rules or regulations. My unspoken side of the bargain was to protect them, in two ways; first by keeping the book unharmed - not that easy, especially in bad weather, but when it rained, I carried the book next to my skin. I can tell you now that carrying Gulliver's Travels or Lays of Ancient Rome or Mr. Oscar Wilde's stories or Mr. William Yeat's poems next to my heart gave me a kind of sweet pleasure. The second half of the bargain often nearly broke my heart, but I always kept it - and that was to return the book safe and sound to the library that had lent it. To part company with Mr. Charles Dickens or Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray and his lovely name! - that was harder than saying good-bye to a dear flesh-and-blood companion. But I always did it - and I sent the book by registered post, no small consideration of cost given the peculiar economics of an itinerant storyteller.

The idea of mining asteroids is not as preposterous as it might seem. We actually know a considerable amount about their makeup, because some of them hit the Earth. They consist of iron, nickel, carbon, and cobalt, and they also contain significant quantities of rare earths and valuable metals such as platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium. These elements are found naturally on Earth, but they are rare and very expensive. As the supply of these resources on Earth is exhausted in the coming decades, it will become economical to mine them in the asteroid belt.

The radical wolves in sheep’s clothing fall into two categories. First are the Crypto-Marxists, calling themselves radical feminists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, or merely progressives, whose agendas remain totalitarian. Then come the Fellow-Travelling Liberals, who acknowledge the bankruptcy of socialism and make a grudging commitment to free markets, but who still do not want to give up the agenda of “social justice”—the idea that government can arrive at a standard of what is just, and that the state can implement such a standard without destroying economic and political freedom.

Free speech is a fundamental foundation of a free and fair democracy. But let’s be honest and have the guts to unpick who gets to speak, where, and why. The real test of this country’s perimeters of freedom of speech will be found if or when a person can freely discuss racism without being subject to intellectually dishonest attempts to undermine their arguments. If free speech, as so many insist, includes being prepared to hear opinions that you don’t like, then let’s open up the parameters of what we consider acceptable debate. I don’t mean new versions of old bigotry. I mean, that if we have to listen to this kind of bigotry, then let us have the equal and opposite viewpoint. If Katie Hopkins, with help from the Sun newspaper, publishes a column describing desperate refugees trying to travel to Britain as cockroaches, then we need a cultural commentator that advocates for true compassion and total open borders. Not the kind of wishy-washy liberalism that harps on about the cultural and economic contributions of migrants to this country as though they are resources to be sucked dry, but someone who speaks in favour of migrants and open borders with the same force of will with which Hopkins despises them.

My time at Parklife got me thinking about drug users who do not have access to such drug-related services and education. The amount of money required to attend a festival, especially when entrance ticket, travel, and food costs are included, is prohibitive for most. Consequently, it is not surprising that the highest drug-related mortality rates in the United States are found in regions, including Appalachia and Oklahoma, with lower rates of university completion and greater economic distress.12 Attention-grabbing headlines claiming that opioids (or any other drug) are killing people are wrong. Ignorance and poverty are killing people, just as they have for centuries.

The ‘tail’ of a comet, by the way, is a train of dust, but it is not streaming out behind the head of the comet as we might think. Instead, it is ‘blown’ by a stream of particles coming from the sun, which we call the solar wind. So the tail of the comet always points away from the sun, no matter which way the comet is travelling. There’s an exciting proposal, once confined to science fiction stories but now being implemented by Japanese space engineers, to use the solar wind to propel spacecraft equipped with gigantic ‘sails’. Like sailing yachts on the sea using real wind, solar wind space-yachts would theoretically provide a very economical way to travel to distant worlds.

The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also...Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.

There is a tendency among environmentalists to single out the big players in the market as the principal culprits: to pin environmental crime on those – like oil companies, motor manufacturers, logging corporations, agribusinesses, supermarkets – that make their profits by exporting their costs to others (including others who are not yet born). But this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emerge by an invisible hand from choices made by all of us. It is the demand for cars, oil, cheap food and expendable luxuries that is the real cause of the industries that provide these things. Of course it is true that the big players externalize their costs whenever they can. But so do we. Whenever we travel by air, visit the supermarket, or consume fossil fuels, we are exporting our costs to others, and to future generations. A free economy is driven by individual demand. And in a free economy individuals, just as much as big businesses, strive to pass on their costs to others, while keeping the benefits. The solution is not the socialist one, of abolishing the free economy, since this merely places massive economic power in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats, who are equally in the business of exporting their costs, while enjoying secure rents on the social product.16 The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And

