Handwriting On The Wall Quotes

Most officially “poor” Americans today have things that middle-class Americans of an earlier time could only dream about—including color TV, videocassette recorders, microwave ovens, and their own cars. Moreover, half of all poor households have air-conditioning. Leftist redistribution of income could never accomplish that, because there are simply not enough rich people for their wealth to have such a dramatic effect on the living standards of the poor, even if it was all confiscated and redistributed. Moreover, many attempts at redistributing wealth in various countries around the world have ended up redistributing poverty. After all, rich people can see the political handwriting on the wall, and can often take their money and leave the country, long before a government program can get started to confiscate it. They are also likely to take with them skills and entrepreneurial experience that are even harder to replace than the money.

Or rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she'd been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall. Sometimes I spotted her in a crowd, or in a taxicab pulling away, and these glimpses of her I treasured despite the fact that I was never able to catch up with her.

Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

The girl lives in a beautiful dollhouse made of stone', I wrote one time in my dairy when I was young, my handwriting shaky but sure. 'But beneath her shining plastic smile, there are only screams'.

Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust for war seemed quite honorable in comparison.

CEOs of large firms often fail to read the handwriting on the wall, because of complacence, inertia, or overconfidence.

He belongs to that fraction of humanity which for centuries has made other fractions the objects of contempt and exploitation, then, when it saw the handwriting on the wall, set about to give them back their humanity.

If this letter system works, it should be reproducible and consistent. If this letter system works, it should be demonstrated in biblical narrative—with consistency. It has. It does. It will. For instance: Daniel interpreted the handwriting on the Babylonian wall. (Da 5:1-31) The question has always been, “What method would produce the same interpretation?” If you will pull out your Strong’s Concordance and translate those same four words, you won’t get the same results that Daniel got. Was Daniel using a different method than modern Christians? Yes, obviously.

Human beings, when confronted with the strange and inexplicable, have an immediate instinct to get back to the accustomed and the normal. We do not hug our miracles close; we put them hastily away, preferring the commonplace to live with it. It is as if some compulsive hand wipes clean the wall on which the handwriting appeared.

Catharine’s office had two plants, three chairs, two desks, one hutch, six personal photos in standing frames, one of those clichéd motivational posters on the wall that had two crows tearing out the insides of a reasonably sized forest cat with the cheesy inspirational caption, “Unremittingly, you must stare into the sun,” and a clay paperweight most likely made by Catharine’s daughter (it was signed by your seed in adorable small-child handwriting).

WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she’d been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall.

Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!

That advice should be taken wherever example has failed, or precept be regarded where warning is ridiculed, is like a picture of hope resting on despair; but when time shall stamp with universal currency the facts you have long encountered with a laugh, and the irresistible evidence of accumulated losses, like the handwriting on the wall, shall ad terror to distress, you will then, in a conflict of suffering, learn to sympathize with others by feeling for yourselves.

When he can't take anymore, Galen plucks his phone from his pocket and dials, then hangs up. When the call is returned, he says, "Hey, sweet lips." The females at the table hush each other to get a better listen. A few of them whip their heads toward Emma to see if she's on the other end of the conversation. Satisfied she's not, they lean closer. Rachel snorts. "If only you liked sweets." "I can't wait to see you tonight. Wear that pink shirt I like." Rachel laughs. "Sounds like you're in what we humans like to call a pickle. My poor, drop-dead-gorgeous sweet pea. Emma still not talking to you, leaving you alone with all those hormonal girls?" "Eight-thirty? That's so far away. Can't I meet you sooner?" One of the females actually gets up and takes her tray and her attitude to another table. Galen tries not to get too excited. "Do you need to be checked out of school, son? Are you feeling ill?" Galen tosses a glance at Emma, who's picking a pepperoni off her pizza and eyeing it as if it were dolphin dung. "I can't skip school to meet you again, boo. But I'll be thinking about you. No one but you." A few more females get up and stalk their trays to the trash. The cheerleader in front of him rolls her eyes and starts a conversation with the chubby brunette beside her-the same chubby brunette she pushed into a locker to get to him two hours ago. "Be still my heart," Rachel drawls. "But seriously, I can't read your signals. I don't know what you're asking me to do." "Right now, nothing. But I might change my mind about skipping. I really miss you." Rachel clears her throat. "All right, sweet pea. You just let your mama know, and she'll come get her wittle boy from school, okay?" Galen hangs up. Why is Emma laughing again? Mark can't be that funny. The girl beside him clues him in: "Mark Baker. All the girls love him. But not as much as they love you. Except maybe Emma, I guess." "Speaking of all these girls, how did they get my phone number?" She giggles. "It's written on the wall in the girls' bathroom. One hundred hall." She holds her cell phone up to his face. An image of his number scrawled onto a stall door lights up the screen. In Emma's handwriting.