The key to understanding the situation is the most elementary principle of economics: the law of demand—the higher the price of anything, the less of it people will be willing to buy. Make labor of any kind more expensive and the number of jobs of that kind will be fewer. Make carpenters more expensive, and fewer houses than otherwise will be built, and those houses that are built will tend to use materials and methods requiring less carpentry. Raise the wage of airline pilots, and air travel will become more expensive. Fewer people will fly, and there will be fewer jobs for airline pilots. Alternatively, reduce the number of carpenters or pilots, and they will command higher wages. Keep down the number of physicians, and they will be able to charge higher fees.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you Obama wasn’t a leftist president, and especially don’t listen to the liberal media. They lied to you throughout the Obama years, and they’re still lying today. I wish Americans had heeded our warnings because Obama was serious when he vowed to fundamentally transform the nation. He proved it during his eight long years in office by ramming through Obamacare on a party-line vote, appointing activist judges, issuing unconstitutional executive orders, downsizing our military, traveling the world apologizing for America, engineering long-term economic malaise, waging war on coal and coal miners, haranguing the cops, conferring legal status on more than one million illegal aliens via Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and aggravating race relations in this country.

MAKING MARKETS SAFE is one of the oldest problems of market design, going back to well before the invention of agriculture, when hunters traded the ax heads and arrowheads that archaeologists today find thousands of miles from where they were made. More recently, one of the responsibilities of kings in medieval Europe was to provide safe passage to and from markets and fairs. For healthy commerce, buyers and sellers needed to be able to participate in these markets safely, without being waylaid and robbed (or worse) by highwaymen. Indeed, the word waylay captures the act of robbing travelers carrying money or valuables on their way to or from a market. Without some assurance of safe passage, these markets would have failed; they would have been too risky to attract many participants. And if the markets had failed, the kingdoms would have been deprived of the prosperity that markets, and the taxes on them, bring.

However, one cannot ignore the folklore of the times; the story of the Odyssey and other legends recounting the adventure and dangers of travelling through the Dardanelles and Bosporus, the legends of the Argonauts and Heracles, the nymph of Arethusa, and the goddess of Syracuse.[23] Centuries of overseas ventures undoubtedly produced a pioneering spirit among the Greeks. I am in agreement with A.G. Woodhead’s emphasis on the ‘general spirit of adventure’ that permeated ‘the dawn of classical Hellas’, and his observation that ‘many of the colonies had their origins in purely individual enterprise or extraordinary happenings.’[24] He writes: ‘This personal element, indeed, probably deserves more stress than it has received. It is fashionable to look for great impersonal causes and trends which, singly or in combination, produce a human response, and the economic considerations already discussed fall into that category.

A while back a young woman from another state came to live with some of her relatives in the Salt Lake City area for a few weeks. On her first Sunday she came to church dressed in a simple, nice blouse and knee-length skirt set off with a light, button-up sweater. She wore hose and dress shoes, and her hair was combed simply but with care. Her overall appearance created an impression of youthful grace. Unfortunately, she immediately felt out of place. It seemed like all the other young women her age or near her age were dressed in casual skirts, some rather distant from the knee; tight T-shirt-like tops that barely met the top of their skirts at the waist (some bare instead of barely); no socks or stockings; and clunky sneakers or flip-flops. One would have hoped that seeing the new girl, the other girls would have realized how inappropriate their manner of dress was for a chapel and for the Sabbath day and immediately changed for the better. Sad to say, however, they did not, and it was the visitor who, in order to fit in, adopted the fashion (if you can call it that) of her host ward. It is troubling to see this growing trend that is not limited to young women but extends to older women, to men, and to young men as well. . . . I was shocked to see what the people of this other congregation wore to church. There was not a suit or tie among the men. They appeared to have come from or to be on their way to the golf course. It was hard to spot a woman wearing a dress or anything other than very casual pants or even shorts. Had I not known that they were coming to the school for church meetings, I would have assumed that there was some kind of sporting event taking place. The dress of our ward members compared very favorably to this bad example, but I am beginning to think that we are no longer quite so different as more and more we seem to slide toward that lower standard. We used to use the phrase “Sunday best.” People understood that to mean the nicest clothes they had. The specific clothing would vary according to different cultures and economic circumstances, but it would be their best. It is an affront to God to come into His house, especially on His holy day, not groomed and dressed in the most careful and modest manner that our circumstances permit. Where a poor member from the hills of Peru must ford a river to get to church, the Lord surely will not be offended by the stain of muddy water on his white shirt. But how can God not be pained at the sight of one who, with all the clothes he needs and more and with easy access to the chapel, nevertheless appears in church in rumpled cargo pants and a T-shirt? Ironically, it has been my experience as I travel around the world that members of the Church with the least means somehow find a way to arrive at Sabbath meetings neatly dressed in clean, nice clothes, the best they have, while those who have more than enough are the ones who may appear in casual, even slovenly clothing. Some say dress and hair don’t matter—it’s what’s inside that counts. I believe that truly it is what’s inside a person that counts, but that’s what worries me. Casual dress at holy places and events is a message about what is inside a person. It may be pride or rebellion or something else, but at a minimum it says, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand the difference between the sacred and the profane.” In that condition they are easily drawn away from the Lord. They do not appreciate the value of what they have. I worry about them. Unless they can gain some understanding and capture some feeling for sacred things, they are at risk of eventually losing all that matters most. You are Saints of the great latter-day dispensation—look the part.

To be sure, there exists in principle a quite simple economic mechanism that should restore equilibrium to the process: the mechanism of supply and demand. If the supply of any good is insufficient, and its price is too high, then demand for that good should decrease, which should lead to a decline in its price. In other words, if real estate and oil prices rise, then people should move to the country or take to traveling about by bicycle (or both). Never mind that such adjustments might be unpleasant or complicated; they might also take decades, during which landlords and oil well owners might well accumulate claims on the rest of the population so extensive that they could easily come to own everything that can be owned, including rural real estate and bicycles, once and for all.3 As always, the worst is never certain to arrive. It is much too soon to warn readers that by 2050 they may be paying rent to the emir of Qatar.

This is the crux of the issue, the crux of our story. For the shift in the American environmental movement from aesthetic environmentalism to regulatory environmentalism wasn’t just a change in political strategy. It was the manifestation of a crucial realization: that unrestricted commercial activity was doing damage—real, lasting, pervasive damage. It was the realization that pollution was global, not just local, and the solution to pollution was not dilution. This shift began with the understanding that DDT remained in the environment long after its purpose was served. And it grew as acid rain and the ozone hole demonstrated that pollution traveled hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from its source, doing damage to people who did not benefit from the economic activity that produced it. It reached a crescendo when global warming showed that even the most seemingly innocuous by-product of industrial civilization—CO2, the stuff on which plants depend—could produce a very different planet.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

...I shall let [Anne] Wallace put the case herself, at what I think is necessary length: 'As travel in general becomes physically easier, faster, and less expensive, more people want and are able to arrive at more destinations with less unpleasant awareness of their travel process. At the same time the availability of an increasing range of options in conveyance, speed, price, and so forth actually encouraged comparisons of these different modes...and so an increasingly positive awareness of process that even permitted semi-nostalgic glances back at the bad old days...Then, too, although local insularity was more and more threatened...people also quite literally became more accustomed to travel and travellers, less fearful of 'foreign' ways, so that they gradually became able to regard travel as an acceptable recreation. Finally, as speeds increased and costs decreased, it simply ceased to be true that the mass of people were confined to that circle of a day's walk: they could afford both the time and the money to travel by various means and for purely recreational purposes...And as walking became a matter of choice, it became a possible positive choice: since the common person need not necessarily be poor. Thus, as awareness of process became regarded as advantageous, 'economic necessity' became only one possible reading (although still sometimes a correct one) in a field of peripatetic meanings that included 'aesthetic choice'.' It sounds a persuasive case. It is certainly possible that something like the shift in consciousness that Wallace describes may have taken place by the 'end' (as conventionally conceived) of the Romantic period, and influenced the spread of pedestrianism in the 1820s and 1830s; even more likely that such a shift was instrumental in shaping the attitudes of Victorian writing in the railway age, and helped generate the apostolic fervour with which writers like Leslie Stephen and Robert Louis Stevenson treated the walking tour. But it fails to account for the rise of pedestrianism as I have narrated it.