Just because you don’t see the point, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

For all we know, the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink invisible?

The girl lives in a beautiful dollhouse made of stone, I wrote one time in my diary when I was young, my handwriting shaky but sure. But underneath her shining plastic smile, there are only screams.

The walls are muted gray and bare, except for a small patch where someone has written, in bright blue marker, DON’T COLOR ON THE WALLS! I recognize the handwriting from Adam’s notebook and smile widely.

His handwriting…” I choked out the words. It was on the walls, all around me—and now that I was looking for it, I recognized something I should have noticed the moment the writing had changed from a childish scrawl.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities—he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites. But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth—the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.

he listened carefully to all the men were saying in the other room. He was stunned by how rapidly it seemed the Reich was rushing toward another European war. He was sympathetic to his uncle’s argument that they should all leave Germany soon. And he was deeply dismayed that his father refused to see the handwriting on the wall and what it bespoke of the fate of Germany and its Jews. “Reuben, have you ever heard of the Dachau camp?” Avi asked one night. “No,” Jacob heard his father say. “Buchenwald?” “No.” “Sachsenhausen?” Avi pressed. “No, why?” “That’s where they’ve been sent, all of them.” “Who?” “The Jews.” “What Jews?” “The thirty thousand they arrested during Kristallnacht.

People can justify a government’s controversial policies and actions for only so long until they see a pattern of abuse of power. Then, even the most devout supporters of any regime must decide if they support these extreme policies and actions or oppose them. With the current government, this point of no return was reached for some when they slowly realized the extent of the vast National Security Agency spying scandal. For others it was the release of known Islamist terrorists from the Guantanamo Bay prison without congressional knowledge. For most Americans, the flood of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America purposely created by the administration to overwhelm our southern borders was the final straw. Still other supporters kept justifying one extremist act after another, justifying the president’s policies and actions with rationalizations that included saying that those who opposed them were “right-wing conspirators,” “racists,” “Obama haters,” and the like. Yet for those of us who study governments that have taken nations from freedom to fascism, the handwriting has been on the wall for many years. My question is this: Will the Obama inner circle of extremist left-wing radicals trigger an event that will provoke an American insurrection, even a civil war? Is this concern to be dismissed as a “right-wing conspiracy”? Let me explain to you what is happening.