Online’ sales on the Internet are only an improvement of the old mail order catalogues, which were introduced in . . . 1850; they do not represent a structural change. Similarly, the Internet, multimedia cell phones, cable television, smartcards and the general computerisation of society — even genetic engineering — do not represent structural changes. They are all only developments of what already existed. There is nothing in all this to compare with inventions that really turned the world upside down, the real techno-economic metamorphoses introduced between 1860 and 1960 that revolutionised society and the framework of life: internal combustion engines, electricity, the telephone, telegraph, radio (which was more revolutionary than television), trains, cars, airplanes, penicillin, antibiotics, and so forth. The ‘new economy’ is behind us! No fundamental innovation has taken place since 1960. Computers only allow us to accomplish differently, faster and more cheaply (but with much greater fragility) what was already being done. On the other hand, the automobile, antibiotics, telecommunications and air travel were authentic revolutions that made possible what before had been impossible.

You’ve come about your manuscript? It’s with the reader; no, I’m getting that wrong, it’s been read, very interesting, of course, now I remember! Remarkable sense of language, heartfelt denunciation, didn’t you receive our letter? We’re very sorry to have to tell you, in the letter it’s all explained, we sent it some time ago, the mail is so slow these days, you’ll receive it of course, our list is overloaded, unfavorable economic situation. Ah, you see? You’ve received it. And what else did it say? Thanking you for having allowed us to read it, we will return it promptly. Ah, you’ve come to collect the manuscript? No, we haven’t found it, do just be patient a little longer, it’ll turn up, nothing is ever lost here, only today we found a manuscript we’d been looking or these past ten years, oh, not another ten years, we’ll find yours sooner, at least let’s hope so, we have so many manuscripts, piles this high, if you like we’ll show them to you, of course you want your own, not somebody else’s, that’s obvious, I mean we preserve so many manuscripts we don’t care a fig about, we’d hardly throw away yours which means so much to us, no, not to publish it, it means so much for us to give it back to you.

Social science now tells us that if we can take indigent girls between the ages of 10 and 14 and give them a basic education, we can change the fabric of an entire community. If we can capture them in that fleeting window, great social advances can be achieved. Give enough young girls an education and per capita income will go up; infant mortality will go down; the rate of economic growth will increase; the rate of HIV/AIDS infection will fall. Child marriages will be less common; child labor, too. Better farming practices will be put into place, which means better nutrition will follow, and overall family health in that community will climb. Educated girls, as former World Bank official Barbara Herz has written, tend to insist that their children be educated. And when a nation has smaller, healthier, better-educated families, economic productivity shoots up, environmental pressures ease, and everyone is better-off. As Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard University president, put it: “Educating girls may be the single highest return investment available in the developing world.” Why is that? Well, you can make all the interpretations you like; you can posit the gendered arguments; but the numbers do not lie.

Under these circumstances, revenue from the New World in the form of exports of gold and silver was critical. The Spanish government, however, imposed strict rules limiting economic exchange—a system known as mercantilism—under the mistaken belief that this would maximize its income from the colonies. Exports from the New World could go only to Spain, indeed, to a single port in Spain; they were required to travel in Spanish ships; and the colonies were not permitted to compete with Spanish producers of manufactured goods. Mercantilism, as Adam Smith was to demonstrate in The Wealth of Nations, created huge inefficiencies and was highly detrimental to economic growth. It also had very significant political consequences: access to markets and the right to make productive economic investments were limited to individuals or corporations favored by the state. This meant that the route to personal wealth lay through the state and through gaining political influence. This then led to a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial mentality, in which energy was spent seeking political favor rather than initiating new enterprises that would create wealth. The landowning and merchant classes that emerged under this system grew rich because of the political protection they received from the state.

The Grosse Pointe that he was raised in was an isolated place of provincial splendor. It is unlikely that in pre-World War II America there was another community quite so sheltered and quite so rich. There was neither economic nor social diversity. Catholics were viewed with suspicion and, on occasion, hatred. (When Henry as a young man married a Catholic and converted, it sent shivers throughout the community; his oldest friends regarded it as at least partly a declaration of independence from his past.) Jews too were unwelcome, and there was a great deal of dinner-party discussion as to whether Walter Chrysler was actually, despite what he claimed, Jewish. Neither World War II nor the coming of modern communications and transportation, which so changed and expanded people’s lives, had yet occurred. It was a secure, comfortable, insular place, largely untouched by the modern world. If Grosse Pointers traveled to New York, they traveled by train, on The Detroiter, where they knew the porter and he knew them; if they traveled to Europe they traveled with each other. The assumption was that Grosse Pointe was the center of the universe; once, announcing the engagement of a Grosse Pointe girl to a young man from Cincinnati, the Detroit Free Press used the headline “Local Girl to Marry Eastern Man.