From east to west, in fact, her gaze swept slowly, without encountering a single obstacle, along a perfect curve. Beneath her, the blue-and-white terraces of the Arab town overlapped one another, splattered with the dark-red spots of the peppers drying in the sun. Not a soul could be seen, but from the inner courts, together with the aroma of roasting coffee, there rose laughing voices or incomprehensible stamping of feet. Father off, the palm grove, divided into uneven squares by clay walls, rustled its upper foliage in a wind that could not be felt up on the terace. Still farther off and all the way to the horizon extended the ocher-and-gray realm of stones, in which no life was visible. At some distance from the oasis, however, near the wadi that bordered the palm grove on the west could be seen broad black tents. All around them a flock of motionless dromedaries, tiny at the distance, formed against the gray ground the black signs of a strange handwriting, the meaning of which had to be deciphered. Above the desert, the silence was as vast as the space. Janine, leaning her whole body against the parapet, was speechless, unable to tear herself away from the void opening before her. Beside her, Marcel was getting restless. He was cold; he wanted to go back down. What was there to see here, after all? But she could not take her gaze from the horizon. Over yonder, still farther south, at that point where sky and earth met in a pure line - over yonder it suddenly seemed there was awaiting her something of which, though it had always been lacking, she had never been aware until now. In the advancing afternoon the light relaxed and softened; it was passing from the crystalline to the liquid. Simultaneously, in the heart of a woman brought there by pure chance a knot tightened by the years, habit, and boredom was slowly loosening. She was looking at the nomads' encampment. She had not even seen the men living in it' nothing was stirring among the black tents, and yet she could think only of them whose existence she had barely known until this day. Homeless, cut off from the world, they were a handful wandering over the vast territory she could see, which however was but a paltry part of an even greater expanse whose dizzying course stopped only thousands of miles farther south, where the first river finally waters the forest. Since the beginning of time, on the dry earth of this limitless land scraped to bone, a few men had been ceaselessly trudging, possessing nothing but serving no one, poverty-stricken but free lords of a strange kingdom. Janine did not know why this thought filled her with such a sweet, vast melancholy that it closed her eyes. She knew that this kingdom had been eternally promised her and yet that it would never be hers, never again, except in this fleeting moment perhaps when she opened her eyes again on the suddenly motionless sky and on its waves of steady light, while the voices rising from the Arab town suddenly fell silent. It seemed to her that the world's course had just stopped and that, from that moment on, no one would ever age any more or die. Everywhere, henceforth, life was suspended - except in her heart, where, at the same moment, someone was weeping with affliction and wonder.

There was a little sketch pad with a pink paper cover, a packet of handwritten notes in what looked like my grandmother's handwriting, a silk scarf of water lilies on a blue background, a black fountain pen with an ornate silver hand on it, a book of poems by American poets with a number of pages dog-eared (I made a mental note to see if "Mending Wall" was in there), a magnifying glass with a carved wooden handle, a book called 'Native Flowers of New England' with a ragged cloth binding, another clothbound book called the 'Berry Farmer's Companion', and a stack of twenty faded black-and-white photographs.

The house was inherited. Death had furnished it for her. She trod in the dining-room on the Turkey carpet of her fathers; she regulated her day by the excellent black clock on the mantelpiece which she remembered from childhood; her walls were entirely covered by the photographs her illustrious deceased friends had either given herself or her father, with their own handwriting across the lower parts of their bodies, and the windows, shrouded by the maroon curtains of all her life, were decorated besides with the selfsame aquariums to which she owed her first lessons in sealore, and in which still swam slowly the goldfishes of her youth.

The camera meanders around various enormous rooms, presumably in different castles or palaces (we cannot be seeing one building; it is simply too vast). The walls are lined with statues and puddles of water crowd the floor. According to the people who believe such things, this is a record of one of Arne-Sayles’s other worlds, possibly the one described in his 2000 book, The Labyrinth. Other people have tried to establish the locations in order to prove that it is not a film of another world, but to date none of them has been conclusively identified. Notes in D’Agostino’s handwriting were found with The Castle, but these are in the same peculiar code as her last diary and remain impenetrable.