Firstly, the Azerbaijanian struggle for a measure of autonomy and self-government is genuine and is locally inspired. The facts of history and existing conditions show that Azerbaijan has always been struggling to overthrow the feudal conditions imposed upon it (and upon the rest of Iran) by corrupt Iranian Governments. Secondly, the extent of Russian interference appeared to be negligible. In our travels we saw few Russian troops, and in Kurdistan we saw none at all. The leaders of the Azerbaijanian Government are not Russians but Azerbaijanians, and with few exceptions their sole aim seems to be the recovery and improvement and economic reform of Azerbaijan. There may be some Russian influence by indirect means, but I would suggest that it is less than our own influence in Iran which we exercise by direct control of ministers, political parties, state financiers, and by petty bribery. As for Kurdish Independence. The Kurds ask for an independence of their own making, not an independence sponsored by the British Government. Like the Azerbaijanians the Kurds are seeking real autonomy, and more than that, self-determination. Our present scheme to take them over and use them as a balancing factor in the political affairs of the Middle East is a reflection upon the honest of our intentions, and a direct blow at the spirit of all good men.

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

The destruction of representative government and private capitalism of the old school was complete when Hitler came to power. He had contributed mightily to the final result by his ceaseless labors to create chaos. But when he stepped into the chancellery all the ingredients of national socialist dictatorship were there ready to his hand… The aim in which Bismarck had failed was accomplished almost at a stroke in the Weimar Constitution – the subordination of the individual states to the federal state. The old imperial state had to depend on the constituent states to provide it with a part of its funds. Now this was altered, and the central government of the republic became the great imposer and collector of taxes, paying to the states each a share. Slowly the central government absorbed the powers of the states. The problems of business groups and social groups were all brought to Berlin. The republican Reichstag, unlike its imperial predecessor, was now charged with the vast duty of managing almost every energy of the social and economic life of the republic. German states were always filled with bureaus, so that long before World War I travelers referred to the ‘bureaucratic tyrannies’ of the empire. But now the bureaus became great centralized organisms of the federal government dealing with the multitude of problems which the Reichstag as completely incapable of handling. Quickly, the actual function of governing leaked out of the parliament into the hands of the bureaucrats. The German republic became a paradise of bureaucracy on a scale which the old imperial government never knew. The state, with its powers enhanced by the acquisition of immense economic powers and those powers brought to the center of government and lodged in the executive, was slowly becoming, notwithstanding its republican appearance, a totalitarian state that was almost unlimited in its powers.

Dear God, We have failed you, we have failed you miserably. From eating animals to becoming animals, from cutting trees to cutting our conscience we have failed you. Your Kindness saved us time and again and You out of your most benevolent mercy tried to show us that Humanity means Humility, that we Your dear creation is capable of so much of Love and Grace after all You made us with your Light, that this world can always come back to Love, that Fear can always be overcome by Kindness, that Strength is always embedded within, that Courage lies in Forgiveness, yet did we listen in with our hearts? Perhaps, perhaps not. You sent us a pandemic to teach us the value of lives and how You United this world and healed this Earth through suffering yet did we learn the value of lives? No, we failed. There is a war going on in a beautiful country, and an economic meltdown in another, and so many other nations are fighting their own unknown battles just like every human being, and yet we fail to tickle our conscience, we fail to see how we have literally ruined this world and made demons out of your beautiful creation of humankind succombing to greed, lust and anger, oh how we have failed! We have failed in absolute disgrace where we don't see the tears of children, the lost smiles of our fellow neighbours and the numb dreams of almost everyone because we have locked the doors of our heart in false pictures of camouflaged pleasures, we indeed have failed you, we have failed us. Yet Your kindness knows no bound, your Love is infinite and your Grace is eternal, forgive us, dear Father and grant us, this Humankind the knowledge and understanding to act as Humans again. Fill those angry hearts with healing, those hurt souls with the grace of forgiveness and above all let your world know your true Nature by giving the strength of Courage in those hearts who walk in your Light, to stand by what is right without the shackles of Fear. Oh, the Kindest of All, may You strengthen the Truth and lead the Light bearers of Love ahead through Your Mercy to win over a world that is slowly crawling into a deep cavern of Hate, a world that was once created to nourish and nurture the different faces of Love, a world that is failing and falling frail in every passing moment, You alone are our only Hope. We know we have failed you miserably and as we keep failing you, I know more than ever that Your Grace will find us through and once again You will save us, because we may fail as children but You won't fail your children as the most Loving Father. - a soul traveling through this beautiful Universe of your making.