The same mode of symbolising the justification by works had evidently been in use in Babylon itself; and, therefore, there was great force in the Divine handwriting on the wall, when the doom of Belshazzar went forth: "Tekel," "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting." In the Parsee system, which has largely borrowed from Chaldea, the principle of weighing the good deeds over against the bad deeds is fully developed. "For three days after dissolution," says Vaux, in his Nineveh and Persepolis, giving an account of Parsee doctrines in regard to the dead, "the soul is supposed to flit round its tenement of clay, in hopes of reunion; on the fourth, the Angel Seroch appears, and conducts it to the bridge of Chinevad. On this structure, which they assert connects heaven and earth, sits the Angel of Justice, to weigh the actions of mortals; when the good deeds prevail, the soul is met on the bridge by a dazzling figure, which says, "I am thy good angel; I was pure originally, but thy good deeds have rendered me purer;' and passing his hand over the neck of the blessed soul, leads it to Paradise. If iniquities preponderate, the soul is met by a hideous spectre, which howls out, 'I am thy evil genius; I was impure from the first, but thy misdeeds have made me fouler; through the we shall remain miserable until the resurrection;' the sinning soul is then dragged away to hell, where Ahriman sits to taunt it with its crimes." Such is the doctrine of Parseeism.

In a dream I sometimes have, I am frantically trying to save as much as I can from my childhood home before I am forced to leave forever because of some disaster. In this dream, from which I awake with my jaw clenched like a fist, I grab whatever I can reach, take whatever I can carry. Always my childhood books and our family photo albums, but sometimes also the silver candlesticks, the things on my father's desk, the paintings on the walls. Maybe it comes from the speed with which my family changed shape one day, maybe it comes from moving, maybe it comes from my grandmother's hinted horror of losing everything in the Holocaust, but I cannot part with a dented pot that I remember my mother putting on the stove each week. Or the sofa my father bought with his first pay cheque, which was never comfortable when I was growing up and is not comfortable now. I cannot part with the lipstick I found softly rolling in an empty drawer months after my mother left. Or a shopping list on an envelope in her handwriting. In a world that changes so quickly, and where everyone eventually leaves, our stuff is the one thing we can trust. It testifies, through the mute medium of Things, that we were part of something greater than ourselves.

My greetings and constant love to Emory and my grandchildren. I am well and continue to make my rounds with the news of the day and as always am well-received in the towns of which we have more than a few now as the Century grows older and the population increases so that large crowds come to hear reportage of distant places as well as those nearby. I enjoy good health as always and hope that Emory is doing well using his left hand now and look forward to an example of his handwriting. It is true what Elizabeth has said about employment for a one-armed man but that concerns manual labor only and at any rate there should be some consideration for a man who has lost a limb in the war. As soon as he is adept with his left I am sure he will consider Typesetting, Accounting, Etc. & Etc. Olympia is I am sure a steady rock to you all. Olympia’s husband, Mason, had been killed at Adairsville, during Johnston’s retreat toward Atlanta. The man was too big to be a human being and too small to be a locomotive. He had been shot out of the tower of the Bardsley mansion and when he fell three stories and struck the ground he probably made a hole big enough to bury a hog in. The Captain’s younger daughter, Olympia, was in reality a woman who affected helplessness and refinement and had never been able to pull a turnip from the garden without weeping over the poor, dear thing. She fluttered and gasped and incessantly tried to demonstrate how sensitive she was. Mason was a perfect foil and then the Yankees went and killed him. Olympia was now living with Elizabeth and Emory in the remains of their farm in New Hope Church, Georgia, and was quite likely a heavy weight. He put one hand to his forehead. My youngest daughter is in reality a bore. There was a pounding on the wall: Kep-dun! Kep-dun!

He took memory sticks and an external drive from his desk, and cables from the mess on the floor. Pike loaded his gear into the backpack, and we made our way toward the garage. Pike stopped when we reached the living room. “The fish.” The aquarium stood on its stand, bubbling. I said, “What about them?” Tyson said, “We gotta feed them.” We waited while Pike fed the fish, then followed him into the garage. The walls were lined with gray metal shelving units. The shelves were crowded with different-sized boxes and the clutter that accumulates as time passes, and more boxes were stacked on the floor in front of the shelves. Handwriting identified their contents: Christmas/ornaments, Christmas/lights, Tyson—baby clothes, Mom’s lamp. Pike pointed out a small black box clipped to the outside of the garage door’s track, up high by the ceiling and difficult to see. “Transmitter.

People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe In this match, surprises are expected Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable

Nate took the sheet. It was covered in the neat, curvy handwriting so many women mastered and men almost never did. The top half was the message, recopied in the same Cyrillic that it had been on the wall. Below it was the translation in English.

People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe In this match, surprises are expected Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable At first glance it resembles a poem.

People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe

Dina hummed to herself as she pulled out an empty jam jar from a busy cupboard. It was still labeled "Apricot Jam" from the batch her mum had made for her last year--- jam that tasted like bottled sunshine. There wasn't an exact science to the magic, but Dina often found that the best tea blends were ones she put into secondhand jars, ones that had been full of delicious, wonderful things. She clipped her curls out of her face and headed into the pantry. The walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with all manner of jars and boxes, all individually labeled in Dina's messy handwriting. She kept her spices together, along with other baking essentials like fish vanilla, cake flour, and a tin that was labeled "Eye of Newt" but actually contained nutmeg. Her tea selection had several shelves dedicated to it. Aside from the specialty blends she made for the shop, Dina kept a collection of tea and tisane ingredients, which she could mix into more personal blends at a moment's notice. Dina never felt more in her element as a kitchen witch than when she was looking through her pantry. Scott's tea blend needed to be something that encapsulated his energies yet also helped him in some way. A tea to drink in the middle of a long work day, Dina decided. She twirled a curl around her finger as she focused. She hadn't met any of his fellow curators yet, but from what Scott had told her they could be a bit of a handful. So the kind of tea that would help him get through a long meeting. Something to sharpen a tired mind. Dina knew just the thing for it. She scooped up several jars and laid them out on the counter before her. Black tea--- a full-bodied assam, cacao nibs, dried ginger and... it was missing something. Dina stepped back into the pantry and surveyed her shelves with her hands on her hips. She knew that this would need one more ingredient to be perfect for Scott. Lion's mane mushroom? Perhaps a little too earthy. Clove? Too heavy. It would overpower the other flavors. As her eyes skirted over the rows of jars, she spotted it. A small glass jar with a dark red powder in it. Dried beetroot! Perfect! Energizing yet slightly sweet and smooth, and it would make Scott look like he was drinking some kind of red-velvet-themed drink. Which was also his favorite cake flavor.

In dealing with men God always uses a language which appeals forcibly to their understanding. This is illustrated in the handwriting on the wall. It is a common belief among idolaters that the gods weigh deeds in balances, and that if the good deeds outweigh the evil, the individual enters into his reward; if the opposite result is obtained, punishment follows. The language, therefore, was familiar to King Belshazzar. “God hath numbered thy kingdom; … thou are weighted in the balances, and art found wanting.

God established the first distinct nations, beginning  about 4500 BC in an area in which an early city was known as Babylon. The city grew over time, and by about 1700 BC, it flourished under the reign of Hammurabi, who developed the world’s first written legal code, pre-dating Moses by about 200 years. Nebuchadnezzar II built Babylon into a magnificent city. Its hanging gardens ranked as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. He ruled for 43 years, until he died in 562 BC. Babylon took Israel captive during his reign in 600 BC, where Israel languished for seventy years. Persia, under Cyrus, conquered Babylon in 539 BC (fulfilling the ‘handwriting on the wall’ – Daniel 5), and Babylon remained under Persian rule, until 332 BC, when Alexander the Great conquered Babylon. As rivers swelled and desert sands shifted, Babylon crumbled. Colonial powers carted away Babylon’s artifacts. The Germans took the Ishtar Gate, the French grabbed ceramics, and the Turks used the bricks, some of which still bore Nebuchadnezzar’s name, to build dams on the Euphrates.

Whatever his reasons, Gorbachev had the intelligence to admit Communism was not working, the courage to battle for change, and, ultimately, the wisdom to introduce the beginnings of democracy, individual freedom, and free enterprise. As I said at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, the Soviet Union faced a choice: Either it made fundamental changes or it became obsolete. Gorbachev saw the handwriting on the Wall and opted for change.