This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraphy summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago. And this is the most worrisome obverse of these advances: they have been accompanied by a multitude of assaults on the biosphere. Foremost among them has been the scale of the human claim on plants, including a significant reduction of the peak posts-glacial area of natural forests (on the order of 20%), mostly due to deforestation in temperate and tropical regions; a concurrent expansion of cropland to cover about 11% of continental surfaces; and an annual harvest of close to 20% of the biosphere's primary productivity (Smil 2013a). Other major global concerns are the intensification of natural soil erosion rates, the reduction of untouched wilderness areas to shrinking isolated fragments, and a rapid loss of biodiversity in general and within the most species-rich biomes in particular. And then there is the leading global concern: since 1850 we have emitted close to 300 Gt of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (Boden and Andres 2017). This has increased tropospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm to 405 ppm by the end of 2017 and set the biosphere on a course of anthropogenic global warming (NOAA 2017). These realities clearly demonstrate that our preferences have not been to channel our growing capabilities either into protecting the biosphere or into assuring decent prospects for all newborns and reducing life's inequalities to tolerable differences. Judging by the extraordinary results that are significantly out of line with the long-term enhancements of our productive and protective abilities, we have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.

For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9

Indeed, on Facebook, 99.91 percent of the two billion people on it belong to the “giant component,” meaning that almost everyone is everyone else’s friend of a friend of a friend.67 There are only about 4.7 “degrees of separation” (the number of “nodes” you have to cross) between any two people in the giant component. This implies that in principle we could easily be exposed to pretty much everyone’s views as they travel through the social network.

All governments must invest in adequate, country-wide disease surveillance and early reporting systems which feed information from the grass roots to WHO’s Outbreak and Emergencies Programme. In reality, to succeed this will require economic incentives for early reporting, and assurances from WHO that reporting will not result in trade and travel restrictions without justification (a fear that led governments to downplay the extent of the Ebola outbreak in 2014).

As both an economist and public-health specialist put it: “Only saving lives will save livelihoods”,[23] making it clear that only policy measures that place people’s health at their core will enable an economic recovery, adding: “If governments fail to save lives, people afraid of the virus will not resume shopping, traveling, or dining out. This will hinder economic recovery, lockdown or no lockdown.

It doesn’t seem that an individual being led through a land by the land’s occupants should count as discovering it, except in a personal sense. Mackenzie and his team should more accurately be called travellers. They were not exploring a land devoid of inhabitants; they were touring distant, populated lands for eastern economic interests. They were discovering new markets, which is not to be sneered at, as these were difficult and dangerous expeditions through geography unknown to them and into lands with people of foreign customs who were not necessarily friendly or welcoming to strangers

I own just two 5 dollar tshirts - one is my regular wear, another my backup for washdays. And for my travels I own two 10 dollar shirts and two 20 dollar jeans, which are also used for my book covers. I don't need more, I don't buy more. This is not minimalism, it's called self-regulation - the lack of which has led to the shallow, judgmental, privilege-craving prick of a society we live in today. It's not about saving money, it's about humanizing money, by using it wisely, not just for individual benefit, but collective benefit. Buy the things you need the most, save a little for rainy days, and use the rest to lift up the fallen. Any citizen who masters this simple humanitarian habit, is no longer obligated to pay taxes to the government. And when enough citizens of the world make it the mantra of their life, not just to lift themselves, but each other, the governments of the world are automatically rendered obsolete. Government is funded by the people - then the governments use those funds to manufacture war, in order to further sustain the democratic cashflow that keeps them in business. Therefore, when people pull their funds and redirect them themselves, towards actual, tangible, humanitarian initiatives, there isn't going to be a government. It's only the humanitarian indifference of the citizens that keeps governments alive, that in turn keep borders and wars alive. Once the citizens are actually, genuinely, nontheoretically accountable of the welfare of society, beyond the prehistoric paradigm peddled by the state, all Capitol, Kremlin and White Hall will crumble to dust.

the world of business continued to move ever rapidly to the global village, accelerated by changing political, social, and economic forces enabled by air travel and communications technology.

The primary objective of dictators is to stay in office, and we help them achieve this goal by punishing their already suffering subjects and letting the oppressors claim to be saviors. When nonmilitary pressure on a government is considered necessary, economic sanctions should be focused on travel, foreign bank accounts, and other special privileges of government officials who make decisions, not on destroying the economy that determines the living conditions of oppressed people.