By the time Beatrix had finished the letter, she was aware of a peculiar feeling, a sense of surprised compassion pressing against the walls of her heart. It didn’t seem possible that such a letter could have come from the arrogant Christopher Phelan. It wasn’t at all what she had expected. There was a vulnerability, a quiet need, that had touched her. “You must write to him, Pru,” she said, closing the letter with far more care than she had previously handled it. “I’ll do no such thing. That would only encourage more complaining. I’ll be silent, and perhaps that will spur him to write something more cheerful next time.” Beatrix frowned. “As you know, I have no great liking for Captain Phelan, but this letter…he deserves your sympathy, Pru. Just write him a few lines. A few words of comfort. It would take no time at all. And about the dog, I have some advice--” “I am not writing anything about the dratted dog.” Prudence gave an impatient sigh. “You write to him.” “Me? He doesn’t want to hear from me. He thinks I’m peculiar.” “I can’t imagine why. Just because you brought Medusa to the picnic…” “She’s a very well behaved hedgehog,” Beatrix said defensively. “The gentleman whose hand was pierced didn’t seem to think so.” “That was only because he tried to handle her incorrectly. When you pick up a hedgehog--” “No, there’s no use telling me, since I’m never going to handle one. As for Captain Phelan…if you feel that strongly about it, write a response and sign my name.” “Won’t he recognize that the handwriting is different?” “No, because I haven’t written to him yet.” “But he’s not my suitor,” Beatrix protested. “I don’t know anything about him.” “You know as much as I do, actually. You’re acquainted with his family, and you’re very close to his sister-in-law. And I wouldn’t say that Captain Phelan is my suitor, either. At least not my only one. I certainly won’t promise to marry him until he comes back from the war with all his limbs intact. I don’t want a husband I would have to push around in an invalid’s chair for the rest of my life.” “Pru, you have the depth of a puddle.” Prudence grinned. “At least I’m honest.” Beatrix gave her a dubious glance. “You’re actually delegating the writing of a love letter to one of your friends?” Prudence waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Not a love letter. There was nothing of love in his letter to me. Just write something cheerful and encouraging.

Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!

The one elementary but elemental factor in all civilizations that collapsed into extinction is the failure to read the handwriting on the wall, the failure to respond to warning signs. Every extinct culture hurled signs high into the heavens for all to see. But every collapsing culture failed to read and heed these flares.52

It’s difficult to imagine that Artificial Intelligence will take the place of people but many believe that it’s only a short time before computers will outthink us. They already can beat our best chess players and have been able to out calculate us since calculators first came onto the scene. IBM’s Watson is on the cutting edge of Cognitive Computers, being used to out think our physicians but closer to home, for the greatest part; our cars are no longer assembled by people but rather robots. Our automobiles can be considered among our first robots, since they took the place of horses. Just after the turn of the last century when the population in the United States crossed the 100 M mark the number of horses came to 20M. Now we have a population of 325 M but only 9 M horses. You might ask what happened. Well back in 1915 there were 2.4 M cars but this jumped to 3.6 M in just one year. Although horses still out-numbered cars the handwriting was on the wall! You might think that this doesn’t apply to us but why not? The number of robots increase, taking the place of first our workers on the assembly line and then workers in the food industry and this takes us from tractors and combines on the farms to the cooking and serving hamburgers at your favorite burger joint. People are becoming redundant! That’s right we are becoming superfluous! Worldwide only 7 out of 100 people have college degrees and here in the United States only 40% of our working population possesses a sheep skin, although mine is printed on ordinary paper. With education becoming ever more expensive, we as a population are becoming ever more uneducated. A growing problem is that as computers and robots become smarter, as they are, we are no longer needed to be anything more than a consumer and where will the money come from for that? I recently read that this death spiral will run its course within 40 years! Nice statistics that we’re looking at…. Looking at the bright side of things you can now buy an atomically correct, life sized doll, as perhaps a robotic non-complaining, companion for under $120. In time these robotic beings will be able to talk back but hopefully there will be an off switch. As interesting as this sounds it will most likely not be for everyone, however it may appeal to some of our less capable, not to have to actually interface with real live people. The fact is that most people will soon outlive their usefulness! We as a society are being challenged and there will soon be little reason for our being. When machines make machines that can out think us; when we become dumb and superfluous, then what? Are we ready for this transition? It’s scary but If nothing else, it’s something to think about….

The Extra Mile. Underneath that was a typed quotation from The Art of War by Sun-tzu: To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish. Alongside that in the margin was a penciled addendum in what I guessed was Vassell’s handwriting: While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a commander’s courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his strength of will. Wavell. “Who’s Wavell?” Summer said. “An old British field marshal,

Just because some people saw the handwriting on the wall didn’t mean they could get anyone else to read it too.

Since at least the time of Einstein’s first letter to FDR, Edward Teller had debated within himself the morality of weapons work. His life had twice been cruelly uprooted by totalitarianism. He understood Germany’s frightening technological advantages at the outset of the war. “I came to the United States in 1935,” he notes. “ . . . The handwriting was on the wall. At that time, I believed that Hitler would conquer the world unless a miracle happened.”1318 But pure science still pacified him.

The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real generative possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words. “It is the right of the oppressed to organize around their oppression as they see and define it,” the movement theorists insist doggedly in an effort to solve the question of these women, to convince themselves that what is going on is still a political process, but the handwriting is already on the wall. These are converts who want not a revolution but “romance,” who believe not in the oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life in exactly the mold of their old life. In certain ways they tell us sadder things about what the culture has done to them than the theorists ever did, and they also tell us, I suspect, that the movement is no longer a cause but a symptom.

It has been said that no matter how often the wisdom of the world fails, we run right back to the same people who have never had the answers. We go to these secular-humanist counselors, who don’t help, and then finally find a Christian counselor to get us straightened out. After we have exhausted all the human possibilities, we do the thing we should have done in the first place.

Much of what I knew had gone through the filter of memory, trauma, self-interest, and my own constantly shifting judgment. I laid all of them out in blocky handwriting on brown sheets of butcher paper taped up to my office wall. Not even dates of death had the automatic legitimacy of simple fact. The official police report for one death, for instance, had been conflated with a two-week old murder whose only connection was the fact that both victims had been salvaged in the city of Manila. The picture was never complete, but it was as close to the truth as I could get.

What happens when Christian parents send their children into a secular environment for their education? The young people are bombarded with information and opinions in all of their subjects, some of which are contrary to God’s Word. Even students who are solid in their beliefs may succumb to the pressure of the “wise men” in their classes.

The handwriting on the wall is useless unless you read it.

Some of us could take a lesson in courtesy from Daniel. Pounding on the pulpit and calling down fire and judgment on everybody who doesn’t agree with us has been an accusation leveled at fighting fundamentalists. But Daniel “asked for permission” and didn’t get nasty about it. It has been said that prudence, politeness, and pluck are a fine trio. Instead of defying authority, Daniel made a dignified request.

Like what you told us about Animal Farm,” Katie piped up. “How the handwriting on the barn wall said ‘All animals are equal—’” “‘But some animals are more equal than others,’” Lilly quoted flatly while still reading her Spinoza. “George Orwell, 1945, chapter ten.

filling the form in.  She held up the photo and matched it with the wall, a tired, thinlooking girl looking out at her. It was set to the right of Oliver’s. They could have had them taken at the same time. She’d ask Mary.  Grace had said she had only been with Oliver — or at least that’s what the answers suggested. She’d have to ask her to make sure. It wasn’t unknown for homeless people to get into disagreements over love. When you’ve got nothing much to lose, the law doesn’t come into play when you’re asking yourself if you’re prepared to kill for someone.  Grace also admitted to being a regular heroin user and agreed to have an examination. She also said she didn’t have any diseases as far as she knew. She was the same age, too. Eighteen. Had they known each other before they’d become homeless? She’d have to find Grace to know the truth.  She went back to Oliver’s file and checked the date next to his signature. It said the seventh of September. Just under two months ago.  Jamie leafed to the next and only other page in the file. It was another shabbily photocopied sheet. Mary must have been doing them on her printer-scanner at home, creating them on her computer. She really did care. The sheet displayed a pixelated outline of the human body — no doubt an image pulled off the web and then stretched out to fill a page. The resolution was too low to keep any sort of detail, but the shape still came through okay. It was a human with their arms out, feet apart. At the top of the page, in Comic Sans, ‘Examination Sheet’ was written as the title.  In appropriately illegible handwriting for a doctor, notes had been jotted around the body. Parts had been circled with lines being drawn to the corresponding note. She read words like ‘graze’ and ‘lesion’. ‘Rash’ cropped up a few times. But there didn’t look to be anything sinister going on. The crooks of the elbows, as well as the ankles, were all circled several times but nothing was written at the sides. Those areas didn’t need explaining, though underneath, as if encapsulating the entire exam were the words ‘No signs of infection’. So he’d been relatively careful, then. Clean needles, at least. Under that, there was a little paragraph recommending a general blood panel, but overall, Oliver seemed to be in decent health. Nothing had been prescribed, it seemed.  She checked Grace’s and found it to be much the same, complete with triple circles around the elbows and ankles. Though her genital area had also been circled and the word ‘Rash’ had been written. At the bottom, a prescription had been written for azithromycin.  Jamie clicked her teeth together, rummaging in her brain for the name. Was it a gonorrhoea medication or chlamydia? She knew it was for an STD, she just couldn’t remember which. But that meant that where she’d put down ‘1’ for number of

Career inflection points are commonplace. A story comes to mind. It so happens that it was related to me by a business journalist who had interviewed me when this book was first published. This man used to be a banker. He was happily and productively employed until one day he went to work and learned that his employer had been acquired by another, larger bank. In short order he was out of a job. He decided to change careers and become a stockbroker. He knew that he would have to pay his dues. While he was comfortable with financial matters, he knew that a banker’s skills are not the same as those required of a stockbroker. So he went to stockbroker school and eventually started working as a full-fledged broker. For a while, things went well and the future looked promising. However, a short time before we met, on-line brokerage firms started to appear. Several of this man’s clients left him, preferring to do their business with low-cost on-line firms. The handwriting was on the wall. This time, our man decided to make his move early. He had always had an interest in, and aptitude for, writing. Building on the financial knowledge that he had first acquired as a banker, and that was reinforced

Worst of all, the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal had demonstrated that a cynical mentality of advertising and public relations—so central in persuading Americans to desire more and more in a nightmarish pattern of meaningless consumerism—had invaded the realm of politics like some lethal disease. For government officials, the falsity of image-making was now taking precedence over actual facts, problem solving, and a genuine attention to the public welfare, leading first to lying and then, inevitably, to criminality. Politics was becoming theater, and theater had no place in politics. Arendt reached for an analogy familiar to her. Totalitarian governments, she said, were willing to kill millions to conceal unpleasant facts. The United States was a long way from that: the manipulation of public opinion, not terror, was Washington’s way of hiding the truth. But the signs were not good; the country was on a road to perdition. A “stab-in-the-back” theory, used so effectively by the Nazis to vanquish their enemies, was already developing with regard to Vietnam. And unless the docile, materialist-minded citizenry woke up to the true realities and demanded real solutions to real problems, instead of trying to escape into “images, theories and sheer follies,” far greater troubles lay in store. She believed the country might be at a turning point in its history. The handwriting was on the wall. The chickens were coming home to roost.