The connection between the changing role of the police in American society and efforts to control culturally subversive groups is illustrated in the backgrounds of some of the most well-known of the “occult cops.” Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedecker’s examination of these usually low-ranking detectives found that many of them “had spied on groups opposing racism or the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.” Before morphing into “occult experts” they traveled the “small town lecture circuit” warning mainly white, middle-class audiences about the danger of “Moonies” and other alternative religious movements. The role of the police in the satanic panic of the 1980s appears to be symptomatic of a much larger problem. Rather than asking its police to prevent and prosecute crimes against person and property, white America asked it to crusade against evil, to slay monsters and demons. In an urban America prostrated by the growing economic inequality of the 1980s and the consequent deadly mix of entrepreneurialism and despair that constituted the crack epidemic, politicians gravitated to the “tough on crime” rhetoric that became such an important part of the successful campaigns of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Meanwhile, the leadership of the evangelical and Charismatic worlds adopted a very similar rhetoric in which their followers were asked to engage in an unrelenting war on the forces of darkness threatening their homes, children, churches, and communities.

A billionaire's idea of vacation is in space, whereas a regular person's idea of a vacation is on some island or in another continent. And if the billionaires are abusing resources for personal enjoyment, so are these regular people. You have no right to demand moral accountability from billionaires, if you yourself don't mind engaging in your everyday luxuries – for your luxuries may seem dim compared to those of the super-rich, but still the resources you spend on them could feed and clothe at least ten families in developing parts of the world for a year.

A pandemic shutting down airports and crushing the travel and hospitality industry is a fact – were you prepared or not? You suddenly waking up and realizing that you hate your job is an opinion – were you prepared or not? The nature of the problem is different. The impact on you is not. In both cases, you need an exit strategy and options. You may say that one of these is worse than the other, or easier to deal with than the other. And that may be true. But you don’t want to be negatively impacted by EITHER for any longer than is absolutely necessary.

By influencing the private and public pronouncements of economists, Beijing shapes global perceptions of China’s economic outlook. When financial risks to the Chinese economy became serious in 2015, the CCP began exerting subtle influence on international banks not to rock the boat with bad news. UBS, the largest Swiss bank, has a long history in China and has been actively pursuing a deeper role in its financial system.103 It too has been pressured to rein in its public commentary, and in 2018 one of its employees was detained in China, for no apparent reason, causing UBS management to bar travel by its staff to China.

The extent of the control over all life that economic control confers is nowhere better illustrated than in the field of foreign exchanges. Nothing would at first seem to affect private life less than a state control of the dealings in foreign exchange, and most people will regard its introduction with complete indifference. Yet the experience of most continental countries has taught thoughtful people to regard this step as the decisive advance on the path to totalitarianism and the suppression of individual liberty. It is in fact the complete delivery of the individual to the tyranny of the state, the final suppression of all means of escape—not merely for the rich, but for everybody. Once the individual is no longer free to travel, no longer free to buy foreign books or journals, once all means of foreign contact can be restricted to those whom official opinion approves or for whom it is regarded as necessary, the effective control of opinion is much greater than that ever exercised by any of the absolutist governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In his report to the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry), Wolff wrote that Husseini said, “Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, antidemocratic state leadership to other countries.” In his view,” current Jewish influence on economy and politics” was “damaging everywhere and needed to be fought.” In the hope of doing economic damage to the Jews, Husseini opined that “Muslims hope for a boycott of the Jews in Germany because it would then be adopted with enthusiasm in the whole of the Muslim world.” Further, he was willing to spread the boycott message among Muslims traveling through Palestine and to “all Muslims.” He also looked forward to trade with “non-Jewish merchants” dealing in German products.3 Husseini’s remarks on March 1933 demonstrated his early enthusiasm for the Nazi regime based on his ideological support for its antidemocratic and anti-Jewish policies.

So what can we do about it, in this age of what Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call ‘weaponised interdependence’? We all need to trade, to invest, to travel and to connect, so the answer cannot be autarky, an attempt to create hermetically sealed economies. The use of economic warfare and positive and negative influence is likely only to increase. The liberal credo that all trade is good and that nations which trade do not war is increasingly unsustainable, as these are no longer binary alternatives.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

Plan B/Second Citizenship Without going into a long and boring economic analysis, first world countries have a sundry amount of structural problems that may make living and working in them no longer tenable.  And while it may be a tedious chore on par with creating a will or doing your taxes, it would pay for every man today to diversify into another country. This can be in the form of attaining a second citizenship, gaining permanent residency in another country, or simply having a piece of property overseas.  But the larger point is to be able to survive and maintain your standard of living in the case your home country collapses or simply becomes too hostile.  People will mock and scoff at this, thinking you're crazy.  And hopefully they're right.  Hopefully, you're just a crazy libertarian who reads too many economic reports and you're overly pessimistic.  But keep in mind these are the same people who said “housing only goes up” and that “dotcoms are the future” and that “any degree is a good degree” and “inflation is transitory.”  They are also the same people who said, “the Titanic can't sink!” and foolishly think their marriages will last until “death do them part.”  Be wise.  Invest the time in building a metaphorical life raft just in case the Titanic does sink.  You don't have to mention it to people, and to avoid ridicule you shouldn't.  But quietly investigate your genealogy, find out if you can get citizenship elsewhere, travel overseas, and make sure you have a sovereign life raft.

Once during the protests before the World Economic Forum, a kind of junket of tycoons, corporate flacks and politicians, networking and sharing cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria, pretended to be discussing ways to alleviate global poverty. I was invited to engage in a radio debate with one of their representatives. As it happened the task went to another activist but I did get far enough to prepare a three-point program that I think would have taken care of the problem nicely: - an immediate amnesty on international debt (An amnesty on personal debt might not be a bad idea either but it’s a different issue.) - an immediate cancellation of all patents and other intellectual property rights related to technology more than one year old - the elimination of all restrictions on global freedom of travel or residence. The rest would pretty much take care of itself. The moment the average resident of Tanzania, or Laos, was no longer forbidden to relocate to Minneapolis or Rotterdam, the government of every rich and powerful country in the world would certainly decide nothing was more important than finding a way to make sure people in Tanzania and Laos preferred to stay there. Do you really think they couldn’t come up with something? (p. 79)

In between the two extremes, there’s a sweet spot for commodities demand. After per capita income rises above $4,000, countries typically industrialise and urbanise, creating a strong, and sometimes disproportionate, relationship between further economic growth and extra commodity demand. China hit the commodity sweet spot around the time that Davis wrote his Xstrata memo: its GDP per capita reached $3,959 in 2001.6 Davis’s analysis wasn’t based on detailed economic modelling, but he knew from his travels there that something big was happening in China that could supercharge the commodity markets

Travelling in the Americas, the Caribbean and the African continent itself, one is struck by the effect of post-colonial economic and cultural conditions that have attempted to dehumanize and destroy the social and economic bases of Black society. Yet paradoxically, the trauma of subjugation has not led to total despair. Instead it has produced an insistent interrogation and resistance by Black people all over the world.

Many elements of the Imperium believe they hold the ultimate power: the Spacing Guild with their monopoly on interstellar travel, CHOAM with its economic stranglehold, the Bene Gesserit with their secrets, the Mentats with their control of mental processes, House Corrino with their throne, the Great and Minor Houses of the Landsraad with their extensive holdings. Woe to us on the day that one of those factions decides to prove the point.

Another product, Couchsurfing, already existed as well, and was an indirect competitor, albeit a peculiar one. Founded in 2003 as a nonprofit, Couchsurfing allowed for people to crash on each other’s sofa while traveling but did not require payment. Instead the focus was on community and letting members guide each other around a new town. (The result was occasional romantic advances, both wanted and unwanted, in the absence of economic clarity and motivations.)

For years, international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), institutions like the World Economic Forum and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI – launched at the Annual Meeting 2017 in Davos), and individuals like Bill Gates have been warning us about the next pandemic risk, even specifying that it: 1) would emerge in a highly populated place where economic development forces people and wildlife together; 2) would spread quickly and silently by exploiting networks of human travel and trade; and 3) would reach multiple countries by thwarting containment. As we will see in the following chapters, properly characterizing the pandemic and understanding its characteristics are vital because they were what underpinned the differences in terms of preparedness.

There were hundreds of pages whose proper home I was at a loss to determine. Should they go in the Medicine folder? The Mental Health folder? The Animism folder? The Shamanism folder? The Social Structure folder? The Body/Mind/Soul Continuum folder? I hovered uncertainly, pages in hand, and realized that I was suspended in a large bowl of Fish Soup. Medicine was religion. Religion was society. Society was medicine. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere (you had to have or borrow enough money to buy a pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required), and so was music (if you didn’t have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn’t be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn’t be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick).